*********
THE GRAND CANYON ZEN GOLF TOUR
A Seminal Journey
By Jack Random
Copyright Ray Miller 2011
Dedicated to James Wisniewski
And the memory of Beatlick Joe Speer
INTRODUCTION
In the year I turned forty, I took a cross-country journey from Nashville, Tennessee to central California where I was born and raised. I had only recently moved to Nashville to marry a former love, a singer-songwriter who longed for fame and fortune in the city of music.
The marriage was one of convenience, an unintended consequence of a healthcare system that failed to provide for struggling artists. It was in retrospect destined to fail but the journey was a critical juncture in a life that had become too predictable and uninspired.
In Nashville, I became a writer. Given my isolation from family and friends, I began to discover the discipline of writing. Back then I was writing plays. I soon switched to prose and eventually published a short story based on the news of the day: Burning Churches. I then became Jack Random and published several other works of fiction in literary magazines.
That first year in Nashville, I attended a Welcome Back party for a man who was legendary where I came from: the extraordinary singer-songwriter John Prine. At that gathering I also met a man named James Wisniewski, a gifted musician who operated under the name of Wiz. With wide eyes he introduced himself and wondered if I was a jazz musician. I replied that I was a writer and I was thinking about writing a jazz play. I would subsequently write Dark Underground: A Jazz Play in Sixteen Choruses. Under the guidance of the Wiz, we recruited a couple of actors and recorded a production of that work. We took to the Nashville poetry scene with Dark Underground and a series of erotic poems. There we collaborated with such luminaries as the Beatlicks (Joe Speer and Pamela Hirst) and Jake Berry, a brilliant experimental poet-songwriter from Florence, Alabama.
When I decided to journey back to California in my 1965 Mustang that summer, I invited the Wiz to go with me. He accepted.
We had two common interests, jazz poetry and Zen golf, and a desire to visit the Grand Canyon to gather what inspiration we could find. It was a seminal experience.
When I returned to Nashville I wrote it all down. It was my first book-length work. Life would never be the same.
May this life be but a passage in the journey of your soul.
********
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
GRAND CANYON: LEAVING NASHVILLE
Nashville, city of music, city of dreams, city of heartbreak and ambition, city of sweltering summers, lurid thunder storms and enchanting fireflies, city of suddenly changing seasons, land of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee and Cherokee, where the Civil War is living history and the rebel cry is still heard on back country roads, city of southern culture and racial strife, city of deafening cicada serenades, red winged birds, ticks and chiggers, city of palatial mansions and southern charm, river city and forest land, city of limestone and rock mountains, city of segregation and homelessness, city that seems to stand still in the eye of the storm, we bid you adieu.
Though we strive to banish you from our thoughts, we will hold you in our hearts, knowing that we will return to you reborn. Like wayward children we will welcome your familiar arms and you, unmoved, will acknowledge our passing. We are but falling leaves in an immense forest, while you are the tree. We are pilgrims in a land of adversity while you are the sanctuary. Whether you remain home to us or become a chapter in the history of our lives, we will think of you often. But for now we must say So Long as we turn our backs and embark once more on the journey to discover ourselves.
Though we strive to banish you from our thoughts, we will hold you in our hearts, knowing that we will return to you reborn. Like wayward children we will welcome your familiar arms and you, unmoved, will acknowledge our passing. We are but falling leaves in an immense forest, while you are the tree. We are pilgrims in a land of adversity while you are the sanctuary. Whether you remain home to us or become a chapter in the history of our lives, we will think of you often. But for now we must say So Long as we turn our backs and embark once more on the journey to discover ourselves.
GRAND CANYON: BLACK CROW
A large black crow (is there any other kind?) touches down in the middle of busy highway and takes flight as we approach. It is a sign. Wait a thousand years and you will never see that sight again. The crow has appointed itself our guardian protector and guide. We welcome him and shall look for him wherever our journey shall take us. We are anxious, full of the life force, and wish only to heed the signs and yield to our inner calling. We are brothers by our own choosing and have chosen to share the path of this sacred journey. We do not know if our paths will part. We welcome the test of our friendship.
We have shared the Zen of the ancient and sacred game of golf. We are the jazz poets of the Nashville fringe. He is the wizard of the jazz poetry happening and holder of the sacred flute. I am the writer of dreams. We share the vision of the Grand Canyon and an enchanted shot under a full moon. We share the memories of journeys past. We are road warriors who have roamed the interstates and highways in search of life’s illusive meaning, in search of brotherhood and illumination. We have gathered what wisdom we could from the words embedded in Siddhartha, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Dharma Bums, On the Road, Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan. We have had peyote dreams. We have seen the desert through the eyes of the coyote. We have ridden the wind of a Pacific sunset. We reserve places in our memories for people and places of distant travels. We hold them like treasures of the heart and wish to breathe into them new and eternal life.
We leave behind our loves and the mystery of how they will receive us on our return. For now we are creatures of the universe, open and free, hungry for adventure and eager to greet our common or separate destinies.
For myself, it is a journey home as well as away from home. It has been only a year since I married and left California. Only a year yet it seems so long ago. My life has changed in more ways than I can know and my heart is divided. I sense the unsettling of my soul has something to do with letting go but how can I let go of the friends and family members that have been so great a part of all that I am and all that I value? How do I let go without letting go? Somehow I must find an answer.
We shoot lie a blast of tequila out of Nashville and into the receding sun. The great forestland of Tennessee, Memphis and the bulging Mississippi, the rolling hills and dales of Arkansas and Oklahoma, blur like a mystery of distorted recollection. Rolling through the Texas panhandle in a sunny blaze, Wiz decides to take action.
The process of Mustang Sally’s preparation for the journey included replacing the gas tank, which had somehow rusted in Tennessee’s tropical air. I didn’t notice the missing spare tire until departure day. Too late. Aside from the time factor, the shop that did the deed had gone out of business. I’m willing to risk it but the Wiz is wary about crossing the desert without one and I know he’s right.
He spots a promising side road that leads us to an unaffiliated gas station. The Wiz connects with the good old boys whose checker game we interrupt. They try on three different tires without success and refer us to a junkyard down the road. Who would have guessed the old Mustang has an unusual number of tire bolts? We locate the junkyard and walk in. There seems to be some confusion about whose job it is to deal with us. It’s a family operation. In the small office space there are three generations of transplanted southerners. Wiz draws on his Alabama upbringing and makes inquiry about the spare. It sits a while until a new man shows up in the cramped office.
“Sixty five Mustang. Right.”
He takes off on the search for a usable replacement and we sit back and wait. One by one members of the family raise their heads from their miscellaneous occupations to give us a look over. The youngest of three children playing in the office, whose name is Bubba or Spunky or something akin, approaches the Wiz and demands: Get out of my chair! The Wiz is dumfounded, throws up his hands and rises to find another place to sit. Accustomed to dealing with troublesome children, I make eye contact with the kid, sitting in his chair, and we share a good laugh. It breaks a spell. We are temporarily accepted into the circle of junkyard society. Smiles all around. All is well.
The change in atmosphere gives us the freedom to look around. The walls are covered with old black and white photographs depicting black people in a curious mixture with white folks. Good old boys. The blacks all seem to have large smiles and are generally the center of focus while the whites linger at the sides or in the background, pleased and proud.
Some time later I come to the realization that the blacks are in servitude, whether enslaved or hired servants I can’t decide. A confirmation comes outside where the Wiz is helping the worker try on a new spare. We get a good deal and bid them goodbye. Wiz then points to a bumper sticker on the rear window of the family pickup: The White Empire. There was a reference to God’s Country.
I understand that this phenomenon has no geographical boundaries. There are white supremacy strongholds in central California and the Great Northwest. Still, my own upbringing does not allow me to feel comfortable in these settings. Maybe it’s the respect I have for the blacks I grew up with. Maybe it’s the memory of Ben May, a friend who stood up for me and a group of white boys back in the day. During the summer of Watts, we were walking through the west side when an angry black mob surrounded us. Ben stepped out of the crowd and vouched for us. They let us pass unharmed and I would always remember.
Maybe it’s the Apache blood that runs through my veins. Maybe it’s the regard I have for the Native American spirit. Whatever it is, I am uncomfortably grateful we did not put it together until after the fact. It is one of my eccentricities that I can’t hide my emotions, despite or perhaps because of years of acting experience.
To the folks at the Texas junkyard, we are good old boys with a keen sense of humor. To us they are rednecks, the racist family that gave us a fair deal on a spare tire somewhere on the Texas panhandle. It is something I will ponder when the time comes. For now there is no time to look back. We’re on the road.
We emerge, as if from a long dark tunnel, on the high desert plains, a land of red rock monuments and the endless highway. We drive on across a horizon of blood red and purple shadows to the oasis city of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Here we will rest to collect our thoughts, breathe deeply the spirit of the desert air, and encounter the first destination of our journey.
We have shared the Zen of the ancient and sacred game of golf. We are the jazz poets of the Nashville fringe. He is the wizard of the jazz poetry happening and holder of the sacred flute. I am the writer of dreams. We share the vision of the Grand Canyon and an enchanted shot under a full moon. We share the memories of journeys past. We are road warriors who have roamed the interstates and highways in search of life’s illusive meaning, in search of brotherhood and illumination. We have gathered what wisdom we could from the words embedded in Siddhartha, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Dharma Bums, On the Road, Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan. We have had peyote dreams. We have seen the desert through the eyes of the coyote. We have ridden the wind of a Pacific sunset. We reserve places in our memories for people and places of distant travels. We hold them like treasures of the heart and wish to breathe into them new and eternal life.
We leave behind our loves and the mystery of how they will receive us on our return. For now we are creatures of the universe, open and free, hungry for adventure and eager to greet our common or separate destinies.
For myself, it is a journey home as well as away from home. It has been only a year since I married and left California. Only a year yet it seems so long ago. My life has changed in more ways than I can know and my heart is divided. I sense the unsettling of my soul has something to do with letting go but how can I let go of the friends and family members that have been so great a part of all that I am and all that I value? How do I let go without letting go? Somehow I must find an answer.
We shoot lie a blast of tequila out of Nashville and into the receding sun. The great forestland of Tennessee, Memphis and the bulging Mississippi, the rolling hills and dales of Arkansas and Oklahoma, blur like a mystery of distorted recollection. Rolling through the Texas panhandle in a sunny blaze, Wiz decides to take action.
The process of Mustang Sally’s preparation for the journey included replacing the gas tank, which had somehow rusted in Tennessee’s tropical air. I didn’t notice the missing spare tire until departure day. Too late. Aside from the time factor, the shop that did the deed had gone out of business. I’m willing to risk it but the Wiz is wary about crossing the desert without one and I know he’s right.
He spots a promising side road that leads us to an unaffiliated gas station. The Wiz connects with the good old boys whose checker game we interrupt. They try on three different tires without success and refer us to a junkyard down the road. Who would have guessed the old Mustang has an unusual number of tire bolts? We locate the junkyard and walk in. There seems to be some confusion about whose job it is to deal with us. It’s a family operation. In the small office space there are three generations of transplanted southerners. Wiz draws on his Alabama upbringing and makes inquiry about the spare. It sits a while until a new man shows up in the cramped office.
“Sixty five Mustang. Right.”
He takes off on the search for a usable replacement and we sit back and wait. One by one members of the family raise their heads from their miscellaneous occupations to give us a look over. The youngest of three children playing in the office, whose name is Bubba or Spunky or something akin, approaches the Wiz and demands: Get out of my chair! The Wiz is dumfounded, throws up his hands and rises to find another place to sit. Accustomed to dealing with troublesome children, I make eye contact with the kid, sitting in his chair, and we share a good laugh. It breaks a spell. We are temporarily accepted into the circle of junkyard society. Smiles all around. All is well.
The change in atmosphere gives us the freedom to look around. The walls are covered with old black and white photographs depicting black people in a curious mixture with white folks. Good old boys. The blacks all seem to have large smiles and are generally the center of focus while the whites linger at the sides or in the background, pleased and proud.
Some time later I come to the realization that the blacks are in servitude, whether enslaved or hired servants I can’t decide. A confirmation comes outside where the Wiz is helping the worker try on a new spare. We get a good deal and bid them goodbye. Wiz then points to a bumper sticker on the rear window of the family pickup: The White Empire. There was a reference to God’s Country.
I understand that this phenomenon has no geographical boundaries. There are white supremacy strongholds in central California and the Great Northwest. Still, my own upbringing does not allow me to feel comfortable in these settings. Maybe it’s the respect I have for the blacks I grew up with. Maybe it’s the memory of Ben May, a friend who stood up for me and a group of white boys back in the day. During the summer of Watts, we were walking through the west side when an angry black mob surrounded us. Ben stepped out of the crowd and vouched for us. They let us pass unharmed and I would always remember.
Maybe it’s the Apache blood that runs through my veins. Maybe it’s the regard I have for the Native American spirit. Whatever it is, I am uncomfortably grateful we did not put it together until after the fact. It is one of my eccentricities that I can’t hide my emotions, despite or perhaps because of years of acting experience.
To the folks at the Texas junkyard, we are good old boys with a keen sense of humor. To us they are rednecks, the racist family that gave us a fair deal on a spare tire somewhere on the Texas panhandle. It is something I will ponder when the time comes. For now there is no time to look back. We’re on the road.
We emerge, as if from a long dark tunnel, on the high desert plains, a land of red rock monuments and the endless highway. We drive on across a horizon of blood red and purple shadows to the oasis city of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Here we will rest to collect our thoughts, breathe deeply the spirit of the desert air, and encounter the first destination of our journey.
GRAND CANYON: ALBUQUERQUE
Albuquerque was once a chosen stop in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the College of Your Choice. It was a sacred reference and one that pulled us here now, this odd mixture of a Zen master, gifted musician and an Alabama working man, paired up with a jazz poet, playwright of the underside, and devotee of golf and baseball. In all our differences and incongruities, we held to a core of beliefs that was essentially the same. We were seekers of secret knowledge and divine wisdom. This was where our search led us.
It was a place where Volkswagen busses broke down on their way to the people’s revolution in Los Angeles, Monterey, Berkeley and San Francisco. Fearful of the desert crossing, they staged their own cultural revolution here. It was a stop that somehow eluded both of us on our previous journeys.
Driving into town I was struck with an uneasy feeling. Was it a mistake? What kind of town was this? The outskirts have all the markings of temporary resolve: Tin can shelters on desert mountain sides, trailer camps, junkyards and tacky little shops hung up for business. Were these the dwellings of city Indians or aging hippies on the fringe still waiting for a few parts and a little more mechanical tinkering before braving the road westward?
From the eastside, the closer you get to the University of New Mexico a metamorphosis becomes more and more apparent. Tie-dye and head shops are chic. Congas and bongos are heard on the streets. Coolness is hanging in the local cafes, listening to folk music and poetry readings. Peace symbols and rainbows are everywhere.
They’re not sure what to make of Nashville jazz poets. They are comfortable in their coolness and have no desire for change. We stand our ground and play.
Jazzman on the corner of the Frontier Restaurant
Blowing cool breeze in the dry heat of a desert night
Faces blank, eyes wide, like an alien retreat
They’d never seen our like before
Jazz poetry in a hip-hop café
Dropped like a stone in black water
They long for a familiar refrain
“Oh very young what will you leave us this time?”
Poetry is dead long live poetry.
Wild man on the street brings terror to the peace monkeys
“Fuck peace!”
Afraid to look into the eyes
Peace to you! he cries
Beat cops on fat tire bikes
Khaki shorts and amber shades
Talk with undertones of brother be not proud
Send him on his way and bow
Applause at the sidewalk café
Walking alone into the shadows of the night
He is Bukowski, jazzman of dreams
Banned on the streets of Albuquerque
Poetry is dead long live poetry
Over the next few days we play rounds of nine on three golf courses. Our companions on the links are cool and easy to talk with. They speak of places and layouts and offer advise. The rounds are comfortable and strike a contrast. The University North layout is lined with trees featuring doglegs left and right. The greens are small and moderately slow to match the pace of play.
A nine-hole course next to the airport is windswept and hilly. A sign on the first tee warns against hitting over flying aircraft.
At the University South course we’re forced to play a three-hole beginner course. It is the most enlightening. We circle it three times and watch the progress of a Zen golf lesson on the driving range each time we make a pass. The teacher is a middle-aged woman with an air of grace. On the first pass she speaks of finding your center. On the second pass she speaks of balance. On the third pass the teacher is gone and the student is hitting balls from a one-legged stance. As she slowly takes back the club, she raises her left foot, methodically shifts her knee to center and replants her foot as she strikes the ball. It is a thing of infinite beauty. Golf from the solar plexus. Balance is the first lesson without which all other lessons are unnecessary.
As with golf so it is with life.
Evenings are for performance on the streets, the Wiz exploring new ground with free flowing riffs on his golden flute and me accompanying with the spoken word. We gather a small following of youthful tie-dyes, children of the late sixties who gaze at us with mystery and awe as if we were the beats of a lost generation, creators of a new mythology. The want to board the Magic Bus but that bus has left the yard. They are uncertain of our intentions. The sounds and words of our jazz have a bite. We carry more that a pleasant breeze and dharmic overtones. The message is infused with irony, spiked with a cynical brew, warm with the flames of rebellion.
They give us the respect of a generation removed and cautiously back away. We press on to the poetry café, place our names on the reading list, order cappuccinos and wait. Through the ears of an outsider the poetry reminds me of television soap and Oprah Winfrey confessionals. There are political commentaries tailored to community standards and thoughts while walking through the desert at night.
The emcee makes a joke about playing war as a child. Precision bombing and automatic weapons punctuate his formative years. His reading is an Indian chant accompanied by guitar. I hear drums in the canyons, drowning the messenger with discord. This is sacred land. The white man may settle here for a thousand years more but the Indian will rule like an unseen hand and the coyote will dance on his grave. The poet holds community grace but his satisfied smile undercuts his theme. He speaks of wild days, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson leathers, tattoos and blowing in the wind as if they were his resume. He has comfort and security as emcee of the local poetry café.
The other poets have made their way to the exit by the time we take the stage. I announce the death of poetry and wonder why the real poets are so hurried to depart before their own words have settled with the lattes and pastry. I summon Bukowski and gain their attention. The exodus is frozen. The Wiz rails on the resident piano…
Play the piano like a percussion instrument until the fingers bleed a bit.
He finds a groove and I begin.
We are the scum that crawls out the cracks in America’s nightmare…
Mid performance I realize that we have become my words in the eyes of our audience. They have met my derision with their own. Karmic dissonance. They make their antagonism clear as water but they listen intently and applaud with vigor at the conclusion of our set. The evening is called to a close.
Our young followers have abandoned us for more promising patronage. Now we are the wild men of the Albuquerque scene. We are the terrorists on the streets. The citizens will not look us in the eyes. I wonder if it is inevitable that we must sacrifice our place in the community of poets in order to sound the discordant notes that spring from our distorted psyches. Are we not men? At what price art? At what price change? Of all people on earth the poets should understand and cheer the death of poetry for only with death can poetry gain rebirth. Must we be content with poets reading to poets, waiting their turns while the family of man remains outside, untouched and unmoved?
After a spell a poet approaches us, tosses a compliment on our multi-media style and advises us to arrive earlier next time. We know there will not be a next time for us. He seems discomforted and withdraws, as if afraid to be identified with the outcasts. He will be here tomorrow. We will not.
Peace to you!
Are we too cynical? Am I? I have played the hitchhiker on previous journeys. The hitchhiker abides by the code of harmony but we have chosen to be messengers of discord on this incarnation. We are instigators and inciters of rebellious thought and we have little choice but to play it out. We reserve our softer side for the golf course where harmony and balance are paramount.
We are not ready to call it a night. The evening at the café has left us with a sense of unease. We need fulfillment. A waitress at the café points us to a downtown nightclub. We cross the railroad tracks and enter the old district. It is the wild side of Albuquerque where leathers, bums, winos, whores and drag queens reign.
There is a burrito stand advertising health food. The attractive blonde working the cart explains that her burritos are lard free. We’re impressed and order a couple. We find them to our liking but we are not allowed to take inside the club for a beer chaser. We hang and listen to the healthy burrito merchant, who strikes me like she belongs on Venice Beach instead of here on the wild side of Albuquerque. She has genuine warmth, a free spirit feeling to compliment an outward appearance that would draw eyes at Cannes. We learn that she’s a college graduate with a degree in accounting. She came to Albuquerque to help her father with his business but it turned out they couldn’t get along. She was now in transition.
Wiz asks her what’s happening around town and she offers a rundown on the bar scene. She says they used to have a hip-hop club but it attracted too many guns. The law in New Mexico apparently allows people to carry guns in bars as long as they’re visible. I wonder why hip-hop as opposed to hard rock or jazz would attract guns. She explains that it’s part of the culture. Our burritos finished we prepare to enter the club and thank her for the conversation. She smiles and wishes us well. She means it. We do not misinterpret her smile and pleasant demeanor as an invitation. They belong to the world and are delivered freely to everyone she encounters.
We pay a three-dollar cover and move inside. The club is divided into three sections in attempt to cover multiple bases. One section has a three-man punk band on an elevated platform with a large-screen video accompaniment. The young and hip crowd is standing room only. In the back an elevated disk jockey plays electronic punk and controls lighting effects on a small, crowded dance floor. Upstairs there is a small bar with sofas and padded chairs. It’s relatively sparse, comfortable and quiet enough for conversation.
We sit back and drink our beers while looking out over the dance floor below. We discuss the generational divide, the passage of time, the distance between us and our lives in Nashville. Wiz takes note of an attractive young woman in our midst. Unlike myself, he is theoretically free of obligation. He is coupled but not married. What kind of understanding or arrangement he and his partner have I don’t know but as of now his sense of loyalty remains. We are willing to enjoy a sense of attraction, to feel the pull of temptation, but we are not willing to cross the line. At least, not yet.
We wander down the street hoping for a jazz club, offer up a dollar to a couple of drunken Indians with a shopping cart full of junk, and encounter a large gathering outside a happening club. Wiz spots what appears to be a Latina fox in a tight black dress and whispers: She’s a man. The club is a drag bar with a scattering of very attractive ladies hanging with queens outside. One of them gives me a look that sends a charge through my libido. We go inside where it looks like a bad production of Pink Flamingos. We walk on. This is not our place.
The evening comes to a grateful end. It is time to leave this town without regrets. The lessons it has delivered will take time to gather and comprehend. Our performance at the poetry café was not we expected or hoped for though we could never be sure what to expect. We had fought to gain acceptance in the Nashville scene and were welcomed into the inner circle where Beatlick Joe Speer of Albuquerque was King. We hadn’t used his name but it was clear that winning acceptance here would take time we didn’t have. It weighs on our minds like a shadow crossing our path.
Like the wild man on the streets, likely the most misunderstood poet in Albuquerque, there must be a better way. Like golf, poetry is not important in itself. But like so many things in life that traditionally offer comfort or some sense of meaning in a chaotic world, poetry is in danger of dying from inbreeding and the deadly diseases of self centrism and boredom. Then let her die gently, in comfort or in rage, for with death comes the promise of transformation.
It is the great hope and we are its messengers. The role of the poet is to shape the living poetry of the future. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe, as Bob Dylan once projected, it is incorporated in the music.
We should not be too quick to judge rap or hip-hop or any other form of creative expression. All forms are valid. All messages are signs. All messengers are children of gods and creatures of creative light. We should listen most intently to those whom we find most offensive for they bring a message that expands our horizon.
We will choose to remember Albuquerque mostly for the golf. Balance is the first lesson. We will not stray from the path that chooses us. We will find our center and hold to it as an infant holds to his mother’s breast.
It was a place where Volkswagen busses broke down on their way to the people’s revolution in Los Angeles, Monterey, Berkeley and San Francisco. Fearful of the desert crossing, they staged their own cultural revolution here. It was a stop that somehow eluded both of us on our previous journeys.
Driving into town I was struck with an uneasy feeling. Was it a mistake? What kind of town was this? The outskirts have all the markings of temporary resolve: Tin can shelters on desert mountain sides, trailer camps, junkyards and tacky little shops hung up for business. Were these the dwellings of city Indians or aging hippies on the fringe still waiting for a few parts and a little more mechanical tinkering before braving the road westward?
From the eastside, the closer you get to the University of New Mexico a metamorphosis becomes more and more apparent. Tie-dye and head shops are chic. Congas and bongos are heard on the streets. Coolness is hanging in the local cafes, listening to folk music and poetry readings. Peace symbols and rainbows are everywhere.
They’re not sure what to make of Nashville jazz poets. They are comfortable in their coolness and have no desire for change. We stand our ground and play.
Jazzman on the corner of the Frontier Restaurant
Blowing cool breeze in the dry heat of a desert night
Faces blank, eyes wide, like an alien retreat
They’d never seen our like before
Jazz poetry in a hip-hop café
Dropped like a stone in black water
They long for a familiar refrain
“Oh very young what will you leave us this time?”
Poetry is dead long live poetry.
Wild man on the street brings terror to the peace monkeys
“Fuck peace!”
Afraid to look into the eyes
Peace to you! he cries
Beat cops on fat tire bikes
Khaki shorts and amber shades
Talk with undertones of brother be not proud
Send him on his way and bow
Applause at the sidewalk café
Walking alone into the shadows of the night
He is Bukowski, jazzman of dreams
Banned on the streets of Albuquerque
Poetry is dead long live poetry
Over the next few days we play rounds of nine on three golf courses. Our companions on the links are cool and easy to talk with. They speak of places and layouts and offer advise. The rounds are comfortable and strike a contrast. The University North layout is lined with trees featuring doglegs left and right. The greens are small and moderately slow to match the pace of play.
A nine-hole course next to the airport is windswept and hilly. A sign on the first tee warns against hitting over flying aircraft.
At the University South course we’re forced to play a three-hole beginner course. It is the most enlightening. We circle it three times and watch the progress of a Zen golf lesson on the driving range each time we make a pass. The teacher is a middle-aged woman with an air of grace. On the first pass she speaks of finding your center. On the second pass she speaks of balance. On the third pass the teacher is gone and the student is hitting balls from a one-legged stance. As she slowly takes back the club, she raises her left foot, methodically shifts her knee to center and replants her foot as she strikes the ball. It is a thing of infinite beauty. Golf from the solar plexus. Balance is the first lesson without which all other lessons are unnecessary.
As with golf so it is with life.
Evenings are for performance on the streets, the Wiz exploring new ground with free flowing riffs on his golden flute and me accompanying with the spoken word. We gather a small following of youthful tie-dyes, children of the late sixties who gaze at us with mystery and awe as if we were the beats of a lost generation, creators of a new mythology. The want to board the Magic Bus but that bus has left the yard. They are uncertain of our intentions. The sounds and words of our jazz have a bite. We carry more that a pleasant breeze and dharmic overtones. The message is infused with irony, spiked with a cynical brew, warm with the flames of rebellion.
They give us the respect of a generation removed and cautiously back away. We press on to the poetry café, place our names on the reading list, order cappuccinos and wait. Through the ears of an outsider the poetry reminds me of television soap and Oprah Winfrey confessionals. There are political commentaries tailored to community standards and thoughts while walking through the desert at night.
The emcee makes a joke about playing war as a child. Precision bombing and automatic weapons punctuate his formative years. His reading is an Indian chant accompanied by guitar. I hear drums in the canyons, drowning the messenger with discord. This is sacred land. The white man may settle here for a thousand years more but the Indian will rule like an unseen hand and the coyote will dance on his grave. The poet holds community grace but his satisfied smile undercuts his theme. He speaks of wild days, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson leathers, tattoos and blowing in the wind as if they were his resume. He has comfort and security as emcee of the local poetry café.
The other poets have made their way to the exit by the time we take the stage. I announce the death of poetry and wonder why the real poets are so hurried to depart before their own words have settled with the lattes and pastry. I summon Bukowski and gain their attention. The exodus is frozen. The Wiz rails on the resident piano…
Play the piano like a percussion instrument until the fingers bleed a bit.
He finds a groove and I begin.
We are the scum that crawls out the cracks in America’s nightmare…
Mid performance I realize that we have become my words in the eyes of our audience. They have met my derision with their own. Karmic dissonance. They make their antagonism clear as water but they listen intently and applaud with vigor at the conclusion of our set. The evening is called to a close.
Our young followers have abandoned us for more promising patronage. Now we are the wild men of the Albuquerque scene. We are the terrorists on the streets. The citizens will not look us in the eyes. I wonder if it is inevitable that we must sacrifice our place in the community of poets in order to sound the discordant notes that spring from our distorted psyches. Are we not men? At what price art? At what price change? Of all people on earth the poets should understand and cheer the death of poetry for only with death can poetry gain rebirth. Must we be content with poets reading to poets, waiting their turns while the family of man remains outside, untouched and unmoved?
After a spell a poet approaches us, tosses a compliment on our multi-media style and advises us to arrive earlier next time. We know there will not be a next time for us. He seems discomforted and withdraws, as if afraid to be identified with the outcasts. He will be here tomorrow. We will not.
Peace to you!
Are we too cynical? Am I? I have played the hitchhiker on previous journeys. The hitchhiker abides by the code of harmony but we have chosen to be messengers of discord on this incarnation. We are instigators and inciters of rebellious thought and we have little choice but to play it out. We reserve our softer side for the golf course where harmony and balance are paramount.
We are not ready to call it a night. The evening at the café has left us with a sense of unease. We need fulfillment. A waitress at the café points us to a downtown nightclub. We cross the railroad tracks and enter the old district. It is the wild side of Albuquerque where leathers, bums, winos, whores and drag queens reign.
There is a burrito stand advertising health food. The attractive blonde working the cart explains that her burritos are lard free. We’re impressed and order a couple. We find them to our liking but we are not allowed to take inside the club for a beer chaser. We hang and listen to the healthy burrito merchant, who strikes me like she belongs on Venice Beach instead of here on the wild side of Albuquerque. She has genuine warmth, a free spirit feeling to compliment an outward appearance that would draw eyes at Cannes. We learn that she’s a college graduate with a degree in accounting. She came to Albuquerque to help her father with his business but it turned out they couldn’t get along. She was now in transition.
Wiz asks her what’s happening around town and she offers a rundown on the bar scene. She says they used to have a hip-hop club but it attracted too many guns. The law in New Mexico apparently allows people to carry guns in bars as long as they’re visible. I wonder why hip-hop as opposed to hard rock or jazz would attract guns. She explains that it’s part of the culture. Our burritos finished we prepare to enter the club and thank her for the conversation. She smiles and wishes us well. She means it. We do not misinterpret her smile and pleasant demeanor as an invitation. They belong to the world and are delivered freely to everyone she encounters.
We pay a three-dollar cover and move inside. The club is divided into three sections in attempt to cover multiple bases. One section has a three-man punk band on an elevated platform with a large-screen video accompaniment. The young and hip crowd is standing room only. In the back an elevated disk jockey plays electronic punk and controls lighting effects on a small, crowded dance floor. Upstairs there is a small bar with sofas and padded chairs. It’s relatively sparse, comfortable and quiet enough for conversation.
We sit back and drink our beers while looking out over the dance floor below. We discuss the generational divide, the passage of time, the distance between us and our lives in Nashville. Wiz takes note of an attractive young woman in our midst. Unlike myself, he is theoretically free of obligation. He is coupled but not married. What kind of understanding or arrangement he and his partner have I don’t know but as of now his sense of loyalty remains. We are willing to enjoy a sense of attraction, to feel the pull of temptation, but we are not willing to cross the line. At least, not yet.
We wander down the street hoping for a jazz club, offer up a dollar to a couple of drunken Indians with a shopping cart full of junk, and encounter a large gathering outside a happening club. Wiz spots what appears to be a Latina fox in a tight black dress and whispers: She’s a man. The club is a drag bar with a scattering of very attractive ladies hanging with queens outside. One of them gives me a look that sends a charge through my libido. We go inside where it looks like a bad production of Pink Flamingos. We walk on. This is not our place.
The evening comes to a grateful end. It is time to leave this town without regrets. The lessons it has delivered will take time to gather and comprehend. Our performance at the poetry café was not we expected or hoped for though we could never be sure what to expect. We had fought to gain acceptance in the Nashville scene and were welcomed into the inner circle where Beatlick Joe Speer of Albuquerque was King. We hadn’t used his name but it was clear that winning acceptance here would take time we didn’t have. It weighs on our minds like a shadow crossing our path.
Like the wild man on the streets, likely the most misunderstood poet in Albuquerque, there must be a better way. Like golf, poetry is not important in itself. But like so many things in life that traditionally offer comfort or some sense of meaning in a chaotic world, poetry is in danger of dying from inbreeding and the deadly diseases of self centrism and boredom. Then let her die gently, in comfort or in rage, for with death comes the promise of transformation.
It is the great hope and we are its messengers. The role of the poet is to shape the living poetry of the future. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe, as Bob Dylan once projected, it is incorporated in the music.
We should not be too quick to judge rap or hip-hop or any other form of creative expression. All forms are valid. All messages are signs. All messengers are children of gods and creatures of creative light. We should listen most intently to those whom we find most offensive for they bring a message that expands our horizon.
We will choose to remember Albuquerque mostly for the golf. Balance is the first lesson. We will not stray from the path that chooses us. We will find our center and hold to it as an infant holds to his mother’s breast.
GRAND CANYON: GRAND CANYON
Streaking across the desert skyline, Albuquerque to Grand Canyon in a heartbeat, coasting in on the fumes of yesterday’s drive, the dream hanging on by a thin white line. Riding the high plains highway under moonlight, a fleeting glimpse of a higher truth, spoken in tongues and deciphered in dreams.
The sun slowly dissolves with a golden orange and purple glow as we make our way to the continent’s great divide. We have crossed endless miles of Indian reservations. We have failed in our attempt to find mescal, forgetting that the selling of alcohol is prohibited on the reservation. We remember that the once proud tribes are still ruled by foreign invaders. We remember that these are a conquered people, protected by law from the weakness that helped to defeat them.
It is a strange phenomenon to see Quick Stops and Exxon stations, the golden arches and Super 8 Motels, and to be reminded that this is the last resting ground of the Navajo. We have traversed the land of the Zuni, the Petrified Forest, and the Apache land of the Painted Desert. The medicine woman’s spell still lingers in the warm dry air, her weathered face etched in the primordial terrain. The sacred dance is still performed on the mesa in a circle of red rock formations. The shadow of the ancient shaman still hovers above us in the evening sky.
A lone coyote yaps and sends us on our way. The crow is with us always. No mescal. No tequila. No alcohol of any kind.
We decide against a detour to Grey Mountain, just outside the reservation, and race the fading light to this day’s grand destination. Along the path in two-by-four shelters draped with canvas and plastic tarps are the new Indians, the commercial Indians who scrape by on the fringe of free enterprise. Signs proclaim them the Friendly Indians -- Manhattan Island’s revenge. They sell authentic Indian jewelry, hand crafted silver and turquoise necklaces, bracelets, medicine pouches and jade earrings.
The sun hovers in a brilliant amber glow. We have lost the race and pull over to a trace canyon, a small sliver of the Grand. The merchant Indians pack their wares, give us a glance over and sensing that we are neither buyers nor a threat to their welfare allow us to pass unobstructed to the edge of their little canyon. I am struck with awe and sit to ponder the hand of god. Wiz is less impressed. He has been to the Grand before. He has walked her ledge and camped on her floor while my eyes are virgin to this spectacle. I am aware of the great glaciers that cut and shaped Yosemite Valley but this is a different creature, bearing a distinctly different spiritual sensation. In a part of the world that desperately needed shelter it is as if the earth opened her womb and gave birth to the greatest shelter the world has ever known. It is a universe of its own, a monument of such depth and breadth that it challenges the eye and questions the very meaning of existence. It invokes flight of mind and humbles the most jaded and reticent of men.
We savor the remaining moments of twilight as we make our way to the edge of the Grand Canyon. The name begins to take on mythological proportions. Was it here beneath the infinite stars of heaven that Prometheus descended with the flame of human enlightenment? Was it here that the muses entertained the gods with music, dance and poetry? Was it here that Hades abducted Persephone and carried her into the bowels of the earth? We stop briefly at the first lookout. Here, under the light of a full moon, I catch my first glimpse on the unimaginable. Towering mountains, cliffs, valleys and bluffs, encapsulated by this slice of earth so far below the surface that the mind cannot grasp its fullness. Chasms within chasms, another world, separate and distinct, a monument to all forces greater than humankind. Its vastness is beyond the realm of fancy yet I am struck by the feeling that I have seen this sight before. Another life, another dream, a crystal meditation. Here on this holy spot of earth all things are possible.
It is late and we must find our place along the canyon’s ledge before the park ranger discovers us. We stop at the second lookout where Wiz spots a parking lot for overnight hikers. I stay with the Mustang while he scrambles to look for a temporary site to plant our gear out of sight of the rangers. He returns and we unload quickly: Sleeping bags, small packs, two beers, two golf balls, two tees and a five iron.
We scuffle down the hill to the chosen spot. It is a small rock ledge just below and to the left of the lookout. It is majestic. The canyon branches briefly to our left and opens in all its glory before us. The mountains on the canyon floor are divided by chasms in three directions: One toward the north rim, another branching to the east and a third toward the west below us.
A mist begins to gather in chasms of the canyon floor as we explore our location and scout for other viewpoints. Our explorations reveal that we have chosen wisely by intuition. Or rather it has chosen us. We return to our camp and settle in. It is the only place we have seen where a golf tee can be implanted in the ground.
I tee up my ball and carefully clean the path of the club’s backswing. As I address the ball I find two imprints in the granite ledge that perfectly fit the soles of my moccasins. I have no doubt that this is the spot. Like Carlos Castaneda rolling around on the porch of Don Juan, the Wiz in his mad scramble zeroed in on the only place our vision could abide. It was not only the right spot; it was the only spot. Had he not found it our destiny would have been altered in ways we can never know.
We are Zen Golfers. A Zen Golfer does not slap or punch a ball into the Grand Canyon. To do so would be sacrilege, an affront not only to the Canyon but also to the game that has come to symbolize and guide our lives.
I plant my feet in the indentations of the ledge and carefully rehearse the swing. I am aware that the force of a golf swing is more than enough to propel the golfer several yards in any direction, including straight forward. I do not mention this knowledge to Wiz who is relatively new to the game, just as one does not mention water on a water hole or out-of-bounds on a long par four. I will give instruction only by example, by preparing for the shot with due caution and sincerity. Balance is the first lesson.
There will be no second chance.
Satisfied, I lay the club along the line where the toes of my feet will be in my stance. Then I sit and wait for the moment. Again and again I visualize the shot. I see the swing, the rotation of the body, the release and the flight of the ball into the canyon. I free my mind of all other thoughts, focusing completely on my center, and wait.
Finally, as the mist rises in the canyon below, I see the white of the ball glowing as if from inner illumination. Moonlight has sprung through an opening in the overhanging shrubs, forming a sacred triangle around the ball. I rise, take up the club, address the ball and suddenly, as if some external force has taken hold of my body, I begin the swing. Like a pendulum, the club head starts its backward motion, the left shoulder swings downward below the chin, weight shifts inward toward the right knee and hip, wrists cock at the top of the swing, hands spring forward as the weight of the body follows closely behind to the point of impact. The coil is unleashed. The club head, still on a downward plain, strikes the ball squarely, snapping the white tee crisply into two equal halves. The body squares to the target of the canyon as the club completes the cycle on its own momentum. My feet remain planted. The ball has disappeared on contact. A sacred shot into the largest hole on the planet. It is my first hole-in-one. We do not mention that it is indeed possible to miss.
Wiz steps forward, tees up his Hogan and addresses the ball. His preparation is not as lengthy but no less sincere. His swing is powerful, full and fearless. He draws sparks from the granite fractions before the ball, a clear sign of solid contact on a downward plain. As before, the ball vanishes on contact. Another ace.
We have succeeded more gloriously than we could ever have imagined. Now we sit back to reflect and bask in the wonder of the moment. Instantly we are both exhausted. There is only time for a little more jostling and a brief visit from the park ranger above, who does not discover us, before sleep envelops us in her dark womb.
We awaken several times over the course of the night to witness the startling changes in the canyon below us. It fills with mist until the clouds below are joined with the clouds above. A more mystical sight cannot be seen in the physical realm. I wonder if Wiz is struck by the same curious urge to jump into the void. The curiosity is that it is by no means a death wish. It is the suspended belief that we are spiritual entities capable of walking to the stars or floating to the canyon floor. I have felt a similar sensation while driving down Highway One on the northern California coast at sunset. It is the sense of being outside oneself and beyond the hold of gravity.
In the morning, while Wiz is off exploring, I open my eyes to discover my sleeping bag has slid down the ledge. My feet are dangling over the precipice. It is time to rise. I stare at the site of the sacred golf shots for a time before I pack my things up and join Wiz in exploration. Tourists have begun to arrive. A German couple seems shy, perhaps humbled by the Canyon. A Japanese man and woman sport broad smiles. The man lets loose a yell that echoes down the canyon walls. Before we leave our sacred place, a place the tourists do not discover, two large crows rise up from the canyon to greet us and send us on our way. One settles on a bush directly before us, scans the canyon, and peers into the space behind my eyes.
It is said that if you look into the eyes of the crow you will see the future. I am filled with calm and wonder. We stop once more to see an Indian dwelling, a stone tower, round with nonlinear windows for lookout. It has been rebuilt and fashioned as a gift shop for tourists. It is still too early to be open but already a crowd is gathering. More Germans, Japanese and French nationals with their cameras ready and wide-eyed curiosity. It seems strange that there are far more foreigners at the Grand Canyon than Americans. Why is it that we never fully appreciate the beauty and majesty of our own back yard?
We leave the canyon the way we came, east and north through the reservation. The park station is unmanned. We are allowed to come and go without charge. This is the way it should be. A ten-dollar bill is deposited below the floor mat on the driver’s side where it will remain until it is needed.
The sun slowly dissolves with a golden orange and purple glow as we make our way to the continent’s great divide. We have crossed endless miles of Indian reservations. We have failed in our attempt to find mescal, forgetting that the selling of alcohol is prohibited on the reservation. We remember that the once proud tribes are still ruled by foreign invaders. We remember that these are a conquered people, protected by law from the weakness that helped to defeat them.
It is a strange phenomenon to see Quick Stops and Exxon stations, the golden arches and Super 8 Motels, and to be reminded that this is the last resting ground of the Navajo. We have traversed the land of the Zuni, the Petrified Forest, and the Apache land of the Painted Desert. The medicine woman’s spell still lingers in the warm dry air, her weathered face etched in the primordial terrain. The sacred dance is still performed on the mesa in a circle of red rock formations. The shadow of the ancient shaman still hovers above us in the evening sky.
A lone coyote yaps and sends us on our way. The crow is with us always. No mescal. No tequila. No alcohol of any kind.
We decide against a detour to Grey Mountain, just outside the reservation, and race the fading light to this day’s grand destination. Along the path in two-by-four shelters draped with canvas and plastic tarps are the new Indians, the commercial Indians who scrape by on the fringe of free enterprise. Signs proclaim them the Friendly Indians -- Manhattan Island’s revenge. They sell authentic Indian jewelry, hand crafted silver and turquoise necklaces, bracelets, medicine pouches and jade earrings.
The sun hovers in a brilliant amber glow. We have lost the race and pull over to a trace canyon, a small sliver of the Grand. The merchant Indians pack their wares, give us a glance over and sensing that we are neither buyers nor a threat to their welfare allow us to pass unobstructed to the edge of their little canyon. I am struck with awe and sit to ponder the hand of god. Wiz is less impressed. He has been to the Grand before. He has walked her ledge and camped on her floor while my eyes are virgin to this spectacle. I am aware of the great glaciers that cut and shaped Yosemite Valley but this is a different creature, bearing a distinctly different spiritual sensation. In a part of the world that desperately needed shelter it is as if the earth opened her womb and gave birth to the greatest shelter the world has ever known. It is a universe of its own, a monument of such depth and breadth that it challenges the eye and questions the very meaning of existence. It invokes flight of mind and humbles the most jaded and reticent of men.
We savor the remaining moments of twilight as we make our way to the edge of the Grand Canyon. The name begins to take on mythological proportions. Was it here beneath the infinite stars of heaven that Prometheus descended with the flame of human enlightenment? Was it here that the muses entertained the gods with music, dance and poetry? Was it here that Hades abducted Persephone and carried her into the bowels of the earth? We stop briefly at the first lookout. Here, under the light of a full moon, I catch my first glimpse on the unimaginable. Towering mountains, cliffs, valleys and bluffs, encapsulated by this slice of earth so far below the surface that the mind cannot grasp its fullness. Chasms within chasms, another world, separate and distinct, a monument to all forces greater than humankind. Its vastness is beyond the realm of fancy yet I am struck by the feeling that I have seen this sight before. Another life, another dream, a crystal meditation. Here on this holy spot of earth all things are possible.
It is late and we must find our place along the canyon’s ledge before the park ranger discovers us. We stop at the second lookout where Wiz spots a parking lot for overnight hikers. I stay with the Mustang while he scrambles to look for a temporary site to plant our gear out of sight of the rangers. He returns and we unload quickly: Sleeping bags, small packs, two beers, two golf balls, two tees and a five iron.
We scuffle down the hill to the chosen spot. It is a small rock ledge just below and to the left of the lookout. It is majestic. The canyon branches briefly to our left and opens in all its glory before us. The mountains on the canyon floor are divided by chasms in three directions: One toward the north rim, another branching to the east and a third toward the west below us.
A mist begins to gather in chasms of the canyon floor as we explore our location and scout for other viewpoints. Our explorations reveal that we have chosen wisely by intuition. Or rather it has chosen us. We return to our camp and settle in. It is the only place we have seen where a golf tee can be implanted in the ground.
I tee up my ball and carefully clean the path of the club’s backswing. As I address the ball I find two imprints in the granite ledge that perfectly fit the soles of my moccasins. I have no doubt that this is the spot. Like Carlos Castaneda rolling around on the porch of Don Juan, the Wiz in his mad scramble zeroed in on the only place our vision could abide. It was not only the right spot; it was the only spot. Had he not found it our destiny would have been altered in ways we can never know.
We are Zen Golfers. A Zen Golfer does not slap or punch a ball into the Grand Canyon. To do so would be sacrilege, an affront not only to the Canyon but also to the game that has come to symbolize and guide our lives.
I plant my feet in the indentations of the ledge and carefully rehearse the swing. I am aware that the force of a golf swing is more than enough to propel the golfer several yards in any direction, including straight forward. I do not mention this knowledge to Wiz who is relatively new to the game, just as one does not mention water on a water hole or out-of-bounds on a long par four. I will give instruction only by example, by preparing for the shot with due caution and sincerity. Balance is the first lesson.
There will be no second chance.
Satisfied, I lay the club along the line where the toes of my feet will be in my stance. Then I sit and wait for the moment. Again and again I visualize the shot. I see the swing, the rotation of the body, the release and the flight of the ball into the canyon. I free my mind of all other thoughts, focusing completely on my center, and wait.
Finally, as the mist rises in the canyon below, I see the white of the ball glowing as if from inner illumination. Moonlight has sprung through an opening in the overhanging shrubs, forming a sacred triangle around the ball. I rise, take up the club, address the ball and suddenly, as if some external force has taken hold of my body, I begin the swing. Like a pendulum, the club head starts its backward motion, the left shoulder swings downward below the chin, weight shifts inward toward the right knee and hip, wrists cock at the top of the swing, hands spring forward as the weight of the body follows closely behind to the point of impact. The coil is unleashed. The club head, still on a downward plain, strikes the ball squarely, snapping the white tee crisply into two equal halves. The body squares to the target of the canyon as the club completes the cycle on its own momentum. My feet remain planted. The ball has disappeared on contact. A sacred shot into the largest hole on the planet. It is my first hole-in-one. We do not mention that it is indeed possible to miss.
Wiz steps forward, tees up his Hogan and addresses the ball. His preparation is not as lengthy but no less sincere. His swing is powerful, full and fearless. He draws sparks from the granite fractions before the ball, a clear sign of solid contact on a downward plain. As before, the ball vanishes on contact. Another ace.
We have succeeded more gloriously than we could ever have imagined. Now we sit back to reflect and bask in the wonder of the moment. Instantly we are both exhausted. There is only time for a little more jostling and a brief visit from the park ranger above, who does not discover us, before sleep envelops us in her dark womb.
We awaken several times over the course of the night to witness the startling changes in the canyon below us. It fills with mist until the clouds below are joined with the clouds above. A more mystical sight cannot be seen in the physical realm. I wonder if Wiz is struck by the same curious urge to jump into the void. The curiosity is that it is by no means a death wish. It is the suspended belief that we are spiritual entities capable of walking to the stars or floating to the canyon floor. I have felt a similar sensation while driving down Highway One on the northern California coast at sunset. It is the sense of being outside oneself and beyond the hold of gravity.
In the morning, while Wiz is off exploring, I open my eyes to discover my sleeping bag has slid down the ledge. My feet are dangling over the precipice. It is time to rise. I stare at the site of the sacred golf shots for a time before I pack my things up and join Wiz in exploration. Tourists have begun to arrive. A German couple seems shy, perhaps humbled by the Canyon. A Japanese man and woman sport broad smiles. The man lets loose a yell that echoes down the canyon walls. Before we leave our sacred place, a place the tourists do not discover, two large crows rise up from the canyon to greet us and send us on our way. One settles on a bush directly before us, scans the canyon, and peers into the space behind my eyes.
It is said that if you look into the eyes of the crow you will see the future. I am filled with calm and wonder. We stop once more to see an Indian dwelling, a stone tower, round with nonlinear windows for lookout. It has been rebuilt and fashioned as a gift shop for tourists. It is still too early to be open but already a crowd is gathering. More Germans, Japanese and French nationals with their cameras ready and wide-eyed curiosity. It seems strange that there are far more foreigners at the Grand Canyon than Americans. Why is it that we never fully appreciate the beauty and majesty of our own back yard?
We leave the canyon the way we came, east and north through the reservation. The park station is unmanned. We are allowed to come and go without charge. This is the way it should be. A ten-dollar bill is deposited below the floor mat on the driver’s side where it will remain until it is needed.
GRAND CANYON: THREE ROUNDS ON THE ROAD
Next stop Page, Arizona by Lake Powell, the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. Wiz remembers this place as the best swimming hole west of the Mississippi. With passion he describes the translucent shades of blue and green and the sparkling clarity of the mile deep waters. It conjures my own memories of Crater Lake in Oregon.
A congenial grey haired lady at the gas station and convenience store tells us where to find the local golf course and our day is set. It is a flat nine-hole course with wide, tree-lined fairways, water and rabbits by the score. We play with the inner self as a theme. I sink a forty footer for birdie and finish two over par. Wiz beats fifty for the fourth time since taking up the game in earnest only a month ago. I’m not sure he realizes what an accomplishment that is. We both make shots with a five iron that allow us to imagine what our shots into the great moonlit void might have looked like had we been able to see the flight of the ball.
We have a good meal at the clubhouse where the bartender speaks about sexism at the dam. She has a degree in engineering and took a job here fresh out of college. Being both female and fresh out of college, the men under her authority resented her. She was smaller in stature than the men and so was often called upon to crawl into small spaces. On one such occasion she was locked in from behind. A lawsuit followed. The men responsible were fired and she quit. She decide to remain in Page as a local bartender, a good station to keep watch and have her revenge on any man who strays from common decency and the sanctity of marriage. We wish each other well and she notes that they have a band at night should we still be around.
The swimming spot is a water-filled rock canyon next to the dam. The water is still clear and striking but Wiz observes that there is a thin sheath of gasoline on the surface – no doubt from the powerboats. It has only been a year.
How frail the beauty of nature now seems when compared to the impregnable grandeur of the Canyon. In one year man has made a mark, like graffiti on the wall of El Capitan. I now understand why boating and recreation is so regulated at Crater Lake. I recall seeing where people had chipped away at a crystal waterfall in a cave called Crystal Palace and wondering how anyone could be so insensitive. Nature’s wonders must be protected. It is the worst of human instinct to want to own or leave a mark on nature one way or another. The signs of human shame are everywhere we look.
Wiz and I discussed our shots into the canyon, wondering if they could be considered littering. Maybe but I think that a golf ball, white and round, is more a holy object than a piece of trash. If we had fired a dozen range balls into the canyon that could be considered littering but a single shot under a full moon was a sacred offering. We ask forgiveness if we offend the pure of heart.
Wiz sends out some inspired sounds as an offering of peace to mother earth. We hope it will help diffuse the damage humans have done. The gentle soaring sounds emerging from his soul will be heard for a thousand miles and a thousand years. They will calm angry men and inspire children. It strikes me as strange the Wiz chose not to play at the canyon. Maybe he was overwhelmed by its perfection. Maybe the sheer magnitude of the canyon’s grace was too great for accompaniment. I never thought to ask. The answer is too simple: The impulse did not strike.
We are back on the road, our spirits soaring and our bodies renewed, though we have sleep only a few hours. The spirit of the crow goes with us and it is more powerful now than ever. What the Wiz calls the All Force is propelling us forward to a destiny that cannot be denied. We head north and cross quickly into Utah. We are at a crossroad on the journey and our senses are sharpened, our awareness heightened. We fight against anticipation but we cannot subdue a feeling of eagerness, of moving forward with eyes of wonder.
Golf has taken prominence in our minds. We have only two books: One is a collection of Bukowski poems and the other is Golf in the Kingdom. We consider the latter the bible of Zen Golf. We open it at random daily and follow its lessons – a tradition born on the short course in Albuquerque. On one occasion, when we were feeling the weight of the journey, Wiz suggested we take a cart. The daily lesson read: It is not the shots; it is the walk. We did not rent a cart and would not for the remainder of our journey.
We have begun taking notes for a pocketbook of Zen Golf. Its lessons are as varied as the game itself and the geography on which it’s played.
Balance is the first lesson.
Without balance, there is nothing.
The swing’s the thing. Julius Boros.
Find the center.
Be the trees.
See the flight of the ball before the shot.
Clear the mind.
Welcome adversity.
See the energy flow through the field of play.
Any shot that can be imagined can be made.
Approach the game with humility.
Swing easy, hit hard. Julius Boros.
Be the wind.
Let the club select you.
Golf is a game of opposites.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The path of the club, the flight of the ball is one.
Hear the wind through the trees.
Everything around you and within you is one.
By the time we get to Zion National Park we are primed and ready to receive the sign that now appears: A golf course on the roadside laid out in a chiseled valley below the red rock and clay formations, sculptures of mother earth and father time. It is mid afternoon, hot and the wind whips across the course in waves of dry heat. Be the wind.
In my mind there are two ways to play golf in the wind. One is to hit a straight ball and allow the wind to move it to the target. The other is to play a ball that moves into or with the wind, merging with complimentary forces or joining contrary forces. I favor the latter approach.
The Wiz chides me on the first tee. The people in the clubhouse, including a couple of young women, are watching us. He wonders if I am road weary. There is of course such a thing. Too long on the road can turn your legs into rubber and envelop your mind in fog. I have cautioned Wiz before to respect the ways and etiquette of other golfers. I have generally allowed him to chide me, preferring to accept the challenge of distraction. It is, however, a lesson I have often addressed. Back in Nashville I once reprimanded him for what I considered an affront to the game. He had playfully chanted “Hey batter-batter…swing!” while I missed a birdie putt. Before I could check my anger I informed him he had about seven holes of bad karma coming. His game went into an immediate tailspin. After three holes of suffering, I handed him a tee and asked him to repair a ball mark on the green. He repaired several and his game returned to him.
Approach the game with humility.
I hit what is known as a wormer. It never leaves the ground. Wiz steps up, hits a solid drive and continues his good-natured needling as we walk down the fairway. My second sails true to course, gliding with the wind. His shot hops along the ground. By the fourth hole we are both struggling. We are fighting the wind and fighting each other despite ourselves.
Welcome adversity.
Suddenly, I raise my head to breathe in the beauty that surrounds us. This is truly one of the most beautiful desert links courses we will ever be blessed to play yet we like spoiled children are waging war against ourselves. War in Paradise! Breathe in, breathe out, smell the desert air. Be the wind.
Like bad karma, good karma is contagious. We begin to play golf. The ball sails and bends gently with the wind. We steer the path of the ball with our minds. (The great Julius Boros once said: to hit a draw think draw, to hit a fade think fade.) We talk to our golf balls and praise their intuitive intelligence. At the seventh tee we are asked to play through by a family of beginning golfers. We greet them with smiles and explain that we are in no hurry but the father insists. We hit tee shots worthy of Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones. (Asked by a reporter how far Jones could hit the ball, his caddy replied: as long as he wants to.) Our balls have wings and soar like eagles with a force far greater than our swings. We are at peace. We are one with the game in all its ancient glory. We finish our round and resume our journey with the same high spirits we possessed at Grand Canyon.
Not more than thirty miles down the road we are greeted by another roadside golf course. It is evening now but we figure we have a good two hours of sunlight left in this sacred day. Once again we do not hesitate but accept this gift of the gods. A sign instructs us to pay for our round at a gas station convenience store down the road. The cost is a phenomenal three dollars per nine. There is a sign by the cash register noting that the last clerk had been fired for giving away golf rounds. At that price the man should have been hung and the golfers banned from the game. Golf at three dollars a round is a poor man’s blessing. It would open the game to the world and the world would be better for it.
It is a short course with an imaginative layout. There are children and ducks, swans and rabbits on the course. The grass is a brilliant shade of green. (The score boasts, “The greenest grass in Utah.”) There are scores of birch with their distinctive white bark. There is laughter and a pleasant breeze beneath a setting sun.
We tee off on a short par four and overshoot the green to the right. After a short hunt Wiz finds his ball and we proceed to play some of the best golf of our journey. By the time we climb to the elevated ninth tee I am aware that he is playing his best ever round. We are forced to wait while the foursome in front of us tees off and clears the fairway. The sun is nearly down. The groundskeeper has turned on the sprinklers, charging the atmosphere with a pulse and rhythm like a pendulum of the soul. There is a glow in the air. There is an uncommon sense of peace and well being.
At length we hit our shots. Mine sails right into a gully but it is well struck and pleasing to the eye. Wiz sends his dead center. Not bad if you like perfect. We descend from the tee like explorers from a high mountain and stride down the fairway in a state of nirvana: the Zen of Golf.
We are more than brothers now. We are comrades. There is an implicit bond and trust between us in this moment of spiritual high. It is beyond common understanding. It is true and unbreakable. It requires no words as words are inadequate but Wiz speaks of it with a satisfied glee: Don Juan would be proud of us!
At that very instant the sprinkler in front of us, as if guided by the hand and humor of the master himself, alters its direction and sends a steady stream directly at us. I bolt to the left and it follows me. I spring to the right and it stays with me. My momentum carries me full force into the braced shoulder of my playing partner and we erupt in gales of laughter.
The Wiz announces: Don Juan is laughing at us. And we have the good sense to laugh along with him.
We finish the hole in good style and humor. It is the best score relative to par the Wiz has ever recorded but it will be remembered as much more than that. We may often in the course of round tell ourselves that we have found it – the Zen, the All Force, the essence – but we have not. What we seek is essentially unattainable. It is illusive like perfection itself. The one sure thing is that those who have found it (or anything close to it) will have no need to speak of it. It is not a source of personal pride and it is not an end in itself. It is a state of mind, a state of being, that is constantly in motion and constantly changing.
We have but begun our journey.
We have played three rounds on the road in a single day and still found time to bathe in the sun and glorious waters of the Colorado River yet we are not tired. Like a golf ball sailing on the wings of an idea we are charged by a separate source of energy. It radiates within us and fills us with a hunger for adventure.
Wiz calls his parents from the pay phone outside the gas station. It is their anniversary. He relates telling his father about his round and his score. His father replied in disbelief: They’re making you count them now, are they? We have a good meal at the restaurant next door. I take note of a strange statement on the menu: They add a ten percent tip to the tab because 70% of their customers are European.
This is Utah. Where are the Americans? Have we made our roads too dangerous for the youth who once traveled these highways in search of self and country? Where are the working class retired in recreational vehicles and vans that once roamed this scenic landscape as a well-earned reward for a life of struggle? Have they discovered that the fruits of their labor, their life savings, are not adequate to the purpose? Have they just lost interest? It is the second reminder of this phenomenon and it leaves me perplexed. I have crossed the country by road, thumb and rail but never before have I witnessed the vanishing American tourist. The road used to be a place separate from society, almost immune to the changing times. It was a place where a young person could find something resembling freedom and it was always worth it to risk the dangers of the road just to experience that feeling.
What has changed? When did the adventurous spirit of Americans die? When did our love of freedom slip away? Now it seems the road is a desperate place where only the foreign born are found.
We decide against getting a room at the motel, opting instead to cross the barren wasteland of Nevada in the cool of the night. The moon is bright and we are charged with a wondrous strange energy as the high Sierras of California beckon us in the distance.
A congenial grey haired lady at the gas station and convenience store tells us where to find the local golf course and our day is set. It is a flat nine-hole course with wide, tree-lined fairways, water and rabbits by the score. We play with the inner self as a theme. I sink a forty footer for birdie and finish two over par. Wiz beats fifty for the fourth time since taking up the game in earnest only a month ago. I’m not sure he realizes what an accomplishment that is. We both make shots with a five iron that allow us to imagine what our shots into the great moonlit void might have looked like had we been able to see the flight of the ball.
We have a good meal at the clubhouse where the bartender speaks about sexism at the dam. She has a degree in engineering and took a job here fresh out of college. Being both female and fresh out of college, the men under her authority resented her. She was smaller in stature than the men and so was often called upon to crawl into small spaces. On one such occasion she was locked in from behind. A lawsuit followed. The men responsible were fired and she quit. She decide to remain in Page as a local bartender, a good station to keep watch and have her revenge on any man who strays from common decency and the sanctity of marriage. We wish each other well and she notes that they have a band at night should we still be around.
The swimming spot is a water-filled rock canyon next to the dam. The water is still clear and striking but Wiz observes that there is a thin sheath of gasoline on the surface – no doubt from the powerboats. It has only been a year.
How frail the beauty of nature now seems when compared to the impregnable grandeur of the Canyon. In one year man has made a mark, like graffiti on the wall of El Capitan. I now understand why boating and recreation is so regulated at Crater Lake. I recall seeing where people had chipped away at a crystal waterfall in a cave called Crystal Palace and wondering how anyone could be so insensitive. Nature’s wonders must be protected. It is the worst of human instinct to want to own or leave a mark on nature one way or another. The signs of human shame are everywhere we look.
Wiz and I discussed our shots into the canyon, wondering if they could be considered littering. Maybe but I think that a golf ball, white and round, is more a holy object than a piece of trash. If we had fired a dozen range balls into the canyon that could be considered littering but a single shot under a full moon was a sacred offering. We ask forgiveness if we offend the pure of heart.
Wiz sends out some inspired sounds as an offering of peace to mother earth. We hope it will help diffuse the damage humans have done. The gentle soaring sounds emerging from his soul will be heard for a thousand miles and a thousand years. They will calm angry men and inspire children. It strikes me as strange the Wiz chose not to play at the canyon. Maybe he was overwhelmed by its perfection. Maybe the sheer magnitude of the canyon’s grace was too great for accompaniment. I never thought to ask. The answer is too simple: The impulse did not strike.
We are back on the road, our spirits soaring and our bodies renewed, though we have sleep only a few hours. The spirit of the crow goes with us and it is more powerful now than ever. What the Wiz calls the All Force is propelling us forward to a destiny that cannot be denied. We head north and cross quickly into Utah. We are at a crossroad on the journey and our senses are sharpened, our awareness heightened. We fight against anticipation but we cannot subdue a feeling of eagerness, of moving forward with eyes of wonder.
Golf has taken prominence in our minds. We have only two books: One is a collection of Bukowski poems and the other is Golf in the Kingdom. We consider the latter the bible of Zen Golf. We open it at random daily and follow its lessons – a tradition born on the short course in Albuquerque. On one occasion, when we were feeling the weight of the journey, Wiz suggested we take a cart. The daily lesson read: It is not the shots; it is the walk. We did not rent a cart and would not for the remainder of our journey.
We have begun taking notes for a pocketbook of Zen Golf. Its lessons are as varied as the game itself and the geography on which it’s played.
Balance is the first lesson.
Without balance, there is nothing.
The swing’s the thing. Julius Boros.
Find the center.
Be the trees.
See the flight of the ball before the shot.
Clear the mind.
Welcome adversity.
See the energy flow through the field of play.
Any shot that can be imagined can be made.
Approach the game with humility.
Swing easy, hit hard. Julius Boros.
Be the wind.
Let the club select you.
Golf is a game of opposites.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The path of the club, the flight of the ball is one.
Hear the wind through the trees.
Everything around you and within you is one.
By the time we get to Zion National Park we are primed and ready to receive the sign that now appears: A golf course on the roadside laid out in a chiseled valley below the red rock and clay formations, sculptures of mother earth and father time. It is mid afternoon, hot and the wind whips across the course in waves of dry heat. Be the wind.
In my mind there are two ways to play golf in the wind. One is to hit a straight ball and allow the wind to move it to the target. The other is to play a ball that moves into or with the wind, merging with complimentary forces or joining contrary forces. I favor the latter approach.
The Wiz chides me on the first tee. The people in the clubhouse, including a couple of young women, are watching us. He wonders if I am road weary. There is of course such a thing. Too long on the road can turn your legs into rubber and envelop your mind in fog. I have cautioned Wiz before to respect the ways and etiquette of other golfers. I have generally allowed him to chide me, preferring to accept the challenge of distraction. It is, however, a lesson I have often addressed. Back in Nashville I once reprimanded him for what I considered an affront to the game. He had playfully chanted “Hey batter-batter…swing!” while I missed a birdie putt. Before I could check my anger I informed him he had about seven holes of bad karma coming. His game went into an immediate tailspin. After three holes of suffering, I handed him a tee and asked him to repair a ball mark on the green. He repaired several and his game returned to him.
Approach the game with humility.
I hit what is known as a wormer. It never leaves the ground. Wiz steps up, hits a solid drive and continues his good-natured needling as we walk down the fairway. My second sails true to course, gliding with the wind. His shot hops along the ground. By the fourth hole we are both struggling. We are fighting the wind and fighting each other despite ourselves.
Welcome adversity.
Suddenly, I raise my head to breathe in the beauty that surrounds us. This is truly one of the most beautiful desert links courses we will ever be blessed to play yet we like spoiled children are waging war against ourselves. War in Paradise! Breathe in, breathe out, smell the desert air. Be the wind.
Like bad karma, good karma is contagious. We begin to play golf. The ball sails and bends gently with the wind. We steer the path of the ball with our minds. (The great Julius Boros once said: to hit a draw think draw, to hit a fade think fade.) We talk to our golf balls and praise their intuitive intelligence. At the seventh tee we are asked to play through by a family of beginning golfers. We greet them with smiles and explain that we are in no hurry but the father insists. We hit tee shots worthy of Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones. (Asked by a reporter how far Jones could hit the ball, his caddy replied: as long as he wants to.) Our balls have wings and soar like eagles with a force far greater than our swings. We are at peace. We are one with the game in all its ancient glory. We finish our round and resume our journey with the same high spirits we possessed at Grand Canyon.
Not more than thirty miles down the road we are greeted by another roadside golf course. It is evening now but we figure we have a good two hours of sunlight left in this sacred day. Once again we do not hesitate but accept this gift of the gods. A sign instructs us to pay for our round at a gas station convenience store down the road. The cost is a phenomenal three dollars per nine. There is a sign by the cash register noting that the last clerk had been fired for giving away golf rounds. At that price the man should have been hung and the golfers banned from the game. Golf at three dollars a round is a poor man’s blessing. It would open the game to the world and the world would be better for it.
It is a short course with an imaginative layout. There are children and ducks, swans and rabbits on the course. The grass is a brilliant shade of green. (The score boasts, “The greenest grass in Utah.”) There are scores of birch with their distinctive white bark. There is laughter and a pleasant breeze beneath a setting sun.
We tee off on a short par four and overshoot the green to the right. After a short hunt Wiz finds his ball and we proceed to play some of the best golf of our journey. By the time we climb to the elevated ninth tee I am aware that he is playing his best ever round. We are forced to wait while the foursome in front of us tees off and clears the fairway. The sun is nearly down. The groundskeeper has turned on the sprinklers, charging the atmosphere with a pulse and rhythm like a pendulum of the soul. There is a glow in the air. There is an uncommon sense of peace and well being.
At length we hit our shots. Mine sails right into a gully but it is well struck and pleasing to the eye. Wiz sends his dead center. Not bad if you like perfect. We descend from the tee like explorers from a high mountain and stride down the fairway in a state of nirvana: the Zen of Golf.
We are more than brothers now. We are comrades. There is an implicit bond and trust between us in this moment of spiritual high. It is beyond common understanding. It is true and unbreakable. It requires no words as words are inadequate but Wiz speaks of it with a satisfied glee: Don Juan would be proud of us!
At that very instant the sprinkler in front of us, as if guided by the hand and humor of the master himself, alters its direction and sends a steady stream directly at us. I bolt to the left and it follows me. I spring to the right and it stays with me. My momentum carries me full force into the braced shoulder of my playing partner and we erupt in gales of laughter.
The Wiz announces: Don Juan is laughing at us. And we have the good sense to laugh along with him.
We finish the hole in good style and humor. It is the best score relative to par the Wiz has ever recorded but it will be remembered as much more than that. We may often in the course of round tell ourselves that we have found it – the Zen, the All Force, the essence – but we have not. What we seek is essentially unattainable. It is illusive like perfection itself. The one sure thing is that those who have found it (or anything close to it) will have no need to speak of it. It is not a source of personal pride and it is not an end in itself. It is a state of mind, a state of being, that is constantly in motion and constantly changing.
We have but begun our journey.
We have played three rounds on the road in a single day and still found time to bathe in the sun and glorious waters of the Colorado River yet we are not tired. Like a golf ball sailing on the wings of an idea we are charged by a separate source of energy. It radiates within us and fills us with a hunger for adventure.
Wiz calls his parents from the pay phone outside the gas station. It is their anniversary. He relates telling his father about his round and his score. His father replied in disbelief: They’re making you count them now, are they? We have a good meal at the restaurant next door. I take note of a strange statement on the menu: They add a ten percent tip to the tab because 70% of their customers are European.
This is Utah. Where are the Americans? Have we made our roads too dangerous for the youth who once traveled these highways in search of self and country? Where are the working class retired in recreational vehicles and vans that once roamed this scenic landscape as a well-earned reward for a life of struggle? Have they discovered that the fruits of their labor, their life savings, are not adequate to the purpose? Have they just lost interest? It is the second reminder of this phenomenon and it leaves me perplexed. I have crossed the country by road, thumb and rail but never before have I witnessed the vanishing American tourist. The road used to be a place separate from society, almost immune to the changing times. It was a place where a young person could find something resembling freedom and it was always worth it to risk the dangers of the road just to experience that feeling.
What has changed? When did the adventurous spirit of Americans die? When did our love of freedom slip away? Now it seems the road is a desperate place where only the foreign born are found.
We decide against getting a room at the motel, opting instead to cross the barren wasteland of Nevada in the cool of the night. The moon is bright and we are charged with a wondrous strange energy as the high Sierras of California beckon us in the distance.
GRAND CANYON: THE LONELIEST ROAD IN AMERICA
We are entering the barren desert that naïve visionaries once dreamed of transforming into farmland through the miracle of irrigation. That dream was long ago swept away like the sagebrush that haunts this landscape. It is hunting ground of the lone coyote, sky of the buzzard and crow, a wasteland where society digs for precious minerals and buries its toxic poisons. It is a land where dreams go to die.
The long stretch of flat desert highway between Ely and Fallen, Nevada, is known as the loneliest road in America. Ely is a major crossroad amidst this desolate land. Its tourist attractions include casinos and one of the world’s largest mining pits. We are not ready to stop in Ely. We fill up with gas and begin the crossing. Despite its flatness the elevation ranges from six to seven thousand feet above sea level. This is what is known as the high desert plains and we half expect Clint Eastwood in black to make an appearance. There are no trees. There are no wires and no electrical lights in the distance. There is nothing but sage and an eerie sensation, a sense of death and longing in the cool desert air.
Wiz has taken the wheel when we encounter kamikaze rabbits. They dash across the highway in droves and turn directly into the headlights of Mustang Sally. This is a breed of animal behavior I have never before observed. I have seen animals of all kinds frozen by the light of approaching vehicles and in their disorientation break the wrong way in an attempt to escape but I have never seen an animal plunge so intentionally into the center of a roaring mechanical beast. It shudders my soul and infuses my mind with doubt and foreboding.
Is it a sign? What lies beyond our naked view to justify such abhorrent behavior? There are thousands of them. Is it Darwin’s process of natural selection, survival of the fittest? With such a sparse supply of food, have these rabbits arrived at this solution to their over-abundant population growth? Should we see this as an act of heroism? Are they sacrificing themselves so that others of their kind can live? Or are there other forces at work: chemicals or radiation that poison and torture the unfortunate of the species? Is this a death of choice or one of madness?
We encounter a deer that startles us with a gesture that reminds us of the suicidal rabbits, feigning a dash into our headlights. We see an elk that watches us with absolute detachment. We see a lone coyote. The coyote alone seems to be home in this place. Here the coyote is king. He is neither startled nor afraid at the sight of our car streaking over asphalt in a vain attempt to outrun the barren loneliness of this land.
At Eureka nothing is open, not even a gas station. We take a look at the map and figure we have just enough to make it to Fallon. Wiz has been driving Sally hard so I take the wheel while he collapses in the passenger seat. I have slept erratically, on edge, but I am driven to put this place behind me. I feel threatened and I know the source of danger is uncertainty. I am not familiar with the rules of this road.
The wise one says: Go into the darkness and be not afraid.
But I am afraid. I can no more deny it than I can deny the moon. I experience the rabbit holocaust from the helm. It is beyond my control. I am driven. I finally begin to accept the unknown, relax and let the road with its flashing line calm me.
Wiz is still asleep when I encounter a stalled four-wheel drive on the opposite side of the road. The driver is on the road trying to wave me down. He is well dressed and the vehicle is new. There is someone else inside. I run all the factors through my mind but I do not stop. I slow and wake Wiz up. I explain the situation and he replies: I’d sure like it if someone stopped to help us. I know he’s right. I should stop and go back.
“How was he dressed?”
“He looks okay.”
I should stop and go back but I keep on driving.
“They should get some rest. There’s nothing we could do anyway. What could we do?”
I am relieved. I realize that my fear is not the risk they pose but the fear that if I stop I will be able to go again. We’re miles and miles from anywhere. Sally has driven harder and longer than she has in a decade. Rational or irrational, I’m afraid.
“We’ll call the highway patrol when we get to the next town.”
“They won’t be stranded long.”
Wiz goes back to sleep. I keep driving. I feel a little better when a truck passes. Truckers have CB radios. All will be well. Still, it is a strange feeling to find myself in a survival mode. How quickly we forget others when we sense ourselves in danger. To feel threatened by the simple act of stopping to aide a fellow traveler. The mirror is unkind. I know this will stay with me a long time. The karmic debt gains a notch.
The sun is slowly rising. The desolate landscape is becoming clearer with stark treeless mountains now in view, rising from the flatland plateau. During the course of a long night I realize that I cannot be sure about the gas status. The gauge is inoperable. The tank originally held twenty gallons but I’m sure about the replacement. The capacity of the new tank is uncertain.
Wiz wakes up some hours into the day and announces, looking at the road atlas, that we are in a danger zone. We have no idea what that means but there it is in black and white. We have entered a danger zone. There are postings in the sage alongside the road at approximately two hundred yard intervals and a hundred yards into the desert. They are too far away to read from the highway. My only thought is: This is not a good place to run out of gas. I wonder if this is my karma for failing to stop in the night.
The road before Fallon is far longer than its mileage. We enter the desert mountains and I coast on the downhills. I whisper solemn encouragement to Sally. Just a little longer. At each crest I look for signs of civilization like a ship lost at sea looking for land. There are cluster of crow, groups of five to seven, and that somehow gives me comfort. Where the crow lives, civilization cannot be far away.
At last Fallon appears like an oasis on the horizon. We have survived desolation row and the loneliest road in America. The gas meter reads 13.1 gallons. The attendant informs us that the danger zone refers to the naval air station’s use of the land for target practice.
It could have been worse. Much worse. The danger was more imaginary than real.
Still I have no desire to pass this way again.
The long stretch of flat desert highway between Ely and Fallen, Nevada, is known as the loneliest road in America. Ely is a major crossroad amidst this desolate land. Its tourist attractions include casinos and one of the world’s largest mining pits. We are not ready to stop in Ely. We fill up with gas and begin the crossing. Despite its flatness the elevation ranges from six to seven thousand feet above sea level. This is what is known as the high desert plains and we half expect Clint Eastwood in black to make an appearance. There are no trees. There are no wires and no electrical lights in the distance. There is nothing but sage and an eerie sensation, a sense of death and longing in the cool desert air.
Wiz has taken the wheel when we encounter kamikaze rabbits. They dash across the highway in droves and turn directly into the headlights of Mustang Sally. This is a breed of animal behavior I have never before observed. I have seen animals of all kinds frozen by the light of approaching vehicles and in their disorientation break the wrong way in an attempt to escape but I have never seen an animal plunge so intentionally into the center of a roaring mechanical beast. It shudders my soul and infuses my mind with doubt and foreboding.
Is it a sign? What lies beyond our naked view to justify such abhorrent behavior? There are thousands of them. Is it Darwin’s process of natural selection, survival of the fittest? With such a sparse supply of food, have these rabbits arrived at this solution to their over-abundant population growth? Should we see this as an act of heroism? Are they sacrificing themselves so that others of their kind can live? Or are there other forces at work: chemicals or radiation that poison and torture the unfortunate of the species? Is this a death of choice or one of madness?
We encounter a deer that startles us with a gesture that reminds us of the suicidal rabbits, feigning a dash into our headlights. We see an elk that watches us with absolute detachment. We see a lone coyote. The coyote alone seems to be home in this place. Here the coyote is king. He is neither startled nor afraid at the sight of our car streaking over asphalt in a vain attempt to outrun the barren loneliness of this land.
At Eureka nothing is open, not even a gas station. We take a look at the map and figure we have just enough to make it to Fallon. Wiz has been driving Sally hard so I take the wheel while he collapses in the passenger seat. I have slept erratically, on edge, but I am driven to put this place behind me. I feel threatened and I know the source of danger is uncertainty. I am not familiar with the rules of this road.
The wise one says: Go into the darkness and be not afraid.
But I am afraid. I can no more deny it than I can deny the moon. I experience the rabbit holocaust from the helm. It is beyond my control. I am driven. I finally begin to accept the unknown, relax and let the road with its flashing line calm me.
Wiz is still asleep when I encounter a stalled four-wheel drive on the opposite side of the road. The driver is on the road trying to wave me down. He is well dressed and the vehicle is new. There is someone else inside. I run all the factors through my mind but I do not stop. I slow and wake Wiz up. I explain the situation and he replies: I’d sure like it if someone stopped to help us. I know he’s right. I should stop and go back.
“How was he dressed?”
“He looks okay.”
I should stop and go back but I keep on driving.
“They should get some rest. There’s nothing we could do anyway. What could we do?”
I am relieved. I realize that my fear is not the risk they pose but the fear that if I stop I will be able to go again. We’re miles and miles from anywhere. Sally has driven harder and longer than she has in a decade. Rational or irrational, I’m afraid.
“We’ll call the highway patrol when we get to the next town.”
“They won’t be stranded long.”
Wiz goes back to sleep. I keep driving. I feel a little better when a truck passes. Truckers have CB radios. All will be well. Still, it is a strange feeling to find myself in a survival mode. How quickly we forget others when we sense ourselves in danger. To feel threatened by the simple act of stopping to aide a fellow traveler. The mirror is unkind. I know this will stay with me a long time. The karmic debt gains a notch.
The sun is slowly rising. The desolate landscape is becoming clearer with stark treeless mountains now in view, rising from the flatland plateau. During the course of a long night I realize that I cannot be sure about the gas status. The gauge is inoperable. The tank originally held twenty gallons but I’m sure about the replacement. The capacity of the new tank is uncertain.
Wiz wakes up some hours into the day and announces, looking at the road atlas, that we are in a danger zone. We have no idea what that means but there it is in black and white. We have entered a danger zone. There are postings in the sage alongside the road at approximately two hundred yard intervals and a hundred yards into the desert. They are too far away to read from the highway. My only thought is: This is not a good place to run out of gas. I wonder if this is my karma for failing to stop in the night.
The road before Fallon is far longer than its mileage. We enter the desert mountains and I coast on the downhills. I whisper solemn encouragement to Sally. Just a little longer. At each crest I look for signs of civilization like a ship lost at sea looking for land. There are cluster of crow, groups of five to seven, and that somehow gives me comfort. Where the crow lives, civilization cannot be far away.
At last Fallon appears like an oasis on the horizon. We have survived desolation row and the loneliest road in America. The gas meter reads 13.1 gallons. The attendant informs us that the danger zone refers to the naval air station’s use of the land for target practice.
It could have been worse. Much worse. The danger was more imaginary than real.
Still I have no desire to pass this way again.
GRAND CANYON: FLIGHT OF THE GRAY EAGLE
We are no more than a stone’s throw from the grand Sierra Mountains, dividing Nevada from California. In the beginning this journey was billed as a trip to the golden state where I was born and raised.
“Going home. Wouldn’t mind some company but I’m going just the same.”
From the moment Wiz decided he would join me, the trip became much more. We spent the night before our departure in the Wiz’s makeshift studio, an old school house in the hills of the Tennessee countryside. We were recording the jazz poetry play inspired by our meeting. It was a wild futuristic vision of Joan of Arc in an underground setting and it took us more than five hours to complete. Wiz controlled all sound, playing keyboard, sax and trumpet as well as working the microphones. The only sounds he did not control were the voices of the actors and the relentless cicada outside.
It was an ordeal and an epic accomplishment. It enabled us to embark on our journey as jazz poets. One of our accomplices gave us references in Albuquerque and a friend from Florence, Alabama where Wiz grew up gave us a stop in Berkeley.
By the time we left Albuquerque none of that seemed important. Jazz poetry was no longer at the forefront of our psyches. We had become Zen Golfers in the sacred moon of Grand Canyon. We had taken the spirit of the Black Crows. We had leaped into the darkness. We had seen death and played our part in it. We had heard the laughter of a Zen master. We had known fear and loneliness as well as beauty beyond belief.
Now, as we ascend the Sierras, we gather our thoughts and collect our visions for soon we would be called upon to become social beings. My family is gathered at the home of my aunt and uncle in Graeagle, California, just over the hills. It had been a year since I had seen any of them. My Aunt Zella and Uncle Tim, cousins Tim and Cathy, and a scattering of friends I had not seen in two years. My older brother, the dark sheep of the family, had only recently returned from Arizona. I had not seen him in over five years.
Graeagle is a family place. As a child I spent many summers in what was then a sparsely populated mountain town. The people who could make a living here were a rare and sturdy breed. It was originally a logging town. The men took jobs in the lumber mills and logging camps during the summer and scraped by the best they could during the winter. It was well suited to a man for all seasons, a jack-of-all-trades, and the mechanically minded. Wiz is such a man. My Uncle Tim is such a man as well, strong and soft-spoken. His son of the same name was made from the same mold. He overcame a reputation for wildness and recklessness to carve his own nitch. His wife of equally sturdy timber and a heart of gold had a lot to do with his success.
Graeagle was an outdoorsman’s paradise. Over the years it had changed. Only an hour from Reno, Nevada, it is now the home of at least three championship golf courses and a burgeoning community of summer homes for the wealthy. My Aunt Zella, a gifted storyteller who came from hardworking folks herself, had the foresight to start a gourmet coffee, candy and card shop in a little space next to the town store. The shop prospered and relocated to its own building on the town’s main street. She passed it down to her son Tim and his wife.
My mother Artis, an artist and as sweet a woman as ever graced the planet, has taken to spending much of her time with her sister Zella. It was a development that left my father feeling alone but that was his own doing. Under the spell of second childhood, he went off on adventures, living away from his family in central California for years at a time. Zella and Artis had found paradise somewhere up on the Klamath River in northern California, where Zella and Uncle Tim owned a cabin. The gray eagle had flown north, leaving behind the old wooden Indian outside the town store and they had followed their own bliss.
The Fourth of July gathering in Graeagle had become a family tradition. My oldest brother John and his family started it many years ago. I had joined in the last few years before moving to Nashville. My sister Sue and her husband Robert were now a part of the tradition, as were most of my fellow siblings and their families.
On this summer only one of my family had opted for a separate vacation. He stands out by his absence. I recall how often he spoke of this place with longing. After a brief separation, his wife had given birth to their second child in the last year. I wonder what unresolved conflicts remain between them. Not coming to Graeagle was a statement.
The family welcomes us and takes Wiz into their embrace. There is always room for one more at the family gathering. My uncle is Polish and is thrilled to share his heritage with the new arrival. Wiz has an easy style and manner with people of all ages. It is one of his many gifts. I envy that quality while recognizing that it comes with an obligation and a responsibility to be generous with one’s time. It can be a curse as well as a blessing but if it is a burden he carries it well.
We exchange stories and make plans. Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we will watch the local parade, play golf on the local nine-hole course, and settle in for the fireworks display. Zella inquires about my wife and wonders when she will get to meet her. My wife has instructed me to reply that we need some time apart. I say only that she has business back in Nashville. She’s in the music business. When I left she was recording in two studios: one as an artist and the other as songwriter/musician. I am not aware that business has slowed to a crawl in the city of music two thousand miles away.
I have called only once and left a message on the phone machine. I have always had a mistrust of phone communications. I need to see a person to trust what he or she is saying. It has been a difficult year, a survival year in many ways, and I want my mind free of the debris it has left with me. I want to focus on the moment. I am a married man approaching his fortieth birthday. I am a speech pathologist in the public schools. I am a writer by avocation only. But tonight and for the length of the journey I am none of these things. I am a man in search of his calling.
The night is spent in the motel room of my sister Sue and her husband Robert. Among the family Sue is closest to me in both age and philosophy. Robert has often served as both counselor and antagonist in late night discussions on the meaning of life, marriage and most anything else that arises in late night discourse. Sue once came to me on a mission to give testimony to the power of the mind. She had taken a course teaching techniques of mind control and affirmation. She was surprised to find me receptive. I did not have to be convinced. I was already a believer. She thanked me for affirming her sanity against the chorus of criticism and belittlement she received from others, family and friends alike.
Over the years Sue and I would share our ideas concerning auras, meditation, altered states, alternative consciousness, charkas, crystals, karma, reincarnation, the afterlife, religion and the New Age. Nothing is beyond the realm of possible and noting is to be trivialized, scoffed at or mocked. The closeness of our bond was more than blood kinship. It was mutual respect, unconditional trust and a shared sense of wonder in the world of ideas.
In some ways our collaboration served to protect her from the cynicism of a family raised on atheism. I was respected as the smartest member of the clan, the only one to receive a higher degree in college. It was a title I never claimed. I enjoy study. I enjoy reading, writing and research. These qualities made me a better student than my siblings. From my point of view, it has little to do with intelligence however that concept may be defined.
Each member of our family needed something to distinguish him or her from the pack. John was a leader, a coach, an organizer and the enforcer of family values. Brother Randy was a smooth operator, a dandy, gifted with the ladies. He was wild but he had the best shot in basketball and a solid golf game. Sue was the communicator, the most spiritual and often the arbiter of dispute. Dave was the hardest worker, the most determined and without doubt the best golfer. Bob was always level headed, pragmatic and a genuine artist. Robin was both the most attractive and sensitive and the best with children. Tom excelled in imagination and had a gift for gadgetry and mechanics. He would go on to get a degree in engineering.
Our family album was like a high school yearbook. Our trophy case was full. We all had something to contribute. It was not for me to tip the balance.
My long lost brother Randy joins us at this gathering. He has been to the lower depths of drugs, poverty and self-imposed banishment to Arizona and parts unknown. He has returned to the family circle. Wiz admires his response to the constant preaching he is obliged to receive. It is well intentioned. Randy listens attentively and calmly as he is reminded of the times he betrayed the family trust. He nods and replies: I agree with you one hundred percent. He seems to mean it and has learned the futility of explaining his past. He is a recovering junkie. He speaks of friends know to us all who have died on the path he has walked.
Randy tells us the story of an old family friend. Sue offers testimony of his kindness. Like my brother, he was a good man who got lost in the shadows of an alternate lifestyle. He was living a separate reality. Randy protests that he was not a junkie. His poisons were alcohol and cocaine, afflictions that grab hold of so many. He says the drugs did not kill him as much as a broken heart. He was devoted to the love of a woman. When she left him he was done. They found him lying on the floor of his apartment, drowned in his own vomit.
He tells me that if his life is ever written it should be called: Sleeping with the Ants.
I don’t ask for an explanation.
Wiz is reminded of his own brother, something he rarely speaks about. He is remembered as a great man gone astray. It is a ghost we share: the knowledge that within ourselves there lurks an attraction to the darkness. There is a cynical side. There is a blues man. There is a rebel who would lead us to the edge of the abyss and push us over. If not for the grace of god…
His brother did not survive. He lives only in memories as a constant reminder of how wrong life can go. He lives in the hearts and minds of those he left behind. He is remembered for the good times and the love but his memory will always be accompanied by sorrow and longing.
My brother is still alive. His manner is light and easy, his spirit full of joy and laughter. He has looked into the eyes of the beast and lived to tell the story. At this moment, frozen like the still waters of a moonlit pond, he has no need to return to the life he led. I believe him because he believes himself. We do not know what the future holds. We can never know. But for now, in this refuge beneath the towering pines, he has rejoined the children of light. He is in the family circle.
We spend hours trying to play a song they’ve written called A Family Tradition. Robert spends as much time explaining that he can’t sing as he does singing. The late hour entrance of our eldest brother John finally interrupts us. He has taken my father’s place as the man who holds the family together. He has learned to temper his own wildness with the wisdom his wife Margie has nurtured in him.
He tells us the police stopped him on his way here. He had been drinking and left his headlights on high beam. The cop let him off with a warning, on the condition that Margie would drive the rest of the way.
It is a cautionary warning and a sign. We are all of us inclined to live a little recklessly in the spirit of celebration. Behold the signs. Go easy. We retire for the evening.
The next morning we gather in front of the Mill Works to watch the Fourth of July Parade. It is pure Rockwell. It summons a more innocent time in America. There is a Vietnam veteran, paralyzed from the waist down, who has traveled the length and breadth of the country in his wheelchair for the rights of the handicapped. He is a genuine American hero and the inspiration of this year’s Graeagle tradition. The volunteer fire department, the logging industry, the jazz jubilee, the Sierra Club and the developers are all represented.
It is a slice of American pie that seems as distant as the seventh star of the Pleiades.
My cousin is a judge on the parade platform, a highly respected position. This same man who once uprooted a kitchen counter and walked through a plate glass door in a nightmare of Armageddon is now a pillar of his community.
Change is possible.
The time has arrived for a round of family golf. We have two foursomes. My father has been uncharacteristically quiet but now he’s in his element. He challenges our concept of the Zen of golf but when I ask him if he has ever guided the ball with his mind it clicks. He loves the game and has often spoken of its mental aspects. I have witnessed him call on the powers of the masters during a round. In my mind he is held back from the realization he has long sought by his competitive nature and the desire for the power of a younger man.
There is some confusion over starting times so we are forced to wait a couple of hours. Mental and physical fatigue is setting in by the time our names are called. The group in front is apparently intimidated and asks us to play through. I decline but my father yells out: Don’t let them fool! They can hit the ball a mile!
We play through at their insistence. My father’s foursome is up first. Pop rips a drive down the middle of the fairway. My brother Randy steps up and sends one hooking out of bounds. My brother-in-law Robert follows with another OB left. My sister adds two more.
One of the foursome who graciously let us play through remarks: Well, I didn’t know they were going to hit two balls apiece.
My foursome adds to the OB total by two. My shot is a dribbler but at least it’s in play. I have often seen this phenomenon. Add a little pressure to the first tee and watch what happens. Observe the player in front of you go astray and you’re more likely to follow. It is the nature of the game.
We settle down to some golf. I finish three over par despite an opening double bogey. The shot of my round is a five iron to within six inches of the hole for a birdie. Visions of the Canyon are alive and well.
The foursome is up and down. My youngest brother Tom is a little too in love with power. He struggles through eight holes but unleashes a monster 280-yard drive to just short of the green on the ninth. It is the talk of the day. His girlfriend is an attractive nurse with a BMW and a friendly disposition. She’s a beginner in golf but plays with touch and finesse. Little brother is a good teacher. Her etiquette is spot on. Wiz surrounds a healthy number of pars and bogeys with a couple of disastrous holes.
All in all, we enjoy the round, the companionship and the walk.
The mood in the other foursome is different. Robert, who thrives on the challenge of competition, tells us what transpired. It seems Randy had been taunting him with an offer of one stroke per hole. Their scores are only a few strokes apart. Neither my father nor my sister wants to talk about their rounds.
When the time is right I speak to my father about the dangers of playing for power. He agrees and promises to make amends.
Swing easy, hit hard.
My brother crowns me the new family champion but reigning champion is not here. I sense family trouble, an old rivalry, and want no part of it. Competition has played a major role in my upbringing. I have grown to recognize the value of competition in instilling drive and inspiring progress but have also recognized its darker influence. The drive for mastery should come from within. The desire to improve and achieve should be independent of one’s competitive standing. A player should never be satisfied with a round because his score was one better than his rival. There is nothing on the golf course uglier than a golfer reveling in his partner’s misfortune. It will inevitably express itself in his own misfortune somewhere down the line.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a round well played. I do. And if that round is reflected in the score it pleases me. But if I ever find myself rooting against a fellow player or worse, planting misfortune in his mind (“Watch out for the water on the right.”), I know I have lost my way and my game will suffer.
Respect your fellow golfers.
“Going home. Wouldn’t mind some company but I’m going just the same.”
From the moment Wiz decided he would join me, the trip became much more. We spent the night before our departure in the Wiz’s makeshift studio, an old school house in the hills of the Tennessee countryside. We were recording the jazz poetry play inspired by our meeting. It was a wild futuristic vision of Joan of Arc in an underground setting and it took us more than five hours to complete. Wiz controlled all sound, playing keyboard, sax and trumpet as well as working the microphones. The only sounds he did not control were the voices of the actors and the relentless cicada outside.
It was an ordeal and an epic accomplishment. It enabled us to embark on our journey as jazz poets. One of our accomplices gave us references in Albuquerque and a friend from Florence, Alabama where Wiz grew up gave us a stop in Berkeley.
By the time we left Albuquerque none of that seemed important. Jazz poetry was no longer at the forefront of our psyches. We had become Zen Golfers in the sacred moon of Grand Canyon. We had taken the spirit of the Black Crows. We had leaped into the darkness. We had seen death and played our part in it. We had heard the laughter of a Zen master. We had known fear and loneliness as well as beauty beyond belief.
Now, as we ascend the Sierras, we gather our thoughts and collect our visions for soon we would be called upon to become social beings. My family is gathered at the home of my aunt and uncle in Graeagle, California, just over the hills. It had been a year since I had seen any of them. My Aunt Zella and Uncle Tim, cousins Tim and Cathy, and a scattering of friends I had not seen in two years. My older brother, the dark sheep of the family, had only recently returned from Arizona. I had not seen him in over five years.
Graeagle is a family place. As a child I spent many summers in what was then a sparsely populated mountain town. The people who could make a living here were a rare and sturdy breed. It was originally a logging town. The men took jobs in the lumber mills and logging camps during the summer and scraped by the best they could during the winter. It was well suited to a man for all seasons, a jack-of-all-trades, and the mechanically minded. Wiz is such a man. My Uncle Tim is such a man as well, strong and soft-spoken. His son of the same name was made from the same mold. He overcame a reputation for wildness and recklessness to carve his own nitch. His wife of equally sturdy timber and a heart of gold had a lot to do with his success.
Graeagle was an outdoorsman’s paradise. Over the years it had changed. Only an hour from Reno, Nevada, it is now the home of at least three championship golf courses and a burgeoning community of summer homes for the wealthy. My Aunt Zella, a gifted storyteller who came from hardworking folks herself, had the foresight to start a gourmet coffee, candy and card shop in a little space next to the town store. The shop prospered and relocated to its own building on the town’s main street. She passed it down to her son Tim and his wife.
My mother Artis, an artist and as sweet a woman as ever graced the planet, has taken to spending much of her time with her sister Zella. It was a development that left my father feeling alone but that was his own doing. Under the spell of second childhood, he went off on adventures, living away from his family in central California for years at a time. Zella and Artis had found paradise somewhere up on the Klamath River in northern California, where Zella and Uncle Tim owned a cabin. The gray eagle had flown north, leaving behind the old wooden Indian outside the town store and they had followed their own bliss.
The Fourth of July gathering in Graeagle had become a family tradition. My oldest brother John and his family started it many years ago. I had joined in the last few years before moving to Nashville. My sister Sue and her husband Robert were now a part of the tradition, as were most of my fellow siblings and their families.
On this summer only one of my family had opted for a separate vacation. He stands out by his absence. I recall how often he spoke of this place with longing. After a brief separation, his wife had given birth to their second child in the last year. I wonder what unresolved conflicts remain between them. Not coming to Graeagle was a statement.
The family welcomes us and takes Wiz into their embrace. There is always room for one more at the family gathering. My uncle is Polish and is thrilled to share his heritage with the new arrival. Wiz has an easy style and manner with people of all ages. It is one of his many gifts. I envy that quality while recognizing that it comes with an obligation and a responsibility to be generous with one’s time. It can be a curse as well as a blessing but if it is a burden he carries it well.
We exchange stories and make plans. Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we will watch the local parade, play golf on the local nine-hole course, and settle in for the fireworks display. Zella inquires about my wife and wonders when she will get to meet her. My wife has instructed me to reply that we need some time apart. I say only that she has business back in Nashville. She’s in the music business. When I left she was recording in two studios: one as an artist and the other as songwriter/musician. I am not aware that business has slowed to a crawl in the city of music two thousand miles away.
I have called only once and left a message on the phone machine. I have always had a mistrust of phone communications. I need to see a person to trust what he or she is saying. It has been a difficult year, a survival year in many ways, and I want my mind free of the debris it has left with me. I want to focus on the moment. I am a married man approaching his fortieth birthday. I am a speech pathologist in the public schools. I am a writer by avocation only. But tonight and for the length of the journey I am none of these things. I am a man in search of his calling.
The night is spent in the motel room of my sister Sue and her husband Robert. Among the family Sue is closest to me in both age and philosophy. Robert has often served as both counselor and antagonist in late night discussions on the meaning of life, marriage and most anything else that arises in late night discourse. Sue once came to me on a mission to give testimony to the power of the mind. She had taken a course teaching techniques of mind control and affirmation. She was surprised to find me receptive. I did not have to be convinced. I was already a believer. She thanked me for affirming her sanity against the chorus of criticism and belittlement she received from others, family and friends alike.
Over the years Sue and I would share our ideas concerning auras, meditation, altered states, alternative consciousness, charkas, crystals, karma, reincarnation, the afterlife, religion and the New Age. Nothing is beyond the realm of possible and noting is to be trivialized, scoffed at or mocked. The closeness of our bond was more than blood kinship. It was mutual respect, unconditional trust and a shared sense of wonder in the world of ideas.
In some ways our collaboration served to protect her from the cynicism of a family raised on atheism. I was respected as the smartest member of the clan, the only one to receive a higher degree in college. It was a title I never claimed. I enjoy study. I enjoy reading, writing and research. These qualities made me a better student than my siblings. From my point of view, it has little to do with intelligence however that concept may be defined.
Each member of our family needed something to distinguish him or her from the pack. John was a leader, a coach, an organizer and the enforcer of family values. Brother Randy was a smooth operator, a dandy, gifted with the ladies. He was wild but he had the best shot in basketball and a solid golf game. Sue was the communicator, the most spiritual and often the arbiter of dispute. Dave was the hardest worker, the most determined and without doubt the best golfer. Bob was always level headed, pragmatic and a genuine artist. Robin was both the most attractive and sensitive and the best with children. Tom excelled in imagination and had a gift for gadgetry and mechanics. He would go on to get a degree in engineering.
Our family album was like a high school yearbook. Our trophy case was full. We all had something to contribute. It was not for me to tip the balance.
My long lost brother Randy joins us at this gathering. He has been to the lower depths of drugs, poverty and self-imposed banishment to Arizona and parts unknown. He has returned to the family circle. Wiz admires his response to the constant preaching he is obliged to receive. It is well intentioned. Randy listens attentively and calmly as he is reminded of the times he betrayed the family trust. He nods and replies: I agree with you one hundred percent. He seems to mean it and has learned the futility of explaining his past. He is a recovering junkie. He speaks of friends know to us all who have died on the path he has walked.
Randy tells us the story of an old family friend. Sue offers testimony of his kindness. Like my brother, he was a good man who got lost in the shadows of an alternate lifestyle. He was living a separate reality. Randy protests that he was not a junkie. His poisons were alcohol and cocaine, afflictions that grab hold of so many. He says the drugs did not kill him as much as a broken heart. He was devoted to the love of a woman. When she left him he was done. They found him lying on the floor of his apartment, drowned in his own vomit.
He tells me that if his life is ever written it should be called: Sleeping with the Ants.
I don’t ask for an explanation.
Wiz is reminded of his own brother, something he rarely speaks about. He is remembered as a great man gone astray. It is a ghost we share: the knowledge that within ourselves there lurks an attraction to the darkness. There is a cynical side. There is a blues man. There is a rebel who would lead us to the edge of the abyss and push us over. If not for the grace of god…
His brother did not survive. He lives only in memories as a constant reminder of how wrong life can go. He lives in the hearts and minds of those he left behind. He is remembered for the good times and the love but his memory will always be accompanied by sorrow and longing.
My brother is still alive. His manner is light and easy, his spirit full of joy and laughter. He has looked into the eyes of the beast and lived to tell the story. At this moment, frozen like the still waters of a moonlit pond, he has no need to return to the life he led. I believe him because he believes himself. We do not know what the future holds. We can never know. But for now, in this refuge beneath the towering pines, he has rejoined the children of light. He is in the family circle.
We spend hours trying to play a song they’ve written called A Family Tradition. Robert spends as much time explaining that he can’t sing as he does singing. The late hour entrance of our eldest brother John finally interrupts us. He has taken my father’s place as the man who holds the family together. He has learned to temper his own wildness with the wisdom his wife Margie has nurtured in him.
He tells us the police stopped him on his way here. He had been drinking and left his headlights on high beam. The cop let him off with a warning, on the condition that Margie would drive the rest of the way.
It is a cautionary warning and a sign. We are all of us inclined to live a little recklessly in the spirit of celebration. Behold the signs. Go easy. We retire for the evening.
The next morning we gather in front of the Mill Works to watch the Fourth of July Parade. It is pure Rockwell. It summons a more innocent time in America. There is a Vietnam veteran, paralyzed from the waist down, who has traveled the length and breadth of the country in his wheelchair for the rights of the handicapped. He is a genuine American hero and the inspiration of this year’s Graeagle tradition. The volunteer fire department, the logging industry, the jazz jubilee, the Sierra Club and the developers are all represented.
It is a slice of American pie that seems as distant as the seventh star of the Pleiades.
My cousin is a judge on the parade platform, a highly respected position. This same man who once uprooted a kitchen counter and walked through a plate glass door in a nightmare of Armageddon is now a pillar of his community.
Change is possible.
The time has arrived for a round of family golf. We have two foursomes. My father has been uncharacteristically quiet but now he’s in his element. He challenges our concept of the Zen of golf but when I ask him if he has ever guided the ball with his mind it clicks. He loves the game and has often spoken of its mental aspects. I have witnessed him call on the powers of the masters during a round. In my mind he is held back from the realization he has long sought by his competitive nature and the desire for the power of a younger man.
There is some confusion over starting times so we are forced to wait a couple of hours. Mental and physical fatigue is setting in by the time our names are called. The group in front is apparently intimidated and asks us to play through. I decline but my father yells out: Don’t let them fool! They can hit the ball a mile!
We play through at their insistence. My father’s foursome is up first. Pop rips a drive down the middle of the fairway. My brother Randy steps up and sends one hooking out of bounds. My brother-in-law Robert follows with another OB left. My sister adds two more.
One of the foursome who graciously let us play through remarks: Well, I didn’t know they were going to hit two balls apiece.
My foursome adds to the OB total by two. My shot is a dribbler but at least it’s in play. I have often seen this phenomenon. Add a little pressure to the first tee and watch what happens. Observe the player in front of you go astray and you’re more likely to follow. It is the nature of the game.
We settle down to some golf. I finish three over par despite an opening double bogey. The shot of my round is a five iron to within six inches of the hole for a birdie. Visions of the Canyon are alive and well.
The foursome is up and down. My youngest brother Tom is a little too in love with power. He struggles through eight holes but unleashes a monster 280-yard drive to just short of the green on the ninth. It is the talk of the day. His girlfriend is an attractive nurse with a BMW and a friendly disposition. She’s a beginner in golf but plays with touch and finesse. Little brother is a good teacher. Her etiquette is spot on. Wiz surrounds a healthy number of pars and bogeys with a couple of disastrous holes.
All in all, we enjoy the round, the companionship and the walk.
The mood in the other foursome is different. Robert, who thrives on the challenge of competition, tells us what transpired. It seems Randy had been taunting him with an offer of one stroke per hole. Their scores are only a few strokes apart. Neither my father nor my sister wants to talk about their rounds.
When the time is right I speak to my father about the dangers of playing for power. He agrees and promises to make amends.
Swing easy, hit hard.
My brother crowns me the new family champion but reigning champion is not here. I sense family trouble, an old rivalry, and want no part of it. Competition has played a major role in my upbringing. I have grown to recognize the value of competition in instilling drive and inspiring progress but have also recognized its darker influence. The drive for mastery should come from within. The desire to improve and achieve should be independent of one’s competitive standing. A player should never be satisfied with a round because his score was one better than his rival. There is nothing on the golf course uglier than a golfer reveling in his partner’s misfortune. It will inevitably express itself in his own misfortune somewhere down the line.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a round well played. I do. And if that round is reflected in the score it pleases me. But if I ever find myself rooting against a fellow player or worse, planting misfortune in his mind (“Watch out for the water on the right.”), I know I have lost my way and my game will suffer.
Respect your fellow golfers.
GRAND CANYON: DOWN HOME IN THE VALLEY
There’s an old movie from the fifties called the Snake Pit in which a song is a running theme: Going home, going home, I’m a going home…
That song keeps running through my head as we descend from the mountains, leaving behind the thin clean air and the scent of pine, down to the valley where I was raised. For all the beauty I have experienced, from the glistening sanctity of the northwest coast to the barren solemnity of the sculpted desert, from the tropical density of the southeast forest to the magical colors of a New England fall, this unremarkable flatland before us is and always will be my home.
It is not the first time I have been away. I lived for two years in the Big Apple pursuing the dream of an artist. I never regretted leaving home but I always knew I would return. I know that now even if I will not reveal it. Nashville is another adventure but it is not my home and it never will be.
Three cars leave Graeagle at the same time on a Sunday afternoon: Wiz and me in Sally, my father and brother Randy in a rough-running 1985 Mustang, and Robert and Sue in their new four-wheel drive Cherokee. The drive is about two hundred miles and normally takes about three and a half hours. After a half hour delay, Robert and Sue make it home to Modesto in four hours. Wary of a prolonged traffic jam and the possibility of overheating, both Mustangs veer south. My father and Randy will arrive in nine hours. We will arrive in ten.
We follow the path that the journey takes us. Rather than fight the traffic, we play golf in Truckee when the opportunity presents itself. We are joined on the first tee by a twosome bearing our first names. Remarkably, it is the first time I have heard the Wiz introduce himself by the name of Jim. They are a doctor and a lawyer nearing retirement age. The doctor is an easy going ethereal man whose first choice in hobbies is tennis. He is taking up golf in earnest now that his knees have betrayed him. The lawyer is more serious and stoic. He has taken lesson recently and is determined to get his money’s worth. The doctor is adept at chiding him for his seriousness in a way that does not offend.
We enjoy the company of our playing partners. They speak of the harshest winter in recorded California history. Coming in the wake of an eight-year drought, they were snowed in well into spring. It reminds me of the storm that greeted the Donner Party, which they tell us is not more than a mile away as the crow flies.
The golf is unremarkable except for an incident that seems to send the entire foursome into a tailspin. On the fifth tee my drive sails to the left out of sight. My vision is obstructed but I am told it skipped hotly by an older woman on an adjacent fairway. Wiz witnesses the event but he is not sufficiently in tune with the etiquette of yelling Fore! It is of course my responsibility. I walk over to their green to apologize and the lady is livid. I try to explain but she’s not having it. I wonder if I should have been more in tune with my surroundings and my fellow golfers. Was it a failure of awareness? My partners advise me to shrug it off but within two holes we’re all struggling. At the end of nine, we decide to play three more to recover our games. We do and exchange well wishing with our namesakes before hitting the road.
We find the traffic is still jammed as we head toward the western shore of Lake Tahoe. Twilight glistens on enchanted waters and we stop for a bite and a bottle of beer. The Wiz buys and I am increasingly aware of his generous nature. We have noticed that a section of Highway 50 is closed and the waitress informs us that cars were sinking in a bad mixture of recently applied asphalt.
We will later learn that my father was caught in that mixture. Their journey takes them on a series of detours and almost comes to blows. The interstate jam, caused by a fruit check, turned out to be the least troublesome. Our road is a series of jams to the valley floor but we don’t mind. Wiz serenades a car full of young ladies with my trumpet. They are thrilled and we chase them down the mountain in the spirit of the moment. It develops into a game of tease and tantalize. We pull off for coffee in Placerville and they nearly follow, veering to the exit before driving on. Had they stopped we would have had an interesting conversation.
We arrive in Modesto after midnight. It takes some time to rouse my sister from her bed. We exchange stories briefly and retire for the night.
It’s almost as if I never left.
That song keeps running through my head as we descend from the mountains, leaving behind the thin clean air and the scent of pine, down to the valley where I was raised. For all the beauty I have experienced, from the glistening sanctity of the northwest coast to the barren solemnity of the sculpted desert, from the tropical density of the southeast forest to the magical colors of a New England fall, this unremarkable flatland before us is and always will be my home.
It is not the first time I have been away. I lived for two years in the Big Apple pursuing the dream of an artist. I never regretted leaving home but I always knew I would return. I know that now even if I will not reveal it. Nashville is another adventure but it is not my home and it never will be.
Three cars leave Graeagle at the same time on a Sunday afternoon: Wiz and me in Sally, my father and brother Randy in a rough-running 1985 Mustang, and Robert and Sue in their new four-wheel drive Cherokee. The drive is about two hundred miles and normally takes about three and a half hours. After a half hour delay, Robert and Sue make it home to Modesto in four hours. Wary of a prolonged traffic jam and the possibility of overheating, both Mustangs veer south. My father and Randy will arrive in nine hours. We will arrive in ten.
We follow the path that the journey takes us. Rather than fight the traffic, we play golf in Truckee when the opportunity presents itself. We are joined on the first tee by a twosome bearing our first names. Remarkably, it is the first time I have heard the Wiz introduce himself by the name of Jim. They are a doctor and a lawyer nearing retirement age. The doctor is an easy going ethereal man whose first choice in hobbies is tennis. He is taking up golf in earnest now that his knees have betrayed him. The lawyer is more serious and stoic. He has taken lesson recently and is determined to get his money’s worth. The doctor is adept at chiding him for his seriousness in a way that does not offend.
We enjoy the company of our playing partners. They speak of the harshest winter in recorded California history. Coming in the wake of an eight-year drought, they were snowed in well into spring. It reminds me of the storm that greeted the Donner Party, which they tell us is not more than a mile away as the crow flies.
The golf is unremarkable except for an incident that seems to send the entire foursome into a tailspin. On the fifth tee my drive sails to the left out of sight. My vision is obstructed but I am told it skipped hotly by an older woman on an adjacent fairway. Wiz witnesses the event but he is not sufficiently in tune with the etiquette of yelling Fore! It is of course my responsibility. I walk over to their green to apologize and the lady is livid. I try to explain but she’s not having it. I wonder if I should have been more in tune with my surroundings and my fellow golfers. Was it a failure of awareness? My partners advise me to shrug it off but within two holes we’re all struggling. At the end of nine, we decide to play three more to recover our games. We do and exchange well wishing with our namesakes before hitting the road.
We find the traffic is still jammed as we head toward the western shore of Lake Tahoe. Twilight glistens on enchanted waters and we stop for a bite and a bottle of beer. The Wiz buys and I am increasingly aware of his generous nature. We have noticed that a section of Highway 50 is closed and the waitress informs us that cars were sinking in a bad mixture of recently applied asphalt.
We will later learn that my father was caught in that mixture. Their journey takes them on a series of detours and almost comes to blows. The interstate jam, caused by a fruit check, turned out to be the least troublesome. Our road is a series of jams to the valley floor but we don’t mind. Wiz serenades a car full of young ladies with my trumpet. They are thrilled and we chase them down the mountain in the spirit of the moment. It develops into a game of tease and tantalize. We pull off for coffee in Placerville and they nearly follow, veering to the exit before driving on. Had they stopped we would have had an interesting conversation.
We arrive in Modesto after midnight. It takes some time to rouse my sister from her bed. We exchange stories briefly and retire for the night.
It’s almost as if I never left.
GRAND CANYON: MOTOWN
To the rest of the world Motown refers to the Motor City, home of the American automobile, conjuring images of the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, the Shondells, Aretha Franklin and Cadillac Records but to those who hail from the central valley of California Motown is Modesto, home of Gallo Wine and American Graffiti.
Modesto is at the dead center of the richest agricultural land the world has ever known outside the Nile. Modesto is from the Spanish for modest and it is appropriately named. I wonder how it looks through Wiz’s eyes with its flatland profile, its Quik Stops and 7-11’s, its Burger Kings and lighted ballparks, its almond orchards and shopping malls, its construction projects and commercialism, its main drag and downtown improvement, its tree lined streets and industrial parks.
In parts of the Midwest I’m told Modesto is known as Sin City. It is a crossroad in the drug trade. In my own travels I have rarely encountered anyone who has even heard of the town except those who have been here. For years there was a controversy played out in the editorial page of the local paper regarding the absence of freeway signs referring to Modesto. We call it a town but the population is over 200,000. To me it is a lot like every town.
Over the years Modesto has undergone massive growth and development yet somehow it remains essentially the same. The children here still have a hard time finding anything to do outside of sports. The adults never tire of complaining about the rebelliousness of youth only now it relates to gangs. Modesto’s prime agricultural land is shrinking. Crime and unemployment are high. Local politicians have given lip service to limited growth policy but the developers march on without restraint.
It is a town of strange bedfellows and curious contradictions. The city council has outlawed the tradition of the cruise made famous by Modesto raised filmmaker George Lucas but they reserve one night a year each summer for reenactment.
There is a new and positive development: the downtown Café. Young people gather with books and notepads, listening to music and talking about art. They look at their elders as we looked at ours with trepidation and mistrust. In my eyes they appear to be taking notes for a cultural revolution. I like the look of them and wish them success whatever the consequences.
A good friend of mine has contributed to the trend by opening a bistro called Deva after his oldest daughter. It is first on my list of places to go. Charlie is one of the nicest guys in America. In more than ten years the harshest criticism I’ve ever heard him utter is: You must be high! I met Charlie at the crossroad of women and sports. I was then a college student involved with an interesting woman from my old neighborhood. Her sister was married to one of the few remaining longhairs from the late sixties. Ron is also one of the nicest guys in America. He was destined to lose his then wife for lack of ambition. My own relationship would stumble to a close after little more than a year. I was never quite certain why it ended but I suspect my interest in sports, my philosophic opposition to marriage and my distrust of counseling contributed to the fading of our relationship. I had begun to look in other directions and so had she.
Before our relationships ended, Ron invited me to try out for a city league softball team. I did and played for the Westside Hammers for the next few seasons. Charlie played third base and Ron was the centerfielder. Before long we were gathering at Charlie’s place on Paradise Road, talking baseball, passing the pipe and listening to rock and roll. Neil Young was Charlie’s hero. My oldest brother John offered me a place in a fantasy baseball team. I recruited Ron and Charlie as my partners and took him up. That was the beginning of a long commitment. My participation in softball would end when I took a part in a summer Shakespeare production but the fantasy baseball team would endure.
Looking back I am amazed at how a chain of seemingly random events so profoundly shape our lives. Our ends never know our means. On the perpetually winding road of life there is so much to be grateful for and so little to regret. I love this life. I love living it. I love bending with the wind in search of my own destiny. Above all I love the people who have become a part of my life.
Charlie’s wife Cathy is a gifted teacher who as chance would have it worked with my mother as instructional aide. She has a strong spiritual side. She believes she has encountered extraterrestrial life on earth and greets that knowledge with both wonder and apprehension. Ron’s second wife Deborah is a nurse and a wise soul from the flower child tradition. She compliments and accepts Ron as himself. She has no need to inspire him with greater ambition. Their children are as gifted and talented as their parents are, free spirits who find their own paths to make a mark in this ever-changing world.
As the Wiz and I make our way to Charlie’s café, the one word that describes both him and the circle of friends surrounding him occurs to me: Acceptance. There is a simple creed governing the conduct of this sacred circle that strangely seems to require a great deal of intellect to comprehend. There is no wrong where there is no harm. At Charlie’s place you are not judged for your opinions, tastes, manner of speech or choice of appearance. Each individual is valued for his contribution to the harmony of the whole. Like Wiz it is a quality that calls on Charlie to give much of his time and energy. It is not his habit to cut a conversation short or turn down a friend in need. As a consequence he will often let his phone ring for hours without answering it. Even nice guys need their own time.
I don’t have an address for the café. I only know it is somewhere on Jay Street, a road that runs from the west side to the center of town and feeds eventually to the new main drag at five corners. We begin on the west side and work our way eastward. I have pictured an informal atmosphere, low keyed and low overhead, like a converted storefront with wooden spools for tables and director chairs dispersed without any discernable pattern. I picture a bar rather than a service counter, a sound system next to the cash register with a rich collection of tapes and disks. On the walls I see avant-garde artwork, photographs and rock posters in style of the psychedelic sixties. Neil Young’s Ragged Glory is playing through quadraphonic speakers. Wednesday night poetry, Thursday jazz and Friday rock is on the program. Books of interest adorn shelves in one corner of the room where a water pipe hides behind a potted plant.
In the back of my mind I hear Charlie saying: You must be high!
We finally locate Deva in the center of town, only a handful of blocks from the main drag. Times have changed. I realize that my vision was drawn from my own ambitions in another time and place. Charlie is no sentimental fool, at least not where business is concerned. Deva is not highbrow but it is impressively upscale by local standards. On the walls are large prints by Van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin and others against a tasteful wallpapered background. Classical music floats softly through the air. A single Neil Young ballad is the only concession to the owner’s personal taste. The décor compliments a menu with items like Pesto a la Panache.
Times have changed. It is I suspect the finest café-bistro in old Motown with a clientele of downtown lawyers, judges and business people.
A beautiful and talented actress, a young woman who was the source of many wet dreams in my former days, greets us at a table by the windows. She is our waitress. I offer an opinion that she has the best boss in town. She agrees with a hint of doubt: You mean Charlie? She has more than one boss. I later learn that Charlie and Cathy have hired a friend from Seattle as a consultant.
Deva is the only establishment in northern California with Guinness stout on tap. Served as intended at room temperature, I am certain that is Charlie’s touch. I suspect the place will take on more of his imprint as time goes by.
Charlie makes a late entrance and his eyes light up. Introductions around. The Wiz is welcomed into the circle. Cathy joins us with a warm embrace. She tells us about a friend who recently died in a car wreck while traveling at an estimated 120 miles per hour. By divine coincidence, at the approximate time of his death I happened to send an email entitled: Is anybody out there? It reads in part:
He was a man who befriended many, who left his mark on trees and park benches…and in the hearts of those he loved. He wandered long and far from home. He returned to find no one who remembered his name. His mark erased, painted over by graffiti artists… Is anybody out there? Does anybody know my name?
The words were not intended in effigy or as an epitaph. They were elicited by the journey before me, not the journey behind. Yet how strangely poignant they are in the death of a friend. Death too is a journey. It is a journey that escapes none of us. As Charlie says: No one gets out alive. He is not in mourning. He says his friend went the way he would like to go, in a blaze of glory, fast, reckless and wild like James Dean. I knew him only as a friend of Charlie’s, a man with a quick smile and encouraging words.
Ron soon joins us with his youngest child Manon, after the film Manon of the Spring. She is a beautiful child, full of life and laughter. We all sit for a few on the house. The more things change the more they stay the same: Baseball, David Lynch, Neil Young and the passage of time. We are invited to dinner and a gathering of minds. We accept and make our way to the Mustang where Manon coaxes the Wiz into a little music on the streets of Motown. The journey brings out the child in us all.
The gods of golf are calling once again.
Modesto is at the dead center of the richest agricultural land the world has ever known outside the Nile. Modesto is from the Spanish for modest and it is appropriately named. I wonder how it looks through Wiz’s eyes with its flatland profile, its Quik Stops and 7-11’s, its Burger Kings and lighted ballparks, its almond orchards and shopping malls, its construction projects and commercialism, its main drag and downtown improvement, its tree lined streets and industrial parks.
In parts of the Midwest I’m told Modesto is known as Sin City. It is a crossroad in the drug trade. In my own travels I have rarely encountered anyone who has even heard of the town except those who have been here. For years there was a controversy played out in the editorial page of the local paper regarding the absence of freeway signs referring to Modesto. We call it a town but the population is over 200,000. To me it is a lot like every town.
Over the years Modesto has undergone massive growth and development yet somehow it remains essentially the same. The children here still have a hard time finding anything to do outside of sports. The adults never tire of complaining about the rebelliousness of youth only now it relates to gangs. Modesto’s prime agricultural land is shrinking. Crime and unemployment are high. Local politicians have given lip service to limited growth policy but the developers march on without restraint.
It is a town of strange bedfellows and curious contradictions. The city council has outlawed the tradition of the cruise made famous by Modesto raised filmmaker George Lucas but they reserve one night a year each summer for reenactment.
There is a new and positive development: the downtown Café. Young people gather with books and notepads, listening to music and talking about art. They look at their elders as we looked at ours with trepidation and mistrust. In my eyes they appear to be taking notes for a cultural revolution. I like the look of them and wish them success whatever the consequences.
A good friend of mine has contributed to the trend by opening a bistro called Deva after his oldest daughter. It is first on my list of places to go. Charlie is one of the nicest guys in America. In more than ten years the harshest criticism I’ve ever heard him utter is: You must be high! I met Charlie at the crossroad of women and sports. I was then a college student involved with an interesting woman from my old neighborhood. Her sister was married to one of the few remaining longhairs from the late sixties. Ron is also one of the nicest guys in America. He was destined to lose his then wife for lack of ambition. My own relationship would stumble to a close after little more than a year. I was never quite certain why it ended but I suspect my interest in sports, my philosophic opposition to marriage and my distrust of counseling contributed to the fading of our relationship. I had begun to look in other directions and so had she.
Before our relationships ended, Ron invited me to try out for a city league softball team. I did and played for the Westside Hammers for the next few seasons. Charlie played third base and Ron was the centerfielder. Before long we were gathering at Charlie’s place on Paradise Road, talking baseball, passing the pipe and listening to rock and roll. Neil Young was Charlie’s hero. My oldest brother John offered me a place in a fantasy baseball team. I recruited Ron and Charlie as my partners and took him up. That was the beginning of a long commitment. My participation in softball would end when I took a part in a summer Shakespeare production but the fantasy baseball team would endure.
Looking back I am amazed at how a chain of seemingly random events so profoundly shape our lives. Our ends never know our means. On the perpetually winding road of life there is so much to be grateful for and so little to regret. I love this life. I love living it. I love bending with the wind in search of my own destiny. Above all I love the people who have become a part of my life.
Charlie’s wife Cathy is a gifted teacher who as chance would have it worked with my mother as instructional aide. She has a strong spiritual side. She believes she has encountered extraterrestrial life on earth and greets that knowledge with both wonder and apprehension. Ron’s second wife Deborah is a nurse and a wise soul from the flower child tradition. She compliments and accepts Ron as himself. She has no need to inspire him with greater ambition. Their children are as gifted and talented as their parents are, free spirits who find their own paths to make a mark in this ever-changing world.
As the Wiz and I make our way to Charlie’s café, the one word that describes both him and the circle of friends surrounding him occurs to me: Acceptance. There is a simple creed governing the conduct of this sacred circle that strangely seems to require a great deal of intellect to comprehend. There is no wrong where there is no harm. At Charlie’s place you are not judged for your opinions, tastes, manner of speech or choice of appearance. Each individual is valued for his contribution to the harmony of the whole. Like Wiz it is a quality that calls on Charlie to give much of his time and energy. It is not his habit to cut a conversation short or turn down a friend in need. As a consequence he will often let his phone ring for hours without answering it. Even nice guys need their own time.
I don’t have an address for the café. I only know it is somewhere on Jay Street, a road that runs from the west side to the center of town and feeds eventually to the new main drag at five corners. We begin on the west side and work our way eastward. I have pictured an informal atmosphere, low keyed and low overhead, like a converted storefront with wooden spools for tables and director chairs dispersed without any discernable pattern. I picture a bar rather than a service counter, a sound system next to the cash register with a rich collection of tapes and disks. On the walls I see avant-garde artwork, photographs and rock posters in style of the psychedelic sixties. Neil Young’s Ragged Glory is playing through quadraphonic speakers. Wednesday night poetry, Thursday jazz and Friday rock is on the program. Books of interest adorn shelves in one corner of the room where a water pipe hides behind a potted plant.
In the back of my mind I hear Charlie saying: You must be high!
We finally locate Deva in the center of town, only a handful of blocks from the main drag. Times have changed. I realize that my vision was drawn from my own ambitions in another time and place. Charlie is no sentimental fool, at least not where business is concerned. Deva is not highbrow but it is impressively upscale by local standards. On the walls are large prints by Van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin and others against a tasteful wallpapered background. Classical music floats softly through the air. A single Neil Young ballad is the only concession to the owner’s personal taste. The décor compliments a menu with items like Pesto a la Panache.
Times have changed. It is I suspect the finest café-bistro in old Motown with a clientele of downtown lawyers, judges and business people.
A beautiful and talented actress, a young woman who was the source of many wet dreams in my former days, greets us at a table by the windows. She is our waitress. I offer an opinion that she has the best boss in town. She agrees with a hint of doubt: You mean Charlie? She has more than one boss. I later learn that Charlie and Cathy have hired a friend from Seattle as a consultant.
Deva is the only establishment in northern California with Guinness stout on tap. Served as intended at room temperature, I am certain that is Charlie’s touch. I suspect the place will take on more of his imprint as time goes by.
Charlie makes a late entrance and his eyes light up. Introductions around. The Wiz is welcomed into the circle. Cathy joins us with a warm embrace. She tells us about a friend who recently died in a car wreck while traveling at an estimated 120 miles per hour. By divine coincidence, at the approximate time of his death I happened to send an email entitled: Is anybody out there? It reads in part:
He was a man who befriended many, who left his mark on trees and park benches…and in the hearts of those he loved. He wandered long and far from home. He returned to find no one who remembered his name. His mark erased, painted over by graffiti artists… Is anybody out there? Does anybody know my name?
The words were not intended in effigy or as an epitaph. They were elicited by the journey before me, not the journey behind. Yet how strangely poignant they are in the death of a friend. Death too is a journey. It is a journey that escapes none of us. As Charlie says: No one gets out alive. He is not in mourning. He says his friend went the way he would like to go, in a blaze of glory, fast, reckless and wild like James Dean. I knew him only as a friend of Charlie’s, a man with a quick smile and encouraging words.
Ron soon joins us with his youngest child Manon, after the film Manon of the Spring. She is a beautiful child, full of life and laughter. We all sit for a few on the house. The more things change the more they stay the same: Baseball, David Lynch, Neil Young and the passage of time. We are invited to dinner and a gathering of minds. We accept and make our way to the Mustang where Manon coaxes the Wiz into a little music on the streets of Motown. The journey brings out the child in us all.
The gods of golf are calling once again.
GRAND CANYON: GOLF AT THE MUNI
There are three public golf courses in Modesto. The oldest is a nine-hole layout next to the ballpark affectionately referred to as the Muni. It is the equivalent of no name at all since all public courses are municipal. Despite the flat terrain the Muni is an excellent test of skill. Its fairways lined with tall sycamore, oak and pine require the golfer to bend the ball both left and right. It is a course designed for shot making.
The finishing holes offer a fair sampling of all the shots in golf. Number seven is a 475-yard par five. For a long hitter it is reachable in two shots but there are a line of trees about two hundred and fifty yards down. The hole calls for a draw off the tee, bending to the left to clear the barrier of trees. The second shot presents a choice: You may be able to reach the green with a fairway wood but you have to avoid a trap guarding the left side and out of bounds on the right. The safer option is to lay up with a mid iron to the right leaving a short wedge to the green. It takes the trap and out of bounds out of play. A third option is to drill a two iron to the front, leaving a chip for eagle. It carries the same risk as a fairway wood to a lesser degree. Unless you’re in the zone the safe play is the best play.
The eighth hole is a standard 150-yard par three to a large sloping green with a large bunker on the left. Pin placement is critical. If the hole is located short right you can fire an eight iron at the stick. If it’s up left the trap comes into play. Aim at the pin and you risk the trap or worse, skipping over the backside for a tough chip back. The best play is an easy seven iron to the middle of the green. Take your chances with the putter.
Number nine is a classic and one of the toughest holes in the valley: A long par four dogleg right with a road bordering the entire right side and a tough bunker to the left of the green. A power fade off the tee leaves you a long iron or a five wood home. There is nothing easier in golf than losing a long iron to the right. The shot calls for a low draw or a gentle fade aimed directly at the trap. If you hit the trap, however, you would prefer to hit from the green side, leaving an uphill lie and a relatively easy sand shot.
My only eagle came on the fifth hole, a short par four. I chipped in after an excellent drive. The Muni has the added feature of a free driving range with room enough for a solid five iron.
I love the Muni. Back in the day we used to play those three holes over and over into the night, stopping only when we could no longer see the flight of the ball. I went to high school a block down the road. We paid five dollars for a monthly pass of unlimited play. Those days are long gone.
Ironically, I was not in love with the game back then. It was the late sixties to early seventies and I had plenty to occupy my mind. It was a time of upheaval. I started hitchhiking and had plans to join the flower children of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. I almost dropped out of school. I had my first taste of mind-bending drugs. I went public with my agnostic views on religion and experienced the effects of ostracism. It was a time of great change and great promise and I wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.
There was so much I did not understand and could not condone. As graduation speaker I accused our president of lying and causing the death of over fifty thousand American soldiers as well as more than a million Vietnamese. More than anything else I represented the frustration and sense of betrayal that my generation felt. In the wake of Kent State and Jackson State, Berkeley, Watts and Chicago, we felt we were disenfranchised.
The worst was yet to come. For me as for countless others the ultimate betrayal was the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I had seen him only days before he was gunned down on the back of a campaign train running through the central California valley. All the joy and promise I once felt was suddenly transformed into a pervasive cynicism. I felt betrayed not only by the nation’s leaders but by the elders of my own generation. To have offered so much hope only to have it smothered and swept away into the back pages of history before I was old enough to play my part.
It seemed a cruel fate to be born at precisely the wrong time: Old enough to be aware but too young to engage. It would be years before I understood well enough to forgive them and to forgive myself. There was nowhere to go and nothing to be done. I had no plan and those we had empowered with our faith were all gone. Dead and gone. We thought we could change the world on faith alone but we were wrong. Jim Morrison became the spokesman of a lost generation and James Dean its hero.
Survival is the cardinal rule of the revolution and the one most overlooked. Too late. It was much too late. Those of us who survived must carry on in our own individual ways. It would be many years before I could recover enough faith to enjoy the simple pleasures and pastimes of life, including baseball where the drama of life is metaphorically played out every year over the course of spring, summer and fall, and including golf which more than any other sport is a game of individual faith.
It is Saturday morning and we arrive at the Muni for a round with my father and an old friend. Mike and I share a common interest in golf, baseball and theater. We met during our college days when we were both engaged in competitive speech. He made his mark with a rhetorical analysis of Charles Lindberg’s opposition to America’s entry into World War II. The tainting of an American hero. My greatest accomplishment was a gold prize in Reader’s Theater at the state championship for my portrayal of the legendary Woody Guthrie in a show called Hard Travelin’. For years after I would answer to the call of Woody. The show turned professional and played the college circuit for a year. It sent my ambition soaring. I wrote, directed and acted in my first original play, Fosdick and Muldoon. I moved to New York shortly thereafter to stake my claim. Two years later I came back home with more modest expectations.
Mike was a member of the cast for both Hard Travelin’ and Fosdick and Muldoon. I typed him as an accountant whose central motive was to win at any cost. There’s a lot of history between us and a lot of memories. Our compadre back in the day was a man who married and later divorced Mike’s sister after a long struggle with alcoholism. He was one of the most intelligent and levelheaded persons I ever knew. There but for the grace of god go all of us. At one point he called upon his circle of friends to provide support in his battle. It was the first time I had heard the term Intervention. I felt acutely uncomfortable sitting in his living room, listening to testimonials of the harm, pain and despair he had caused. My days with him were full of joy and laughter, glory and adventure. He had never been a source of misery to me but I was told these accusations were critical to his recovery. I sensed that I was much too far removed from his life to be of help. Maybe I also feared that I was in danger of drowning myself so I didn’t have the heart to hang on to a drowning man.
The last I heard from him he was doing well, a dedicated member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He had begun a new relationship. From the depths of my heart I wished him well. I offered him what I did not know then was a major truism of AA: One day at a time.
Don’t look back, brother. You can never look back.
I wonder now if what drove us in those college days of glory was not some fundamental insecurity. I wonder if we sought external recognition to compensate for some deficiency in our upbringing. Our ends never know our means.
Mike is now an accountant for the county, married to a woman we half jokingly refer to as a saint. It is a title she does not claim. She has without doubt helped him along to overcome his reputation as a hot head. Wiz recognizes a few glimpses of that personality trait in his golf game. As it is in golf, so it is in life. It has been Mike’s habit to curse a wayward shot and talk incessantly about his own game to the last person on earth who wants to hear it: another golfer.
Fortunately, Mike is in control today, though his game is suffering from his characteristic stubbornness and a lack of attention. He is not interested in improving his game. He is only interested in improving his score. He does not seem to understand the relationship between the two.
I have learned not to offer advise on the course. I have come to believe that a player’s game need only be good enough to enable him or her to enjoy the walk. One does not have to play well to keep pace.
My father is on his home turf. He smacks one down the middle, long lean and mean. Wiz finds the trees left, Mike skies one to the right and chump one about a hundred yards in the fairway. Pop remarks that it is one of the worst shots he has seen me hit. His memory is apparently not as good as it once was. I make an excuse of the road though I know there are no excuses in this game. Back to basics: Balance is the first lesson. I recover with a solid shot and hit the green in three but take three putts for a double bogey. I make a note that I need to warm up before a round.
Pop, whose nickname from his boxing days is Killer, has a number of tactics to distract and otherwise thwart his opponents. In addition to good-natured ribbing, they include whispering while a fellow player is addressing the ball and standing directly behind the ball while another player hits or putts on tees and greens. They are practices that drive many golfers through the roof. Because of them I had great difficulty playing with my father until I decided to welcome distractions as a challenge to my ability to focus on the shot. Although I still may gesture for silence when others are addressing the ball, I have greatly enjoyed the rounds we have shared since that time. On the golf course, we have achieved a level of camaraderie and mutual respect that we rarely experience while living in the same house.
Pop is a great golfer and a great man. He has fought his entire life for the things he believes are right. When he stays within the limits of his age, he is the kind of golfer who compliments you on a drive fifty yards past his and then takes the wind from you sails with a 30-yard chip to the center of the cup. The difficulty is accepting one’s limitations.
I double the second hole in the same manner as the first. Bad drive, good recovery and three putts. I save par on three with an excellent wedge over a trap. I take a tough bogey on number four and after a booming drive on five, par out the nine. The last three holes I play to perfection. On seven, I take the fairway trees out of play with a draw to the left, play a mid iron to the right side and hit a wedge to within eight feet. I just miss the putt. On eight, with the pin up left, I play to the center of the green and two putt. On nine, I follow a power fade with a low two iron to the front of the green. Up and in for par.
My run of pars draws me even with the old man, who has played well despite a few careless shots. It is a good round enjoyed by all. We have each played well enough to enjoy the game, the walk and the companionship. Mike has managed to keep his cool despite his trials and Wiz takes great joy in my father’s company. According to plan, pop calls it a day after nine and we join him in the clubhouse for a beer. We talk golf, politics, Nashville and Motown. Others join in the conversation. Everyone knows Killer.
When I was growing up pop was a policeman and a wrestling promoter, a celebrity on the local sports scene. Pop has spent most of his life in the limelight. He was a star athlete as a kid. He was a top ranked boxer as a young man, at a time when pugilists were regarded as baseball or basketball players are regarded today. We kids were awed by his collection of trophies, photographs, clippings and stories. One of his most prized possessions were a championship belt and a sterling silver statuette of a boxer, commemorating his military conquest of allied China, Burma and India during the great war. He was named the most scientific boxer of the tournament and he was proud of that acknowledgement. He also had a black satin jacket with a Golden Gloves emblem on it. He once said that I was the only son who had the skills to follow him in the ring. He gave that jacket and I treasured it.
Acting as his own lawyer he sued his former fight manager for skimming the purse and won. He used that money to stake himself to his own gym in Modesto. For a while he trained boxers and promoted fights but eventually went exclusively into wrestling and rock promotion. There was just too much risk in the boxing game and not enough profit. Top ranked fighters required a large purse up front but wrestlers worked on a percentage basis. Rock and roll had a large following in a town that offered so little to its youth.
I have vivid memories of the day two young Mexican American brothers who were trained by my father decided to challenge the old man. One of them had risen to the ranks of local stardom but my father knocked them both out, one after the other in a matter of minutes. It may have ended a budding career but it secured pop’s larger than life stature in the eyes of his children.
Pop was the man who brought The Doors to Modesto only weeks before Light my Fire hit the airwaves catapulting them to international prominence. They were by far the most professional I have ever seen. They were the second bill that night and I remember a local band wanting billing above them. Their manager informed them that they did not want to follow The Doors.
Eventually pop’s promotion of rock concerts ended his career as a policeman. After twenty years service as a Westside cop, the only cop trusted in the black community during the days of racial unrest, the new chief didn’t approve of rock and roll. My father didn’t approve of the new chief or many of his policies, like ticket quotas, duck ponds, preferential law enforcement or phasing out veteran cops. He fought his dismissal and won a personnel hearing against long odds but the city dismissed him anyway. His appeal was allowed to expire by a corrupt lawyer turned politician who had volunteered to represent him at minimal cost. A red cent would have been too much. His last advice to my father was to sue him, knowing that he could not afford to do so.
I wondered then how he was paid off. The city had spared no expense defending itself in a nonbinding personnel hearing. A sitting circuit court judge who soon after was appointed to an appellate court bench represented them. He did all he could to avoid the civil rights issue at the heart of the case. The corrupt politician lawyer advised my father to save the issue for an appeal he knew would never happen. He instructed pop to cease his practice of stating his case before the public where he was winning widespread sympathy. It was then that I became suspicious but my father still believed in him. He was from our neighborhood and had been a state representative. Pop wanted to believe in him. It would be years before he realized he had been betrayed.
The local paper pulled an enthusiastic reporter from the case when he got too close to the truth. The story had been front-page news but was afterward buried in the back pages. A particularly damning piece of evidence, a newspaper clipping in which the chief and several of his lieutenants advocated an ordinance requiring local businesses to purchase alarm systems. The article did not mention that those same individuals had started a security alarm business, a clear conflict of interest. The profit they stood to gain was staggering. My father spent hours in the local library looking through back issues to find that article to no avail. Somehow the city had been tipped off. The article disappeared. The mayor, who had advocated the establishment of a citizen’s review board for police affairs, was called to testify and turned to mush. The case was much larger than the mayor’s office.
This was the way city hall fights back against those who dare to stand up against the machine. They all but crushed my father’s spirit. He was only months shy of retirement but they could not allow him to retain his job after such a challenge. He ended up selling the wrestling business and found jobs as a security here and there. He moved from Modesto to the bay area to Reno to Portland, Oregon.
In Portland he suffered a heart attack on the golf course and returned home for bypass surgery. I happened to be at his side when he awoke from the operation. He held my hand as if for life itself. It was a strange feeling to be holding the hand of this proud man who had long ago rejected his religious upbringing to stand alone as an atheist of conviction. I felt his fear of death.
I wanted to be sure he knew I loved him. We were all changed by that experience. We were all a little wiser and a little stronger. Life is frail in the strongest man but life goes on in the community of man.
Of all the words the great Walt Whitman ever wrote the only ones I ever disagreed with were those of his most his most famous poem:
Do not go gently into that goodnight
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
I believe that this life is but a prelude to the great mystery ahead. We should not race to an end but neither should we fail to accept it when death arrives. When the time comes we should go gently into that goodnight. But Whitman spoke for my father now and it was not his time to go.
Within three years my father’s father, a wise and devoutly spiritual man, my father’s sister, who had fallen into her own snake pit of madness and returned, his mother, who was always kind to her grandchildren but who preached hatred and distrust of men, and his brother, who in the end betrayed him by handing what remained of the family inheritance to an opportunist black widow, would all be gone. Like my father, maybe they expected too much in life and, with the exception of my grandfather, too little in death.
Pop was the last of his family and in a very real sense he was more alone than he had ever been. He is in many ways the tragedy of the American family.
My mother understandably grew apart from him during his years of wandering. She grew stronger over the years, influenced partly by the women’s movement and partly by her own resolve. After more than two decades of raising a family of eight children, running a home and keeping the books of the family business, she was forced to reenter the workforce. At fifty-five she learned to drive a car alone for the first time. She soon learned that she had valuable skills to offer and that children instinctively treasured her. Eventually, she secured her own modest retirement and began spending more and more time with her sister and less with the family in Modesto. We were all very proud of her fortitude and accomplishment but saddened that she was no longer around as much as we would have wanted. We were saddened too that my father’s pride was damaged; however much he brought it on himself. Her dependency was broken and they would never again be as close as they once were.
Now it seems pop lives mainly for golf, for the camaraderie and competition it affords him, and for the hope that my mother will one day forgive him and come home. He is unable to live in the secluded surroundings of the Klamath River cabin nor in the mountain environment of Graeagle. He needs the company of his family and friends as much as he needs her affection.
Let go. Let go of the things you love and they will find you. Let go of your feelings of guilt and betrayal to rediscover your own sense of worth. Sit still in the winter of your discontent and behold the glory and the beauty of life all around you. The best is yet to come.
We leave pop at the clubhouse and embark on second nine. We are joined by a local legend known to all Golfer Joe. He has known more hard times than an Appalachian sharecropper. In his early forties he is dedicated to making a go at the senior tour on his fiftieth birthday. Outside our foursome he is pretty much the only familiar face left at the old Muni. Rising fees and the changing attitude of the new staff have alienated everyone else. They have moved on to other courses. Once a golfer is alienated it is difficult to win him back.
Joe has been able to pick up some cash giving golf lessons but is acutely worried about his job situation. The off-season unemployment rate in Modesto is up to forty percent, an astonishing figure. He talks about coming to Nashville to seek his fortune on the mini tours in the south. I can only tell him: Times are tough all over. I am unaware of Nashville’s unemployment rate but I am very much aware of the rising problem of homelessness. I am also aware of the amazement that greets me in the city of music when I say I was able to find work without difficulty.
It is hard to concentrate on the game when you’re listening to someone’s story. It is equally difficult to concentrate while telling your story. Golfer Joe has an up and down round while showing off his new titanium shaft oversized driver. He hits them long but a little out of control. I pick up a birdie on five and finish the nine three over par. On number eight I’m feeling good and go for the pin. It’s on line but comes up about ten feet short. Wiz sends a seven iron stiff to the target. It hits hard and skips to the back fringe about fifteen feet away from home. We leave the stick in as he lines it up, addresses the ball and strokes it dead center. It is his first birdie. The satisfaction of that dead solid perfect stroke will last a lifetime. It is a blessing to bear witness. He buys the beers at the clubhouse.
It’s a great round of golf.
I love this game. You can skull it, scrape it, chunk it, slice it, duck hook, shank it and yank it for seventeen holes and then: perfection. The game teaches you to hang in there no matter what happens. Never give up a shot. Never give up on a hole. Never give up on a round because, if you still believe, anything can happen. Anything you can imagine in a round of golf is possible. I am still waiting for that magic moment when the perfect shot drops into the cup for a hole-in-one. Twice on this very hole I have been everywhere but in. One hit the stick on the first bounce and settled inches from the cup. The other marked in front of the hole and finished directly behind it. Wiz’s birdie goes a long way toward keeping the faith. Hang in there. It will happen.
Keep the faith.
The finishing holes offer a fair sampling of all the shots in golf. Number seven is a 475-yard par five. For a long hitter it is reachable in two shots but there are a line of trees about two hundred and fifty yards down. The hole calls for a draw off the tee, bending to the left to clear the barrier of trees. The second shot presents a choice: You may be able to reach the green with a fairway wood but you have to avoid a trap guarding the left side and out of bounds on the right. The safer option is to lay up with a mid iron to the right leaving a short wedge to the green. It takes the trap and out of bounds out of play. A third option is to drill a two iron to the front, leaving a chip for eagle. It carries the same risk as a fairway wood to a lesser degree. Unless you’re in the zone the safe play is the best play.
The eighth hole is a standard 150-yard par three to a large sloping green with a large bunker on the left. Pin placement is critical. If the hole is located short right you can fire an eight iron at the stick. If it’s up left the trap comes into play. Aim at the pin and you risk the trap or worse, skipping over the backside for a tough chip back. The best play is an easy seven iron to the middle of the green. Take your chances with the putter.
Number nine is a classic and one of the toughest holes in the valley: A long par four dogleg right with a road bordering the entire right side and a tough bunker to the left of the green. A power fade off the tee leaves you a long iron or a five wood home. There is nothing easier in golf than losing a long iron to the right. The shot calls for a low draw or a gentle fade aimed directly at the trap. If you hit the trap, however, you would prefer to hit from the green side, leaving an uphill lie and a relatively easy sand shot.
My only eagle came on the fifth hole, a short par four. I chipped in after an excellent drive. The Muni has the added feature of a free driving range with room enough for a solid five iron.
I love the Muni. Back in the day we used to play those three holes over and over into the night, stopping only when we could no longer see the flight of the ball. I went to high school a block down the road. We paid five dollars for a monthly pass of unlimited play. Those days are long gone.
Ironically, I was not in love with the game back then. It was the late sixties to early seventies and I had plenty to occupy my mind. It was a time of upheaval. I started hitchhiking and had plans to join the flower children of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. I almost dropped out of school. I had my first taste of mind-bending drugs. I went public with my agnostic views on religion and experienced the effects of ostracism. It was a time of great change and great promise and I wanted nothing more than to be a part of it.
There was so much I did not understand and could not condone. As graduation speaker I accused our president of lying and causing the death of over fifty thousand American soldiers as well as more than a million Vietnamese. More than anything else I represented the frustration and sense of betrayal that my generation felt. In the wake of Kent State and Jackson State, Berkeley, Watts and Chicago, we felt we were disenfranchised.
The worst was yet to come. For me as for countless others the ultimate betrayal was the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I had seen him only days before he was gunned down on the back of a campaign train running through the central California valley. All the joy and promise I once felt was suddenly transformed into a pervasive cynicism. I felt betrayed not only by the nation’s leaders but by the elders of my own generation. To have offered so much hope only to have it smothered and swept away into the back pages of history before I was old enough to play my part.
It seemed a cruel fate to be born at precisely the wrong time: Old enough to be aware but too young to engage. It would be years before I understood well enough to forgive them and to forgive myself. There was nowhere to go and nothing to be done. I had no plan and those we had empowered with our faith were all gone. Dead and gone. We thought we could change the world on faith alone but we were wrong. Jim Morrison became the spokesman of a lost generation and James Dean its hero.
Survival is the cardinal rule of the revolution and the one most overlooked. Too late. It was much too late. Those of us who survived must carry on in our own individual ways. It would be many years before I could recover enough faith to enjoy the simple pleasures and pastimes of life, including baseball where the drama of life is metaphorically played out every year over the course of spring, summer and fall, and including golf which more than any other sport is a game of individual faith.
It is Saturday morning and we arrive at the Muni for a round with my father and an old friend. Mike and I share a common interest in golf, baseball and theater. We met during our college days when we were both engaged in competitive speech. He made his mark with a rhetorical analysis of Charles Lindberg’s opposition to America’s entry into World War II. The tainting of an American hero. My greatest accomplishment was a gold prize in Reader’s Theater at the state championship for my portrayal of the legendary Woody Guthrie in a show called Hard Travelin’. For years after I would answer to the call of Woody. The show turned professional and played the college circuit for a year. It sent my ambition soaring. I wrote, directed and acted in my first original play, Fosdick and Muldoon. I moved to New York shortly thereafter to stake my claim. Two years later I came back home with more modest expectations.
Mike was a member of the cast for both Hard Travelin’ and Fosdick and Muldoon. I typed him as an accountant whose central motive was to win at any cost. There’s a lot of history between us and a lot of memories. Our compadre back in the day was a man who married and later divorced Mike’s sister after a long struggle with alcoholism. He was one of the most intelligent and levelheaded persons I ever knew. There but for the grace of god go all of us. At one point he called upon his circle of friends to provide support in his battle. It was the first time I had heard the term Intervention. I felt acutely uncomfortable sitting in his living room, listening to testimonials of the harm, pain and despair he had caused. My days with him were full of joy and laughter, glory and adventure. He had never been a source of misery to me but I was told these accusations were critical to his recovery. I sensed that I was much too far removed from his life to be of help. Maybe I also feared that I was in danger of drowning myself so I didn’t have the heart to hang on to a drowning man.
The last I heard from him he was doing well, a dedicated member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He had begun a new relationship. From the depths of my heart I wished him well. I offered him what I did not know then was a major truism of AA: One day at a time.
Don’t look back, brother. You can never look back.
I wonder now if what drove us in those college days of glory was not some fundamental insecurity. I wonder if we sought external recognition to compensate for some deficiency in our upbringing. Our ends never know our means.
Mike is now an accountant for the county, married to a woman we half jokingly refer to as a saint. It is a title she does not claim. She has without doubt helped him along to overcome his reputation as a hot head. Wiz recognizes a few glimpses of that personality trait in his golf game. As it is in golf, so it is in life. It has been Mike’s habit to curse a wayward shot and talk incessantly about his own game to the last person on earth who wants to hear it: another golfer.
Fortunately, Mike is in control today, though his game is suffering from his characteristic stubbornness and a lack of attention. He is not interested in improving his game. He is only interested in improving his score. He does not seem to understand the relationship between the two.
I have learned not to offer advise on the course. I have come to believe that a player’s game need only be good enough to enable him or her to enjoy the walk. One does not have to play well to keep pace.
My father is on his home turf. He smacks one down the middle, long lean and mean. Wiz finds the trees left, Mike skies one to the right and chump one about a hundred yards in the fairway. Pop remarks that it is one of the worst shots he has seen me hit. His memory is apparently not as good as it once was. I make an excuse of the road though I know there are no excuses in this game. Back to basics: Balance is the first lesson. I recover with a solid shot and hit the green in three but take three putts for a double bogey. I make a note that I need to warm up before a round.
Pop, whose nickname from his boxing days is Killer, has a number of tactics to distract and otherwise thwart his opponents. In addition to good-natured ribbing, they include whispering while a fellow player is addressing the ball and standing directly behind the ball while another player hits or putts on tees and greens. They are practices that drive many golfers through the roof. Because of them I had great difficulty playing with my father until I decided to welcome distractions as a challenge to my ability to focus on the shot. Although I still may gesture for silence when others are addressing the ball, I have greatly enjoyed the rounds we have shared since that time. On the golf course, we have achieved a level of camaraderie and mutual respect that we rarely experience while living in the same house.
Pop is a great golfer and a great man. He has fought his entire life for the things he believes are right. When he stays within the limits of his age, he is the kind of golfer who compliments you on a drive fifty yards past his and then takes the wind from you sails with a 30-yard chip to the center of the cup. The difficulty is accepting one’s limitations.
I double the second hole in the same manner as the first. Bad drive, good recovery and three putts. I save par on three with an excellent wedge over a trap. I take a tough bogey on number four and after a booming drive on five, par out the nine. The last three holes I play to perfection. On seven, I take the fairway trees out of play with a draw to the left, play a mid iron to the right side and hit a wedge to within eight feet. I just miss the putt. On eight, with the pin up left, I play to the center of the green and two putt. On nine, I follow a power fade with a low two iron to the front of the green. Up and in for par.
My run of pars draws me even with the old man, who has played well despite a few careless shots. It is a good round enjoyed by all. We have each played well enough to enjoy the game, the walk and the companionship. Mike has managed to keep his cool despite his trials and Wiz takes great joy in my father’s company. According to plan, pop calls it a day after nine and we join him in the clubhouse for a beer. We talk golf, politics, Nashville and Motown. Others join in the conversation. Everyone knows Killer.
When I was growing up pop was a policeman and a wrestling promoter, a celebrity on the local sports scene. Pop has spent most of his life in the limelight. He was a star athlete as a kid. He was a top ranked boxer as a young man, at a time when pugilists were regarded as baseball or basketball players are regarded today. We kids were awed by his collection of trophies, photographs, clippings and stories. One of his most prized possessions were a championship belt and a sterling silver statuette of a boxer, commemorating his military conquest of allied China, Burma and India during the great war. He was named the most scientific boxer of the tournament and he was proud of that acknowledgement. He also had a black satin jacket with a Golden Gloves emblem on it. He once said that I was the only son who had the skills to follow him in the ring. He gave that jacket and I treasured it.
Acting as his own lawyer he sued his former fight manager for skimming the purse and won. He used that money to stake himself to his own gym in Modesto. For a while he trained boxers and promoted fights but eventually went exclusively into wrestling and rock promotion. There was just too much risk in the boxing game and not enough profit. Top ranked fighters required a large purse up front but wrestlers worked on a percentage basis. Rock and roll had a large following in a town that offered so little to its youth.
I have vivid memories of the day two young Mexican American brothers who were trained by my father decided to challenge the old man. One of them had risen to the ranks of local stardom but my father knocked them both out, one after the other in a matter of minutes. It may have ended a budding career but it secured pop’s larger than life stature in the eyes of his children.
Pop was the man who brought The Doors to Modesto only weeks before Light my Fire hit the airwaves catapulting them to international prominence. They were by far the most professional I have ever seen. They were the second bill that night and I remember a local band wanting billing above them. Their manager informed them that they did not want to follow The Doors.
Eventually pop’s promotion of rock concerts ended his career as a policeman. After twenty years service as a Westside cop, the only cop trusted in the black community during the days of racial unrest, the new chief didn’t approve of rock and roll. My father didn’t approve of the new chief or many of his policies, like ticket quotas, duck ponds, preferential law enforcement or phasing out veteran cops. He fought his dismissal and won a personnel hearing against long odds but the city dismissed him anyway. His appeal was allowed to expire by a corrupt lawyer turned politician who had volunteered to represent him at minimal cost. A red cent would have been too much. His last advice to my father was to sue him, knowing that he could not afford to do so.
I wondered then how he was paid off. The city had spared no expense defending itself in a nonbinding personnel hearing. A sitting circuit court judge who soon after was appointed to an appellate court bench represented them. He did all he could to avoid the civil rights issue at the heart of the case. The corrupt politician lawyer advised my father to save the issue for an appeal he knew would never happen. He instructed pop to cease his practice of stating his case before the public where he was winning widespread sympathy. It was then that I became suspicious but my father still believed in him. He was from our neighborhood and had been a state representative. Pop wanted to believe in him. It would be years before he realized he had been betrayed.
The local paper pulled an enthusiastic reporter from the case when he got too close to the truth. The story had been front-page news but was afterward buried in the back pages. A particularly damning piece of evidence, a newspaper clipping in which the chief and several of his lieutenants advocated an ordinance requiring local businesses to purchase alarm systems. The article did not mention that those same individuals had started a security alarm business, a clear conflict of interest. The profit they stood to gain was staggering. My father spent hours in the local library looking through back issues to find that article to no avail. Somehow the city had been tipped off. The article disappeared. The mayor, who had advocated the establishment of a citizen’s review board for police affairs, was called to testify and turned to mush. The case was much larger than the mayor’s office.
This was the way city hall fights back against those who dare to stand up against the machine. They all but crushed my father’s spirit. He was only months shy of retirement but they could not allow him to retain his job after such a challenge. He ended up selling the wrestling business and found jobs as a security here and there. He moved from Modesto to the bay area to Reno to Portland, Oregon.
In Portland he suffered a heart attack on the golf course and returned home for bypass surgery. I happened to be at his side when he awoke from the operation. He held my hand as if for life itself. It was a strange feeling to be holding the hand of this proud man who had long ago rejected his religious upbringing to stand alone as an atheist of conviction. I felt his fear of death.
I wanted to be sure he knew I loved him. We were all changed by that experience. We were all a little wiser and a little stronger. Life is frail in the strongest man but life goes on in the community of man.
Of all the words the great Walt Whitman ever wrote the only ones I ever disagreed with were those of his most his most famous poem:
Do not go gently into that goodnight
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
I believe that this life is but a prelude to the great mystery ahead. We should not race to an end but neither should we fail to accept it when death arrives. When the time comes we should go gently into that goodnight. But Whitman spoke for my father now and it was not his time to go.
Within three years my father’s father, a wise and devoutly spiritual man, my father’s sister, who had fallen into her own snake pit of madness and returned, his mother, who was always kind to her grandchildren but who preached hatred and distrust of men, and his brother, who in the end betrayed him by handing what remained of the family inheritance to an opportunist black widow, would all be gone. Like my father, maybe they expected too much in life and, with the exception of my grandfather, too little in death.
Pop was the last of his family and in a very real sense he was more alone than he had ever been. He is in many ways the tragedy of the American family.
My mother understandably grew apart from him during his years of wandering. She grew stronger over the years, influenced partly by the women’s movement and partly by her own resolve. After more than two decades of raising a family of eight children, running a home and keeping the books of the family business, she was forced to reenter the workforce. At fifty-five she learned to drive a car alone for the first time. She soon learned that she had valuable skills to offer and that children instinctively treasured her. Eventually, she secured her own modest retirement and began spending more and more time with her sister and less with the family in Modesto. We were all very proud of her fortitude and accomplishment but saddened that she was no longer around as much as we would have wanted. We were saddened too that my father’s pride was damaged; however much he brought it on himself. Her dependency was broken and they would never again be as close as they once were.
Now it seems pop lives mainly for golf, for the camaraderie and competition it affords him, and for the hope that my mother will one day forgive him and come home. He is unable to live in the secluded surroundings of the Klamath River cabin nor in the mountain environment of Graeagle. He needs the company of his family and friends as much as he needs her affection.
Let go. Let go of the things you love and they will find you. Let go of your feelings of guilt and betrayal to rediscover your own sense of worth. Sit still in the winter of your discontent and behold the glory and the beauty of life all around you. The best is yet to come.
We leave pop at the clubhouse and embark on second nine. We are joined by a local legend known to all Golfer Joe. He has known more hard times than an Appalachian sharecropper. In his early forties he is dedicated to making a go at the senior tour on his fiftieth birthday. Outside our foursome he is pretty much the only familiar face left at the old Muni. Rising fees and the changing attitude of the new staff have alienated everyone else. They have moved on to other courses. Once a golfer is alienated it is difficult to win him back.
Joe has been able to pick up some cash giving golf lessons but is acutely worried about his job situation. The off-season unemployment rate in Modesto is up to forty percent, an astonishing figure. He talks about coming to Nashville to seek his fortune on the mini tours in the south. I can only tell him: Times are tough all over. I am unaware of Nashville’s unemployment rate but I am very much aware of the rising problem of homelessness. I am also aware of the amazement that greets me in the city of music when I say I was able to find work without difficulty.
It is hard to concentrate on the game when you’re listening to someone’s story. It is equally difficult to concentrate while telling your story. Golfer Joe has an up and down round while showing off his new titanium shaft oversized driver. He hits them long but a little out of control. I pick up a birdie on five and finish the nine three over par. On number eight I’m feeling good and go for the pin. It’s on line but comes up about ten feet short. Wiz sends a seven iron stiff to the target. It hits hard and skips to the back fringe about fifteen feet away from home. We leave the stick in as he lines it up, addresses the ball and strokes it dead center. It is his first birdie. The satisfaction of that dead solid perfect stroke will last a lifetime. It is a blessing to bear witness. He buys the beers at the clubhouse.
It’s a great round of golf.
I love this game. You can skull it, scrape it, chunk it, slice it, duck hook, shank it and yank it for seventeen holes and then: perfection. The game teaches you to hang in there no matter what happens. Never give up a shot. Never give up on a hole. Never give up on a round because, if you still believe, anything can happen. Anything you can imagine in a round of golf is possible. I am still waiting for that magic moment when the perfect shot drops into the cup for a hole-in-one. Twice on this very hole I have been everywhere but in. One hit the stick on the first bounce and settled inches from the cup. The other marked in front of the hole and finished directly behind it. Wiz’s birdie goes a long way toward keeping the faith. Hang in there. It will happen.
Keep the faith.
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