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.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
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.
GRAND CANYON: THE SHADOW OF DEATH
It strikes like a bolt of lightning in a summer storm
Invades the solar plexus like an omen
Spreading like a cancer like a hellish nightmare
On a sleepless night
Wolves howl at a clouded blue moon
Owls take flight and the air stills
To a hollow silence
I don’t know what we did that day. I tried to piece it together after the fact. It evaded me like an intricate puzzle. I believe it began with something mundane like taking care of some car business, an oil change for Sally.
We then played the front nine at Dryden Park, an eighteen-hole course on the Tuolumne River. I played well, birdied the par-three fifth, scored par on the sixth, the toughest hole on the course. It is a long dogleg left and would be hard enough without a tall branching oak in the center of the fairway about two hundred yards down. I hit a solid drive to the left of the oak and stiff a five iron to the back of the green. I finished the nine two over par. I can’t recall how Wiz played except that our hotshot playing partner, who was dying to give us a few tips on the game, complimented him as the most relaxed player he had ever seen.
We have a couple of the famous Dryden cheeseburgers and kill some time driving around town. We read jazz poetry accompanied by flute at Mancini Bowl in Graceada Park. It is ironic that this prominent park in this conservative town is actually named after a couple reputed to be lesbian. The amphitheater is name after Henry Mancini of the famous marching bands, another local legend.
As I near the conclusion of the first chorus of Dark Underground a drunk Latino in ragged clothes rises from his park bench and grumbles his displeasure. He throws the word Satin at us like a dagger to the throat. It gains my attention and raises my ire. The piece is in fact the story of Joan of Arc. The charge of Satanism should not surprise me by now but it does. It startles me and settles in my gut. I will not to be censored in my own hometown. I finish the chorus and flip to the Demands of the Underground:
We demand food for hunger free of charge!
We demand jobs for all who call and ones that suit our make and model not our soles!
We demand the laser stun be drop and done or access free to all!
We demand the opening of the boundaries, free travel, an end to border stops and crossing!
We demand the closing of the righteous guard! Let them work to feed the poor!
We demand access to the stars! Let all behold the heavens and scope the upper maze!
We demand a home for all and not a hole to shovel dirt in!
We finish our performance to the silence of our former critic. It hits home. He doesn’t say a word but he knows he has judged us harshly. Maybe he will think twice before he accuses someone of Satanism again. We are in fact his advocates yet he would have cut our throats had he had the chance.
We drive over to Charlie’s place on Paradise Road for an early dinner. This is where the drag races were in the bee-bop early sixties when the Wolf Man was growling on the AM radio and crew cuts glistened with the glow of Dixie Peach. It was also where my second crush lived. We were at Mark Twain Junior High. She was a cheerleader and I was vice president of the student body. We were both thin but she was a good six inches taller and I thought she was a queen. We danced all night in the age of innocence to Johnny Mathis, the Four Seasons and the Supremes. The end of that sweet and tender romance at the beginning of our freshman year was the effect of miscommunication and my initiation to the mixed blessing of relationships. It was an experience I would always treasure.
My first crush was a pretty blonde in elementary school. It ended much the same way: an awkward miscommunication gone out of control, brought on by the betrayal of a jealous friend. Funny how it stays with you, shaping how you approach relationships for much of your life.
In contrast to Deva, Charlie is a basic meat and potatoes man. His dinners are down home affairs. There is always a parade of visitors and they are always good people. Wiz entertains the kids with improvisational flute and piano. They are inspired. There will be music in their lives. We move outside to the patio and Charlie puts on our recording of Dark Underground: A Jazz Poetry Play in Fifteen Choruses. I suggest turning it off after the first chorus but Charlie insists on playing it in its entirety. It runs two hours and draws both encouraging and insightful comments.
It is the first time anyone has listened to the work beside us and the response means a lot. It has been a long and winding road in the jazz poetry business and I for one am in need of some encouraging words. We are reluctant to leave this place of warmth but the obligations of time press on.
We return to Robert and Sue’s house where we find an old friend of Robert is entertaining them. He’s a good musician with the mind of a businessman and the ambition of Julius Caesar. He has found tough times. His band in the bay area, featuring an old Chicago blues man, recently broke up. He has been diagnosed with kidney failure and his health is faltering. Wiz joins him on flute but his guitar falls oddly silent when Wiz plays and he engages in distracting conversation.
I am suddenly aware that Wiz is despondent, struggling and weak. It is a state I have not seen in him. I am only vaguely aware of the cause but a sense of discomfort settles in my soul. We are due to visit some close friends twenty miles down the road in Turlock. They are rehearsing for a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which has prevented me from seeing them until now. I suggest it is time to go and the Wiz is more than ready. In the car he informs me he is having trouble breathing. Some strange spell has taken hold of him and he feels threatened. I wait to allow him to catch his breath before telling him what he cannot know: That old friend and jealous musician is a dying man.
It is the shadow of death that follows us even now.
Adding to my own discomfort is a growing sense of anxiety. I feel vulnerable. There is a hole in my aura and I feel it. My vision is discolored, shrouded and awry. Something is happening and something must happen to relieve us of this cloud that hovers above us like the pall of a funeral procession. Wiz begins to chant in the tongue of another world. It has a calming effect like the ocean at twilight. I join in the chant but the ghost is still with us.
As we approach Turlock, Sally checks and sputters. We glide to a stop out of gas. After 2,500 miles of journey, traversing land of every description from Nevada’s desolation row to the tower peaks of Donner Summit, here by the familiar Turlock off ramp, we run out of gas. Something has happened. It could have been so much worse. I take it as a strange blessing and a warning of renewed caution.
Wiz stays with Sally as I walk the short distance to a nearby gas station. It is a time for reflection. There has been too much recklessness, too much late night partying, too much blowing with the wind, too much trust where it does not belong, too little grounding and self-control. A man must learn to play the safe shot when the safe shot is appropriate. Grip it and rip it may work for John Daly but its bound to lead you astray.
We struggle into town and the company of friends, the darkness subsiding but still hovering over us, the weight still bearing down on our shoulders. At last we arrive and the spell is broken. We have found sanctuary. The shadow has vanished. We could not outrun it but we could banish by entering a sacred circle of unconditional trust. Wiz will refer to the Jere and Patty O’Donnell as saints. They serve on this night as our guardian angels like the crow of Grand Canyon.
Heart and soul, angels above
Circle in unconditional love
Diffuse the darkness
Dry the fear from wetted brow
Smooth the furrowed woe
Blessed friendship, sacred light
Like the first beacon on a jagged shore
Like the first breath of spring
If an individual is born as I was into a warm and loving family, it is a blessing of chance or fate beyond our control or comprehension. The friends we find thereafter, those with whom we choose to share our lives with mutual respect and understanding is a blessing of choice. It is something we all search for and when we find it we instinctively embrace it. We value it highly. We must take care not to abuse it by holding too tightly or leaning on it too heavily. When I moved to Nashville it was more than difficult to leave behind this family of friends, just as it was to leave my bloodline.
Liberated from the shadow of death, we are welcomed by a warm embrace. Wiz plays more freely than he has since our journey began. Patty is entranced. She has become a politician of sorts, having been appointed to the chair of the local arts council. After years of raising a child (now eight) she is asserting herself as a major force of the local theater. It is her calling and her eyes, already brilliant, shine with enthusiasm and purpose.
Jere has become the first tenured acting instructor in the history of the local university. He speaks of playing a part in Uncle Vanya that is the kind of part he always avoided. He is playing a romantic idealist. I consider it a positive development. He has long fought that side of himself that is as natural as honey to a bee. What he perceived as a weakness has opened a door. He will become the stronger for it.
Our old friend Gary is also here. He has a calm about him that is rare. Having quit a job as a cook due to a back condition that will not allow him to stand for long periods of time, he is jobless. His situation is little changed but he is being paid for the part he is acting in Vanya and he treasures working with the O’Donnell’s.
Gary should be an acting instructor in a high school or college. He has the talent, the experience and the acquired wisdom of a natural teacher but he is haunted by a mistake he made in the distant past. While working as an elementary school teacher he was busted for importing hashish. It was decades ago at a time when it was far less shocking than it would be today and it should be expunged from his record. But in the small town mentality of the central valley, records are never expunged. Still he is well. He offers Wiz and I a reading from the I Ching and a quote that came to him from some external voice:
At last the wanderer understood
It was the cup, not the water
It was the journey, not the spring
It was the search, not the drinking
There is a feeling of peace, contentment, a mood of calm reflection and joy. It is unusual in the days preceding opening night. It is late and time to move on. We will see them again and thank them for an inspired performance on the opening of Uncle Vanya. We make a golf date with Jere and Patty though it will keep us here longer than we originally intended.
It is difficult to let go.
Invades the solar plexus like an omen
Spreading like a cancer like a hellish nightmare
On a sleepless night
Wolves howl at a clouded blue moon
Owls take flight and the air stills
To a hollow silence
I don’t know what we did that day. I tried to piece it together after the fact. It evaded me like an intricate puzzle. I believe it began with something mundane like taking care of some car business, an oil change for Sally.
We then played the front nine at Dryden Park, an eighteen-hole course on the Tuolumne River. I played well, birdied the par-three fifth, scored par on the sixth, the toughest hole on the course. It is a long dogleg left and would be hard enough without a tall branching oak in the center of the fairway about two hundred yards down. I hit a solid drive to the left of the oak and stiff a five iron to the back of the green. I finished the nine two over par. I can’t recall how Wiz played except that our hotshot playing partner, who was dying to give us a few tips on the game, complimented him as the most relaxed player he had ever seen.
We have a couple of the famous Dryden cheeseburgers and kill some time driving around town. We read jazz poetry accompanied by flute at Mancini Bowl in Graceada Park. It is ironic that this prominent park in this conservative town is actually named after a couple reputed to be lesbian. The amphitheater is name after Henry Mancini of the famous marching bands, another local legend.
As I near the conclusion of the first chorus of Dark Underground a drunk Latino in ragged clothes rises from his park bench and grumbles his displeasure. He throws the word Satin at us like a dagger to the throat. It gains my attention and raises my ire. The piece is in fact the story of Joan of Arc. The charge of Satanism should not surprise me by now but it does. It startles me and settles in my gut. I will not to be censored in my own hometown. I finish the chorus and flip to the Demands of the Underground:
We demand food for hunger free of charge!
We demand jobs for all who call and ones that suit our make and model not our soles!
We demand the laser stun be drop and done or access free to all!
We demand the opening of the boundaries, free travel, an end to border stops and crossing!
We demand the closing of the righteous guard! Let them work to feed the poor!
We demand access to the stars! Let all behold the heavens and scope the upper maze!
We demand a home for all and not a hole to shovel dirt in!
We finish our performance to the silence of our former critic. It hits home. He doesn’t say a word but he knows he has judged us harshly. Maybe he will think twice before he accuses someone of Satanism again. We are in fact his advocates yet he would have cut our throats had he had the chance.
We drive over to Charlie’s place on Paradise Road for an early dinner. This is where the drag races were in the bee-bop early sixties when the Wolf Man was growling on the AM radio and crew cuts glistened with the glow of Dixie Peach. It was also where my second crush lived. We were at Mark Twain Junior High. She was a cheerleader and I was vice president of the student body. We were both thin but she was a good six inches taller and I thought she was a queen. We danced all night in the age of innocence to Johnny Mathis, the Four Seasons and the Supremes. The end of that sweet and tender romance at the beginning of our freshman year was the effect of miscommunication and my initiation to the mixed blessing of relationships. It was an experience I would always treasure.
My first crush was a pretty blonde in elementary school. It ended much the same way: an awkward miscommunication gone out of control, brought on by the betrayal of a jealous friend. Funny how it stays with you, shaping how you approach relationships for much of your life.
In contrast to Deva, Charlie is a basic meat and potatoes man. His dinners are down home affairs. There is always a parade of visitors and they are always good people. Wiz entertains the kids with improvisational flute and piano. They are inspired. There will be music in their lives. We move outside to the patio and Charlie puts on our recording of Dark Underground: A Jazz Poetry Play in Fifteen Choruses. I suggest turning it off after the first chorus but Charlie insists on playing it in its entirety. It runs two hours and draws both encouraging and insightful comments.
It is the first time anyone has listened to the work beside us and the response means a lot. It has been a long and winding road in the jazz poetry business and I for one am in need of some encouraging words. We are reluctant to leave this place of warmth but the obligations of time press on.
We return to Robert and Sue’s house where we find an old friend of Robert is entertaining them. He’s a good musician with the mind of a businessman and the ambition of Julius Caesar. He has found tough times. His band in the bay area, featuring an old Chicago blues man, recently broke up. He has been diagnosed with kidney failure and his health is faltering. Wiz joins him on flute but his guitar falls oddly silent when Wiz plays and he engages in distracting conversation.
I am suddenly aware that Wiz is despondent, struggling and weak. It is a state I have not seen in him. I am only vaguely aware of the cause but a sense of discomfort settles in my soul. We are due to visit some close friends twenty miles down the road in Turlock. They are rehearsing for a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which has prevented me from seeing them until now. I suggest it is time to go and the Wiz is more than ready. In the car he informs me he is having trouble breathing. Some strange spell has taken hold of him and he feels threatened. I wait to allow him to catch his breath before telling him what he cannot know: That old friend and jealous musician is a dying man.
It is the shadow of death that follows us even now.
Adding to my own discomfort is a growing sense of anxiety. I feel vulnerable. There is a hole in my aura and I feel it. My vision is discolored, shrouded and awry. Something is happening and something must happen to relieve us of this cloud that hovers above us like the pall of a funeral procession. Wiz begins to chant in the tongue of another world. It has a calming effect like the ocean at twilight. I join in the chant but the ghost is still with us.
As we approach Turlock, Sally checks and sputters. We glide to a stop out of gas. After 2,500 miles of journey, traversing land of every description from Nevada’s desolation row to the tower peaks of Donner Summit, here by the familiar Turlock off ramp, we run out of gas. Something has happened. It could have been so much worse. I take it as a strange blessing and a warning of renewed caution.
Wiz stays with Sally as I walk the short distance to a nearby gas station. It is a time for reflection. There has been too much recklessness, too much late night partying, too much blowing with the wind, too much trust where it does not belong, too little grounding and self-control. A man must learn to play the safe shot when the safe shot is appropriate. Grip it and rip it may work for John Daly but its bound to lead you astray.
We struggle into town and the company of friends, the darkness subsiding but still hovering over us, the weight still bearing down on our shoulders. At last we arrive and the spell is broken. We have found sanctuary. The shadow has vanished. We could not outrun it but we could banish by entering a sacred circle of unconditional trust. Wiz will refer to the Jere and Patty O’Donnell as saints. They serve on this night as our guardian angels like the crow of Grand Canyon.
Heart and soul, angels above
Circle in unconditional love
Diffuse the darkness
Dry the fear from wetted brow
Smooth the furrowed woe
Blessed friendship, sacred light
Like the first beacon on a jagged shore
Like the first breath of spring
If an individual is born as I was into a warm and loving family, it is a blessing of chance or fate beyond our control or comprehension. The friends we find thereafter, those with whom we choose to share our lives with mutual respect and understanding is a blessing of choice. It is something we all search for and when we find it we instinctively embrace it. We value it highly. We must take care not to abuse it by holding too tightly or leaning on it too heavily. When I moved to Nashville it was more than difficult to leave behind this family of friends, just as it was to leave my bloodline.
Liberated from the shadow of death, we are welcomed by a warm embrace. Wiz plays more freely than he has since our journey began. Patty is entranced. She has become a politician of sorts, having been appointed to the chair of the local arts council. After years of raising a child (now eight) she is asserting herself as a major force of the local theater. It is her calling and her eyes, already brilliant, shine with enthusiasm and purpose.
Jere has become the first tenured acting instructor in the history of the local university. He speaks of playing a part in Uncle Vanya that is the kind of part he always avoided. He is playing a romantic idealist. I consider it a positive development. He has long fought that side of himself that is as natural as honey to a bee. What he perceived as a weakness has opened a door. He will become the stronger for it.
Our old friend Gary is also here. He has a calm about him that is rare. Having quit a job as a cook due to a back condition that will not allow him to stand for long periods of time, he is jobless. His situation is little changed but he is being paid for the part he is acting in Vanya and he treasures working with the O’Donnell’s.
Gary should be an acting instructor in a high school or college. He has the talent, the experience and the acquired wisdom of a natural teacher but he is haunted by a mistake he made in the distant past. While working as an elementary school teacher he was busted for importing hashish. It was decades ago at a time when it was far less shocking than it would be today and it should be expunged from his record. But in the small town mentality of the central valley, records are never expunged. Still he is well. He offers Wiz and I a reading from the I Ching and a quote that came to him from some external voice:
At last the wanderer understood
It was the cup, not the water
It was the journey, not the spring
It was the search, not the drinking
There is a feeling of peace, contentment, a mood of calm reflection and joy. It is unusual in the days preceding opening night. It is late and time to move on. We will see them again and thank them for an inspired performance on the opening of Uncle Vanya. We make a golf date with Jere and Patty though it will keep us here longer than we originally intended.
It is difficult to let go.
GRAND CANYON: BAY AREA POETRY SCENE
Since we arrived in Modesto we have had little time to sit back, relax and reflect. The commitment of family and friends is gratifying but we have a yen to continue the adventure of the road. We have a day open and decide to make a sojourn to San Francisco and an appointment with the king of the Bay Area poetry scene. Wiz has made a connection through Jake Berry, a Florence Alabama poet of underground notoriety, a poet of poets. He is convinced that San Francisco will embrace our cutting edge style and content.
We get an early start and ascend from the valley of agriculture, past the windmills of Altamont Pass, where the Rolling Stones hosted the concert that became the film Gimme Shelter, and veer north to the city that gave birth to most of the dreams of my youth: Berkeley, California. I tell Wiz about the changes I have witnessed here since the days I used to thumb a ride, hang out in the square listening to the conga line, roam Telegraph Avenue in search of a new nation, study the hipsters in the cafes, and crash by a creek that runs through the campus of the university.
I remember the beautiful beaded woman in layered dress and painted face who gave me a smile and a kiss of promise. It was the dawning of a new age. I remember the charge that ran through this chosen place like an electric current of hope. I remember radical speech, political pamphlets, a sitar harmonizing with Jimi Hendrix electric lady land, the spirit of love and the sensation of being infallible.
I also remember the cops and People’s Park and the time they formed a line with their blue helmets and black riot sticks. I remember when they cleared the courtyard in front of the library with tear gas and a march of terror. It was all here: the entire history of what is now referred to as the sixties movement.
Everything has changed.
We walk down Telegraph toward the university. The street people who once roamed freely and unobstructed are now a homeless problem. The sidewalk venders are far more stylish, commercial and hip. There is no music, no buzz of political discourse and no charge of electric energy. My memories have become mythology.
We make our way to the square and the library steps where I once watched Mario Salvo address a throng of student activists. The students now are studious and more politically correct. Their issues now are more practical: the cost of tuition, public housing and parking, smoking in public places. There is a scattering of musicians but Wiz senses they would not welcome his accompaniment. They have staked claim to their turfs so we stake our claim to ours. We find our spot and the Wiz pulls out his magic flute, letting loose a kaleidoscope of sound that lingers in the air before drifting into wistful memory. I allow the enchantment to capture me before weighing in.
The karmic debt is mounting like an ancient den of thieves
With each tick of the cosmic clock like a chill in a gentle breeze
The karmic debt is mounting like a river overrun
With each lie in a soulful sorrow like a story almost done
The karmic debt is mounting with each I where we belongs
Like a river dammed and clogged like an old familiar song
The karmic debt is mounting with avarice and deceit
Each thump of the collective heartbeat and every all begins with me
The karmic debt is mounting like a storm that threatens all
And I am chained to the floodgates to suffer the karmic fall
Set me free so I may rise or die a free and noble man
On the train of the Wiz’s melody my mood carries me from politics and philosophy to ethereal dreams to the jazz underground and back again. The people around us take note and offer unspoken approval. A man with writer’s eyes sits to our side as listens as if to read our intentions. We have made a mark. It is enough.
We walk back down Telegraph, stopping at a familiar café for a bite to eat, pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Golf at Powell’s Bookstore and put Berkeley in the mirror. The transition from a hotbed of political thought and activism to a progressive university metropolis is difficult to accept for those of us who remember what was before but these are good people and worthy of their legacy in their way.
The times are a changing and we better make way.
We drive from Berkeley to Oakland and the home of Jack Foley, king of the bay area poetry scene. He greets us as if we are long lost brothers. He speaks with an enthusiasm that belies his age, dropping names like a politician on the move: Shepard, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, McClure and Ray Manzarek of The Doors. He hosts a weekly radio show and offers up samples of his recordings. He hands us scores of poetry magazines. His theory is that poetry has its roots in the oral tradition of Homer, the original poet of the western world.
We are fascinated by his exuberance. He’s like a child showing off his toys the day after Christmas. He looks the part of a poet with long frazzled hair, loose fitting clothes and sandals. His wife is clearly devoted to her husband’s artistic lifestyle but she strikes a contrast, straight and proper. Their home in the Oakland hills is beautiful but they are worried about money. Their teenage son is not interested in poetry or poets. He likes baseball and rock and roll.
We continue our conversation at a charming little Chinese restaurant where he engages an unknown couple in a discussion of the origins of pot stickers. Jack has something to say about virtually everything. He is a man of knowledge, literature and culture.
I put the meal on my credit card as he recommends a club in San Francisco where we might try out our jazz poetry. Wiz slips him a copy of Dark Underground as the three of us share a hug of brotherhood.
Crossing the Bay Bridge I realize that we have spent over four hours in the company of whirlwind mind. It is the approximate time of a round of golf. It is a rare pleasure to listen to a man so eager to share his remarkable life and experience. I wonder at the breadth of his knowledge and the passion that sustains his sense of adventure. He has found his bliss. His bliss has found him. It is not chosen but chooses.
Nothing is happening at the poetry joint. The scheduled readings are over. A bearded man plays a younger man in chess. No one else is here. I sneak a peak at the stage in the back where the readings take place. There is a naked podium on the floor and a single bleacher in front of it. I am struck by how very small the poetry universe is. Poetry is dead. There is no future. Not here in San Francisco, not across the bay, not in Nashville or Albuquerque, New York or Chicago. Poetry is for poets with large dreams but small ambitions. The devotees have large hearts. They are driven not by success, which is measured in humility, but by the thing itself, the Zen of poetry. If poetry is an oral tradition it is enough to stand before a handful of fellow poets. Let the words be heard. Let them roar like a stampede of buffalo on the open plains, or let them rattle and quiver like a lover’s lips in the embrace of ecstasy. Poetry is dead, long live poetry.
Maybe we are too ambitious. We have not yet come to understand the Zen of poetry as we intuitively understand the Zen of golf. We are too dependent on the response of our audience. We want too much to please, to be accepted and embraced. Wiz is a phenomenal musician. He has often played for hours in the isolation of a forest or in a secluded corner of a busy park. I am a writer. Though I fear I may never be published, my plays never destined for the professional stage, I continue to write. I will always write. It is not chosen but chooses. Just as the music itself is enough to spur the Wiz on a quest for musical or creative growth, the act of committing words to paper is my calling. Even if no more than a handful of friends or acquaintances will ever read them, even if they are not read at all, the act of writing itself speaks to me in a language that pulls at my heart.
Every writer wants his words to live on, just as every composer and musician wants his music to be heard beyond his time on earth, but the desired outcome is the reason we write, compose or play. Wiz plays because it fulfills a need and because it speaks to the center of his being. As it is with music so it is with writing. As it is with writing so it is with golf. As it is with golf so it is with life and the living of it.
We walk out of the poetry joint and perform our piece on the street. We gather a few curious glances but nothing more. No one is listening but it no longer matters. We read and play for our own fulfillment. It is enough.
We drive down Van Ness to the heart of San Francisco but nothing captures our interest. We decide to head south to Santa Cruz. It is late when we arrive and I suggest staying over to ride the roller coaster in the morning. The Santa Cruz roller coaster is famous as the largest wooden structure of its kind. Wiz declines. He wants no part of it. We are both in a strange reflective mood. We drive on without aim, finally laying out our sleeping bags at a small beach along Highway 1. The smell of the Pacific and the sound of ocean wildlife have a calming effect. The ocean has always spoken to me in times of sorrow or upheaval. It has never failed to soothe my soul.
We awake just after sunrise to the hustle of farm workers on their way to work in the fields. We shake off sleep and the restlessness of the last twenty-four hours, pack our bags and drive into Monterey.
Dollar for dollar, Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay is among the most beautiful courses in the world. Nine holes of tree-lined fairways in typical municipal course style give way to a back nine of ocean side links. Wide open to the elements of the coast, the links nine features no more than a scattering of windswept cypress, evergreen bushes and tall grass no taller than a man, and ice plant over sand where golf balls go to die. If you’ve never hit out of ice plant you would be well advised to use nothing more than a wedge. The course with its narrow fairways, punishing rough and small greens places a premium on accuracy and the ability to hit the ball on a low trajectory.
The back nine has earned Pacific Grove the name: a poor man’s Pebble Beach. Its more famous namesake is just down the coast. The story goes that the land was donated to the city on the condition that the course should always be affordable to the common man. It is a tale that is repeated most every time I come here. Today is no exception.
We arrive early and are paired with a twosome of retired gentlemen. It is reminiscent of our round in Truckee by Donner Pass. We play well enough on the front side to settle in for some inspired golf on the back nine. There are dozens of deer wandering the course along with scores of sea gulls, crows, squirrels and jackrabbits. It is a spectacle of nature rivaling the Grand Canyon. It is a place to forget your troubles and your game and allow yourself to soar with the wind. The sight of the eleventh hole, gazing out over the Pacific, a family of deer grazing below an elevated tee, brings out the best in me. A solid three wood, a stiff wedge and ten-foot putt for birdie. It is the peak of my round but it hardly matters.
On the twelfth, a sweeping par five alongside the coastline, Wiz unloads a drive and a fairway wood that charges the imagination and extends the limits of his game. The ball kicks left into the rough but it doesn’t matter. Here, amidst the grandeur of the California coast, the game takes on a new dimension. We play well, score decently and depart with newfound sense of wonder and admiration for the world around us.
We head on to Carmel on a natural high, a mixture of joy and a sense of infallibility riding with us. Nothing can stop us. Nothing can bring us down. Not even a suicide pigeon that dives into the grill beneath Sally’s hood at the exit ramp can dampen our spirits. Its timing is unfathomable. It leaves me a little dazed, perplexed and without explanation. Maybe we are in need of grounding. Maybe we are too high, too centered on ourselves. Pigeons have long been attracted to Sally’s Mustang orange exterior and have pelted her with droppings at every opportunity. Maybe it’s Sally’s revenge.
I believe in life in all its forms and would not take it lightly. I know only that I don’t know. The why is beyond my comprehension. I only understand that I do not understand. Like the mesmerizing magnitude of the sea, it is a mystery and a mystery it will remain.
In all my life I have seen nothing more beautiful than the cypress of Monterey and Carmel beach. The home of the immortal John Steinbeck it is a living tribute to man’s fascination and devotion to the sea. When I was a younger man it was my habit to come here whenever my mind was clouded with trouble and despair. I would sit for hours, my feet buried in the fine sand or above on a cliff or overhang, where the gulls would trace the shoreline. The gentle but all-powerful waves of the Pacific would empty my mind, cleanse my soul and send me back to the world reborn.
It has the same effect now. Wiz has supplied me with a trumpet and a mute. We stand in the sand, him with his magic flute, me with my muted horn, sending sweet sounds into the endless sea. The crow is here. Of all the times I have spent on this beach I can only remember gulls. It is as mystifying as the sea itself.
Wiz gives me a lesson on looking cool while playing the trumpet. My tendency is to point the horn downward. He wants me to raise it up. We eventually walk back to Sally and deposit our instruments, suddenly aware of the human beauty that surrounds us. She is young enough to be his daughter but old enough to hunger for experience. A bronzed beauty, breasts like golden delicious apples, she moves in a manner that defies the laws of physics. I look down and see a golden anklet. It is the gift I have sought for my wife two thousand miles away. The signs are all around us.
We have to this place in service to my memories. We have play glorious golf in the company of wildlife at Pacific Grove. Wiz has played shots he never thought he was capable of hitting. I have played with a free and open mind. We have been absorbed in the majesty of nature. We have had communion with the sea.
All this leads me back to Nashville where my love awaits.
We have one more service to perform. We are heading to the Hog’s Breath Inn, Clint Eastwood’s place, where once I caught him dashing in and out, a beautiful blonde by his side, to check on his affairs. Wiz asks me the time and I immediately realize we are due back in Motown for a family picnic. A couple of fine looking ladies give us a glance but we are immune to temptation. We cut our visit short and head back to the valley. Clint is not in.
The ride back is thoughtful, peaceful, full of dreams and pleasant memories. I realize that it will be a year or more before I am likely to feel the Pacific breeze again. It is difficult to let go. We stop in the valley town of Los Banos for gas and call ahead to let the family know we’re on our way.
Wiz takes care of the gas and encounters a young lady with the frazzled look of methamphetamine. As we’re pulling out he tells the story. A man says it’s his birthday and she offers him a gift he will remember. She looks at Wiz and says: Hell, I’d give it to almost anyone. She looks our way as she climbs the stairs of a hotel across the way. She charges the imagination. I tell Wiz he’d better wear two condoms for that encounter. Temptation aside, we drive off with the weight of the road a little heavier and the stuff of wet dreams swirling in our minds.
We get an early start and ascend from the valley of agriculture, past the windmills of Altamont Pass, where the Rolling Stones hosted the concert that became the film Gimme Shelter, and veer north to the city that gave birth to most of the dreams of my youth: Berkeley, California. I tell Wiz about the changes I have witnessed here since the days I used to thumb a ride, hang out in the square listening to the conga line, roam Telegraph Avenue in search of a new nation, study the hipsters in the cafes, and crash by a creek that runs through the campus of the university.
I remember the beautiful beaded woman in layered dress and painted face who gave me a smile and a kiss of promise. It was the dawning of a new age. I remember the charge that ran through this chosen place like an electric current of hope. I remember radical speech, political pamphlets, a sitar harmonizing with Jimi Hendrix electric lady land, the spirit of love and the sensation of being infallible.
I also remember the cops and People’s Park and the time they formed a line with their blue helmets and black riot sticks. I remember when they cleared the courtyard in front of the library with tear gas and a march of terror. It was all here: the entire history of what is now referred to as the sixties movement.
Everything has changed.
We walk down Telegraph toward the university. The street people who once roamed freely and unobstructed are now a homeless problem. The sidewalk venders are far more stylish, commercial and hip. There is no music, no buzz of political discourse and no charge of electric energy. My memories have become mythology.
We make our way to the square and the library steps where I once watched Mario Salvo address a throng of student activists. The students now are studious and more politically correct. Their issues now are more practical: the cost of tuition, public housing and parking, smoking in public places. There is a scattering of musicians but Wiz senses they would not welcome his accompaniment. They have staked claim to their turfs so we stake our claim to ours. We find our spot and the Wiz pulls out his magic flute, letting loose a kaleidoscope of sound that lingers in the air before drifting into wistful memory. I allow the enchantment to capture me before weighing in.
The karmic debt is mounting like an ancient den of thieves
With each tick of the cosmic clock like a chill in a gentle breeze
The karmic debt is mounting like a river overrun
With each lie in a soulful sorrow like a story almost done
The karmic debt is mounting with each I where we belongs
Like a river dammed and clogged like an old familiar song
The karmic debt is mounting with avarice and deceit
Each thump of the collective heartbeat and every all begins with me
The karmic debt is mounting like a storm that threatens all
And I am chained to the floodgates to suffer the karmic fall
Set me free so I may rise or die a free and noble man
On the train of the Wiz’s melody my mood carries me from politics and philosophy to ethereal dreams to the jazz underground and back again. The people around us take note and offer unspoken approval. A man with writer’s eyes sits to our side as listens as if to read our intentions. We have made a mark. It is enough.
We walk back down Telegraph, stopping at a familiar café for a bite to eat, pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Golf at Powell’s Bookstore and put Berkeley in the mirror. The transition from a hotbed of political thought and activism to a progressive university metropolis is difficult to accept for those of us who remember what was before but these are good people and worthy of their legacy in their way.
The times are a changing and we better make way.
We drive from Berkeley to Oakland and the home of Jack Foley, king of the bay area poetry scene. He greets us as if we are long lost brothers. He speaks with an enthusiasm that belies his age, dropping names like a politician on the move: Shepard, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, McClure and Ray Manzarek of The Doors. He hosts a weekly radio show and offers up samples of his recordings. He hands us scores of poetry magazines. His theory is that poetry has its roots in the oral tradition of Homer, the original poet of the western world.
We are fascinated by his exuberance. He’s like a child showing off his toys the day after Christmas. He looks the part of a poet with long frazzled hair, loose fitting clothes and sandals. His wife is clearly devoted to her husband’s artistic lifestyle but she strikes a contrast, straight and proper. Their home in the Oakland hills is beautiful but they are worried about money. Their teenage son is not interested in poetry or poets. He likes baseball and rock and roll.
We continue our conversation at a charming little Chinese restaurant where he engages an unknown couple in a discussion of the origins of pot stickers. Jack has something to say about virtually everything. He is a man of knowledge, literature and culture.
I put the meal on my credit card as he recommends a club in San Francisco where we might try out our jazz poetry. Wiz slips him a copy of Dark Underground as the three of us share a hug of brotherhood.
Crossing the Bay Bridge I realize that we have spent over four hours in the company of whirlwind mind. It is the approximate time of a round of golf. It is a rare pleasure to listen to a man so eager to share his remarkable life and experience. I wonder at the breadth of his knowledge and the passion that sustains his sense of adventure. He has found his bliss. His bliss has found him. It is not chosen but chooses.
Nothing is happening at the poetry joint. The scheduled readings are over. A bearded man plays a younger man in chess. No one else is here. I sneak a peak at the stage in the back where the readings take place. There is a naked podium on the floor and a single bleacher in front of it. I am struck by how very small the poetry universe is. Poetry is dead. There is no future. Not here in San Francisco, not across the bay, not in Nashville or Albuquerque, New York or Chicago. Poetry is for poets with large dreams but small ambitions. The devotees have large hearts. They are driven not by success, which is measured in humility, but by the thing itself, the Zen of poetry. If poetry is an oral tradition it is enough to stand before a handful of fellow poets. Let the words be heard. Let them roar like a stampede of buffalo on the open plains, or let them rattle and quiver like a lover’s lips in the embrace of ecstasy. Poetry is dead, long live poetry.
Maybe we are too ambitious. We have not yet come to understand the Zen of poetry as we intuitively understand the Zen of golf. We are too dependent on the response of our audience. We want too much to please, to be accepted and embraced. Wiz is a phenomenal musician. He has often played for hours in the isolation of a forest or in a secluded corner of a busy park. I am a writer. Though I fear I may never be published, my plays never destined for the professional stage, I continue to write. I will always write. It is not chosen but chooses. Just as the music itself is enough to spur the Wiz on a quest for musical or creative growth, the act of committing words to paper is my calling. Even if no more than a handful of friends or acquaintances will ever read them, even if they are not read at all, the act of writing itself speaks to me in a language that pulls at my heart.
Every writer wants his words to live on, just as every composer and musician wants his music to be heard beyond his time on earth, but the desired outcome is the reason we write, compose or play. Wiz plays because it fulfills a need and because it speaks to the center of his being. As it is with music so it is with writing. As it is with writing so it is with golf. As it is with golf so it is with life and the living of it.
We walk out of the poetry joint and perform our piece on the street. We gather a few curious glances but nothing more. No one is listening but it no longer matters. We read and play for our own fulfillment. It is enough.
We drive down Van Ness to the heart of San Francisco but nothing captures our interest. We decide to head south to Santa Cruz. It is late when we arrive and I suggest staying over to ride the roller coaster in the morning. The Santa Cruz roller coaster is famous as the largest wooden structure of its kind. Wiz declines. He wants no part of it. We are both in a strange reflective mood. We drive on without aim, finally laying out our sleeping bags at a small beach along Highway 1. The smell of the Pacific and the sound of ocean wildlife have a calming effect. The ocean has always spoken to me in times of sorrow or upheaval. It has never failed to soothe my soul.
We awake just after sunrise to the hustle of farm workers on their way to work in the fields. We shake off sleep and the restlessness of the last twenty-four hours, pack our bags and drive into Monterey.
Dollar for dollar, Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay is among the most beautiful courses in the world. Nine holes of tree-lined fairways in typical municipal course style give way to a back nine of ocean side links. Wide open to the elements of the coast, the links nine features no more than a scattering of windswept cypress, evergreen bushes and tall grass no taller than a man, and ice plant over sand where golf balls go to die. If you’ve never hit out of ice plant you would be well advised to use nothing more than a wedge. The course with its narrow fairways, punishing rough and small greens places a premium on accuracy and the ability to hit the ball on a low trajectory.
The back nine has earned Pacific Grove the name: a poor man’s Pebble Beach. Its more famous namesake is just down the coast. The story goes that the land was donated to the city on the condition that the course should always be affordable to the common man. It is a tale that is repeated most every time I come here. Today is no exception.
We arrive early and are paired with a twosome of retired gentlemen. It is reminiscent of our round in Truckee by Donner Pass. We play well enough on the front side to settle in for some inspired golf on the back nine. There are dozens of deer wandering the course along with scores of sea gulls, crows, squirrels and jackrabbits. It is a spectacle of nature rivaling the Grand Canyon. It is a place to forget your troubles and your game and allow yourself to soar with the wind. The sight of the eleventh hole, gazing out over the Pacific, a family of deer grazing below an elevated tee, brings out the best in me. A solid three wood, a stiff wedge and ten-foot putt for birdie. It is the peak of my round but it hardly matters.
On the twelfth, a sweeping par five alongside the coastline, Wiz unloads a drive and a fairway wood that charges the imagination and extends the limits of his game. The ball kicks left into the rough but it doesn’t matter. Here, amidst the grandeur of the California coast, the game takes on a new dimension. We play well, score decently and depart with newfound sense of wonder and admiration for the world around us.
We head on to Carmel on a natural high, a mixture of joy and a sense of infallibility riding with us. Nothing can stop us. Nothing can bring us down. Not even a suicide pigeon that dives into the grill beneath Sally’s hood at the exit ramp can dampen our spirits. Its timing is unfathomable. It leaves me a little dazed, perplexed and without explanation. Maybe we are in need of grounding. Maybe we are too high, too centered on ourselves. Pigeons have long been attracted to Sally’s Mustang orange exterior and have pelted her with droppings at every opportunity. Maybe it’s Sally’s revenge.
I believe in life in all its forms and would not take it lightly. I know only that I don’t know. The why is beyond my comprehension. I only understand that I do not understand. Like the mesmerizing magnitude of the sea, it is a mystery and a mystery it will remain.
In all my life I have seen nothing more beautiful than the cypress of Monterey and Carmel beach. The home of the immortal John Steinbeck it is a living tribute to man’s fascination and devotion to the sea. When I was a younger man it was my habit to come here whenever my mind was clouded with trouble and despair. I would sit for hours, my feet buried in the fine sand or above on a cliff or overhang, where the gulls would trace the shoreline. The gentle but all-powerful waves of the Pacific would empty my mind, cleanse my soul and send me back to the world reborn.
It has the same effect now. Wiz has supplied me with a trumpet and a mute. We stand in the sand, him with his magic flute, me with my muted horn, sending sweet sounds into the endless sea. The crow is here. Of all the times I have spent on this beach I can only remember gulls. It is as mystifying as the sea itself.
Wiz gives me a lesson on looking cool while playing the trumpet. My tendency is to point the horn downward. He wants me to raise it up. We eventually walk back to Sally and deposit our instruments, suddenly aware of the human beauty that surrounds us. She is young enough to be his daughter but old enough to hunger for experience. A bronzed beauty, breasts like golden delicious apples, she moves in a manner that defies the laws of physics. I look down and see a golden anklet. It is the gift I have sought for my wife two thousand miles away. The signs are all around us.
We have to this place in service to my memories. We have play glorious golf in the company of wildlife at Pacific Grove. Wiz has played shots he never thought he was capable of hitting. I have played with a free and open mind. We have been absorbed in the majesty of nature. We have had communion with the sea.
All this leads me back to Nashville where my love awaits.
We have one more service to perform. We are heading to the Hog’s Breath Inn, Clint Eastwood’s place, where once I caught him dashing in and out, a beautiful blonde by his side, to check on his affairs. Wiz asks me the time and I immediately realize we are due back in Motown for a family picnic. A couple of fine looking ladies give us a glance but we are immune to temptation. We cut our visit short and head back to the valley. Clint is not in.
The ride back is thoughtful, peaceful, full of dreams and pleasant memories. I realize that it will be a year or more before I am likely to feel the Pacific breeze again. It is difficult to let go. We stop in the valley town of Los Banos for gas and call ahead to let the family know we’re on our way.
Wiz takes care of the gas and encounters a young lady with the frazzled look of methamphetamine. As we’re pulling out he tells the story. A man says it’s his birthday and she offers him a gift he will remember. She looks at Wiz and says: Hell, I’d give it to almost anyone. She looks our way as she climbs the stairs of a hotel across the way. She charges the imagination. I tell Wiz he’d better wear two condoms for that encounter. Temptation aside, we drive off with the weight of the road a little heavier and the stuff of wet dreams swirling in our minds.
GRAND CANYON: FAMILY GATHERING
It is an evening picnic in the large back yard of my brother John’s house. When we called from Los Banos no one was inside to receive it. Everyone is here. Dave and his wife, who passed on Graeagle, are here with their two children. Cameron is a precocious seven-year-old overcoming an only-child syndrome. Matthew is an infant whom I have only seen once. Dave is the best golfer in the family and at this stage of life may be the most cynical. He is a technical golfer in the Jack Nicklaus tradition. In the recent past he has overspent on such frivolous items as a large-screen television to go with his new house on the west side. He is grateful to me for having loaned him five hundred dollars in a time of need without making him suffer a lecture on economics. He won my admiration for the diligent manner in which he repaid me. He is the only person I have ever loaned money who did not require a reminder of the debt. I am aware that loaning money is often the surest way to end a friendship but in this case it helped form one.
Dave is an honest and honorable man who is in danger of losing faith. He is skeptical of spiritual values. He is skeptical of affirmation, the power of the mind, the concept of karma and alternative paths to enlightenment. He believes in hard work and he is frustrated when it is not enough. He has recovered from hard times and now seems content. His wife Lisa is in many ways a reflection of himself. Very intelligent, highly competitive, talented and hard working, she has an edge of cynicism. It is amusing to see them both on the golf course. They both demand so much more of themselves than they expect in others. It is little wonder Dave has all but given up the game. He can no longer rise to the level of play that once allowed him to break the course record at Dryden Park. He does not seem to enjoy the walk. The demands they place on each other almost cost them their marriage but all is well now and I wonder if they have discovered something. Maybe they are beginning to enjoy the walk.
The next generation of the family now numbers six with one more on the way. My brother Bob’s wife Robin has given birth to their second child and John’s wife Margie is pregnant with their third. It is a huge surprise since she had her tubes tied. It is ironic that my sister Sue, the most spiritual of the family, wants desperately to have a child but it hasn’t happened. In another world maybe she could have raised the unwanted child of a brother.
Coming from a large family, there was a time when my parents began to wonder if the future of the family was secure. The fear of a lost progeny is gone. The children have become the dominant force in the family. They are the markers of time, the center of all gatherings, and the primary topic of discussion.
This gathering however is for the childless, a wondering son back home from Tennessee. We talk about Nashville, my marriage, John Prine, the music business, the rich forestland of the Tennessee countryside, ticks and chiggers, and the sweltering heat. I realize that I am the only member of the family who has strayed from the nest. Drawn by an old but not forgotten love, I followed her wandering nature to another world. I alone have broken the chain.
I realize as well that the time for wandering and adventure has pretty much passed my family by. Only the youngest, Tom and Robin, are without their own families to bind them to this place. I sense they are not likely to leave. They are attached to the central valley and the surrounding area. They each have a spirit of rebellion that expresses itself in different ways: driving too fast, drunken parties, reckless relationships. They have both had schooling in Texas and Oklahoma before returning home. They have shown no inclination to wander again.
There is comfort here and a sense of security that is at once reassuring and disturbing. It was that disturbing feeling of getting stuck, of not advancing, of being left behind that I answered with my move to Tennessee. I fear the age of the journey is coming to an end not only for myself but also for the nation. There are so few hitchhikers on the road these days and most of them are hitchers of necessity rather than choice. This generation of youth does not seem interested in the journey as a path to spiritual growth. Maybe the futility of my generation has made its mark. Maybe they have learned what Henry Miller learned late in life at Big Sur: Sit still and watch the world go by while all the things you need come to you.
Brother Tom has inquired about my philosophy, my way of looking at life as a journey of the soul and the road to wisdom. I told him about the books that inspired me: Castaneda, Hesse, Kerouac, Miller. He gave them a look but they didn’t take hold. They did not hold the magic for him that they did for me. To each his own. In the end we must all find our own paths. It is one of the tenets of my own journey: There is no one way.
Our days in Motown are numbered now. There is a vague and growing sense of urgency that I do not define. Time is growing short. We spend what remains of the night and most of the next day with Robert and Sue. We tell stories, kick the old dogs, exchange opinions and enjoy music. Robert is in rare form on the trumpet and on the microphone. Brother Randy who has formed a bond with Robert joins us. They are like children, singing and recording songs a little off key. I am convinced that Randy has a chance to rebuild his life. I wonder if his transformation has something to do with Robert’s way of diving into the center of one’s being.
I’m a little surprised he does not probe deeply into my life on the present journey. Maybe there is no need. Maybe he understands what I am beginning to realize. I am no longer a part of his world. I may never return home. My visits may grow further and further apart until I am only a stranger he once knew.
I wonder if Randy is in fact the true adventurer of the family. He has been to the belly of the beast and wrestled with the dragon of his inmost self. It is something I have not yet experienced. I force myself to see everything with new eyes. There is no one way.
Wiz and I have a date with the theater. We excuse ourselves and drive down to Turlock for Uncle Vanya. It is the finest production of Chekhov I have ever seen. Patty plays the object of desire and the personification of life in a decaying world. It is a familiar role and one that she graces with the ease of a professional. Jere is the enlightened doctor who perceives the decay in the deforestation of the land. He senses life in the wife of another man and is too wise to be denied by the moral code of a dying society. Gary is the personification of death and the social machine that enforces it. His is the most tragic of tales: Growing old without comfort. Another old friend whose life journey seems parallel to my own plays the title role. He has married, moved to Seattle and is now preparing for a move to Dublin, Ireland. His talent has blossomed under the tutelage these gifted forces of the creative mind. His part is that of a humble man, a man who lives by the rules, who works diligently and suffers without complaint only to find that his interests are discarded in the decaying rubble. He too is in love with live and his tragedy is that he has known so little of it.
It is a surprisingly moving play and one that speaks to our world in more ways than the obvious. It raises the question: As we destroy our environment, are we not also destroying our souls? Have we lost our zeal for life? Are we destined to meet our ends with the realization that our lives have been without meaning? Life is the rallying cry. Live and have no regrets. That is the central purpose of our journey. Enlightenment must follow life. It cannot escape or transcend life itself. Without life made rich and full by experience there can be no wisdom.
We gather at Jere and Patty’s after the play as I have so many times before. Wiz finds harmony with Jere’s brother John, a superb guitarist. As the conversation gradually shifts from the play to more personal matters, my attention is increasingly drawn to Gary. He is now fifty, an age that I have come to believe is the age of the shaman of my generation. He was twenty-five in the summer of love. He has seen the world change through the eyes of a man. His childhood was not happy. He shares with us a story of abuse at the hands of a nun in parochial school. Wiz had a similar experience.
I wonder if these women, empowered with the cloth of faith and the role of a teacher, realize the mark of cynicism they left in the world. It is no less than a miracle that those abused children grew up to be the men that stand before me now. Maybe it served as their initiations. Maybe it helped them to break free of the ties that bound them. Their wounds healed as they made their way through life’s journey.
Gary preceded me on the path of wisdom that is represented in the words of Joseph Campbell. He is the sage that enabled both of us to reclaim our faith. When once I believe in none, I now believe in all religions. I believe they are essentially the same. I believe they are one. I believe in a universal mythology that, far from reducing their value, empowers them to speak to all. Gary understands this far better than I. He has achieved a level of wisdom if not enlightenment that I am still pursuing. I give him a copy of my latest works in the hope that he will understand my intentions and shed some needed light. We wish him well as we depart in the late hours of the night.
We have two more rounds of golf before we leave this valley. We are scheduled to play a course in Manteca with Jere and Patty and Creekside in Modesto with Robert and Sue.
Manteca is a beautiful valley municipal course. Tight well-kept fairways, varied terrain, water hazards and a major wind factor on the back nine. Jere and Patty opt for a cart. Wiz and I are walking. We share some of our ideas concerning Zen golf, a topic that is not new to them. Patty is open and Jere is less skeptical than he was. He proclaims: It’s not the shots; it’s the ride. Wiz turns in some amazing shots and cards his second birdie, adding to the mystical appeal of Zen.
We take the turn to the backside in good shape but the long haul and the adversity of the wind begins to take its toll. On the sixteenth hole the foursome behind us fires a pair of drives beyond us as we look for my ball in the woods. While we’re on the green a third shot skips hotly past us to the right. I linger on the next tee to issue a stern but vague warning. The force of my voice surprises my playing partners. Wiz wonders if I have a little of the redneck buried within. To me it is no more than the game demands: Respect your fellow players. In the future they will be a little more cognizant of those around them and in front of them.
Unfortunately, I experience a little karmic kickback, doubling the next hole. We all struggle to the finish. I reflect that maybe my partners were right. I have an acute sense of right versus wrong that can trigger an angry response. It strikes a contrast to my normal mellow demeanor and often shocks those I know. It is something I must work on: controlling my emotions. It is a reminder as well that we are never alone in the game of golf. Our fellow players are as much a part of our game as the trees and the wind. The struggle is not so great as our scores are respectable. We have spent the afternoon in the company of friends and we are grateful.
Next stop: Creekside. It was falsely billed as Modesto’s first championship course. It is in fact far too short for that status and the trees are a good ten years from becoming the barriers they should be. It is nevertheless a good layout. Like Jere and Patty, Robert and Sue opt for a cart while we prefer the walk. We are acclimated to the humidity of Nashville so the dry heat of California goes relatively easy on us.
It is a good day for golf and I am on my game. I have come to believe that good golf, like bad, is contagious. We all play the front nine well once we hit our strides. An errant shot into the water on the difficult ninth hole costs me a sub-forty round. We grab a bite to eat at the clubhouse and start the back nine in good spirits. Like Manteca, the wind picks up as the day goes on and the backside is wide open.
We allow a series of twosomes in carts to play through. They are excellent golfers but the speed of their play is excessive. I speculate that they are gamblers who have chosen golf as the field on which their stakes are laid. I am aware that Robert is a gambling man. I once witnessed his magic in high stakes action on the blackjack tables in Lake Tahoe. There is an unmistakable aura about him when he’s on a roll. He speaks of it in spiritual terms. It feeds on the positive energy of those around him. It feeds on itself. It is its own entity and it is something to behold. It is the Zen of gambling. There is no other way to describe it. Though I am not a gambler, I understand it through the venue of golf. I know the feeling. The energy of the life force is focused and channeled into one cause. The effect is inevitable.
I cannot pass judgment on the chosen venue. Whether it is golf or bowling, darts or basketball, pool, gambling or a path of artistic endeavor, it is all one. It gathers at the center of one’s being and unites the one with all. It is the essence of faith and the mystical wonder of the human experience.
I have been driving the ball extremely well. On the thirteenth hole, a long par five with a tail wind, I let loose a monster drive. The rockets down the left side of the fairway like a rifle shot. It will measure about three hundred and ten yards. As the others take their turns at the tee an elderly man playing solo approaches. He is the image of the immortal Sam Snead with his easy manner and a small straw hat. We invite him to play through and he graciously accepts. He steps to the tee and hammers a drive with a smooth, even-tempered swing. Swing easy, hit hard. He tips his hat and delays his departure long enough to tell Wiz that the three-wood he has picked up at a yard sale is a classic persimmons wood. It is highly valued.
As we trail behind him, I notice that he walks as if by instinct to the longest ball. It is not his. He pauses and scans our foursome from a distance until his eyes meet mine. This master of the game is impressed. I give him a satisfied nod which he returns as he walks back to his own ball. He places it on the front of the green, misses the putt and settles for a tap-in birdie. By the time we reach the next tee he is long gone.
It is a perfect moment in golf and one that leaves me with a feeling of exhilaration. I play inspired golf, birdie the fifteenth and finish the back nine at level par. On the sixteenth sister Sue finds her iron game and rips a series of fine shots. She is elated and her joy is gratifying. Robert reaches the greenside bunker in two but takes three to get out. His red haired temper flares and he gives his wedge a heave. It is a modified thrust which allows him to claim later that he was merely tossing it aside to retrieve his putter. The contrast in moods between Robert and Sue strikes me as hilarious and I have to fight my instinct to laugh.
To Robert’s credit he recovers his demeanor on the next hole and finishes a fine round. We have all played well. It is a fitting goodbye to golf in the valley of my upbringing. Tomorrow we are back on the road. Our first destiny is Wawona Golf Course in Yosemite National Park. It has been a wondrous visit and all that I could have asked for. Like a good round of golf, it will leave me with a yen to return.
Dave is an honest and honorable man who is in danger of losing faith. He is skeptical of spiritual values. He is skeptical of affirmation, the power of the mind, the concept of karma and alternative paths to enlightenment. He believes in hard work and he is frustrated when it is not enough. He has recovered from hard times and now seems content. His wife Lisa is in many ways a reflection of himself. Very intelligent, highly competitive, talented and hard working, she has an edge of cynicism. It is amusing to see them both on the golf course. They both demand so much more of themselves than they expect in others. It is little wonder Dave has all but given up the game. He can no longer rise to the level of play that once allowed him to break the course record at Dryden Park. He does not seem to enjoy the walk. The demands they place on each other almost cost them their marriage but all is well now and I wonder if they have discovered something. Maybe they are beginning to enjoy the walk.
The next generation of the family now numbers six with one more on the way. My brother Bob’s wife Robin has given birth to their second child and John’s wife Margie is pregnant with their third. It is a huge surprise since she had her tubes tied. It is ironic that my sister Sue, the most spiritual of the family, wants desperately to have a child but it hasn’t happened. In another world maybe she could have raised the unwanted child of a brother.
Coming from a large family, there was a time when my parents began to wonder if the future of the family was secure. The fear of a lost progeny is gone. The children have become the dominant force in the family. They are the markers of time, the center of all gatherings, and the primary topic of discussion.
This gathering however is for the childless, a wondering son back home from Tennessee. We talk about Nashville, my marriage, John Prine, the music business, the rich forestland of the Tennessee countryside, ticks and chiggers, and the sweltering heat. I realize that I am the only member of the family who has strayed from the nest. Drawn by an old but not forgotten love, I followed her wandering nature to another world. I alone have broken the chain.
I realize as well that the time for wandering and adventure has pretty much passed my family by. Only the youngest, Tom and Robin, are without their own families to bind them to this place. I sense they are not likely to leave. They are attached to the central valley and the surrounding area. They each have a spirit of rebellion that expresses itself in different ways: driving too fast, drunken parties, reckless relationships. They have both had schooling in Texas and Oklahoma before returning home. They have shown no inclination to wander again.
There is comfort here and a sense of security that is at once reassuring and disturbing. It was that disturbing feeling of getting stuck, of not advancing, of being left behind that I answered with my move to Tennessee. I fear the age of the journey is coming to an end not only for myself but also for the nation. There are so few hitchhikers on the road these days and most of them are hitchers of necessity rather than choice. This generation of youth does not seem interested in the journey as a path to spiritual growth. Maybe the futility of my generation has made its mark. Maybe they have learned what Henry Miller learned late in life at Big Sur: Sit still and watch the world go by while all the things you need come to you.
Brother Tom has inquired about my philosophy, my way of looking at life as a journey of the soul and the road to wisdom. I told him about the books that inspired me: Castaneda, Hesse, Kerouac, Miller. He gave them a look but they didn’t take hold. They did not hold the magic for him that they did for me. To each his own. In the end we must all find our own paths. It is one of the tenets of my own journey: There is no one way.
Our days in Motown are numbered now. There is a vague and growing sense of urgency that I do not define. Time is growing short. We spend what remains of the night and most of the next day with Robert and Sue. We tell stories, kick the old dogs, exchange opinions and enjoy music. Robert is in rare form on the trumpet and on the microphone. Brother Randy who has formed a bond with Robert joins us. They are like children, singing and recording songs a little off key. I am convinced that Randy has a chance to rebuild his life. I wonder if his transformation has something to do with Robert’s way of diving into the center of one’s being.
I’m a little surprised he does not probe deeply into my life on the present journey. Maybe there is no need. Maybe he understands what I am beginning to realize. I am no longer a part of his world. I may never return home. My visits may grow further and further apart until I am only a stranger he once knew.
I wonder if Randy is in fact the true adventurer of the family. He has been to the belly of the beast and wrestled with the dragon of his inmost self. It is something I have not yet experienced. I force myself to see everything with new eyes. There is no one way.
Wiz and I have a date with the theater. We excuse ourselves and drive down to Turlock for Uncle Vanya. It is the finest production of Chekhov I have ever seen. Patty plays the object of desire and the personification of life in a decaying world. It is a familiar role and one that she graces with the ease of a professional. Jere is the enlightened doctor who perceives the decay in the deforestation of the land. He senses life in the wife of another man and is too wise to be denied by the moral code of a dying society. Gary is the personification of death and the social machine that enforces it. His is the most tragic of tales: Growing old without comfort. Another old friend whose life journey seems parallel to my own plays the title role. He has married, moved to Seattle and is now preparing for a move to Dublin, Ireland. His talent has blossomed under the tutelage these gifted forces of the creative mind. His part is that of a humble man, a man who lives by the rules, who works diligently and suffers without complaint only to find that his interests are discarded in the decaying rubble. He too is in love with live and his tragedy is that he has known so little of it.
It is a surprisingly moving play and one that speaks to our world in more ways than the obvious. It raises the question: As we destroy our environment, are we not also destroying our souls? Have we lost our zeal for life? Are we destined to meet our ends with the realization that our lives have been without meaning? Life is the rallying cry. Live and have no regrets. That is the central purpose of our journey. Enlightenment must follow life. It cannot escape or transcend life itself. Without life made rich and full by experience there can be no wisdom.
We gather at Jere and Patty’s after the play as I have so many times before. Wiz finds harmony with Jere’s brother John, a superb guitarist. As the conversation gradually shifts from the play to more personal matters, my attention is increasingly drawn to Gary. He is now fifty, an age that I have come to believe is the age of the shaman of my generation. He was twenty-five in the summer of love. He has seen the world change through the eyes of a man. His childhood was not happy. He shares with us a story of abuse at the hands of a nun in parochial school. Wiz had a similar experience.
I wonder if these women, empowered with the cloth of faith and the role of a teacher, realize the mark of cynicism they left in the world. It is no less than a miracle that those abused children grew up to be the men that stand before me now. Maybe it served as their initiations. Maybe it helped them to break free of the ties that bound them. Their wounds healed as they made their way through life’s journey.
Gary preceded me on the path of wisdom that is represented in the words of Joseph Campbell. He is the sage that enabled both of us to reclaim our faith. When once I believe in none, I now believe in all religions. I believe they are essentially the same. I believe they are one. I believe in a universal mythology that, far from reducing their value, empowers them to speak to all. Gary understands this far better than I. He has achieved a level of wisdom if not enlightenment that I am still pursuing. I give him a copy of my latest works in the hope that he will understand my intentions and shed some needed light. We wish him well as we depart in the late hours of the night.
We have two more rounds of golf before we leave this valley. We are scheduled to play a course in Manteca with Jere and Patty and Creekside in Modesto with Robert and Sue.
Manteca is a beautiful valley municipal course. Tight well-kept fairways, varied terrain, water hazards and a major wind factor on the back nine. Jere and Patty opt for a cart. Wiz and I are walking. We share some of our ideas concerning Zen golf, a topic that is not new to them. Patty is open and Jere is less skeptical than he was. He proclaims: It’s not the shots; it’s the ride. Wiz turns in some amazing shots and cards his second birdie, adding to the mystical appeal of Zen.
We take the turn to the backside in good shape but the long haul and the adversity of the wind begins to take its toll. On the sixteenth hole the foursome behind us fires a pair of drives beyond us as we look for my ball in the woods. While we’re on the green a third shot skips hotly past us to the right. I linger on the next tee to issue a stern but vague warning. The force of my voice surprises my playing partners. Wiz wonders if I have a little of the redneck buried within. To me it is no more than the game demands: Respect your fellow players. In the future they will be a little more cognizant of those around them and in front of them.
Unfortunately, I experience a little karmic kickback, doubling the next hole. We all struggle to the finish. I reflect that maybe my partners were right. I have an acute sense of right versus wrong that can trigger an angry response. It strikes a contrast to my normal mellow demeanor and often shocks those I know. It is something I must work on: controlling my emotions. It is a reminder as well that we are never alone in the game of golf. Our fellow players are as much a part of our game as the trees and the wind. The struggle is not so great as our scores are respectable. We have spent the afternoon in the company of friends and we are grateful.
Next stop: Creekside. It was falsely billed as Modesto’s first championship course. It is in fact far too short for that status and the trees are a good ten years from becoming the barriers they should be. It is nevertheless a good layout. Like Jere and Patty, Robert and Sue opt for a cart while we prefer the walk. We are acclimated to the humidity of Nashville so the dry heat of California goes relatively easy on us.
It is a good day for golf and I am on my game. I have come to believe that good golf, like bad, is contagious. We all play the front nine well once we hit our strides. An errant shot into the water on the difficult ninth hole costs me a sub-forty round. We grab a bite to eat at the clubhouse and start the back nine in good spirits. Like Manteca, the wind picks up as the day goes on and the backside is wide open.
We allow a series of twosomes in carts to play through. They are excellent golfers but the speed of their play is excessive. I speculate that they are gamblers who have chosen golf as the field on which their stakes are laid. I am aware that Robert is a gambling man. I once witnessed his magic in high stakes action on the blackjack tables in Lake Tahoe. There is an unmistakable aura about him when he’s on a roll. He speaks of it in spiritual terms. It feeds on the positive energy of those around him. It feeds on itself. It is its own entity and it is something to behold. It is the Zen of gambling. There is no other way to describe it. Though I am not a gambler, I understand it through the venue of golf. I know the feeling. The energy of the life force is focused and channeled into one cause. The effect is inevitable.
I cannot pass judgment on the chosen venue. Whether it is golf or bowling, darts or basketball, pool, gambling or a path of artistic endeavor, it is all one. It gathers at the center of one’s being and unites the one with all. It is the essence of faith and the mystical wonder of the human experience.
I have been driving the ball extremely well. On the thirteenth hole, a long par five with a tail wind, I let loose a monster drive. The rockets down the left side of the fairway like a rifle shot. It will measure about three hundred and ten yards. As the others take their turns at the tee an elderly man playing solo approaches. He is the image of the immortal Sam Snead with his easy manner and a small straw hat. We invite him to play through and he graciously accepts. He steps to the tee and hammers a drive with a smooth, even-tempered swing. Swing easy, hit hard. He tips his hat and delays his departure long enough to tell Wiz that the three-wood he has picked up at a yard sale is a classic persimmons wood. It is highly valued.
As we trail behind him, I notice that he walks as if by instinct to the longest ball. It is not his. He pauses and scans our foursome from a distance until his eyes meet mine. This master of the game is impressed. I give him a satisfied nod which he returns as he walks back to his own ball. He places it on the front of the green, misses the putt and settles for a tap-in birdie. By the time we reach the next tee he is long gone.
It is a perfect moment in golf and one that leaves me with a feeling of exhilaration. I play inspired golf, birdie the fifteenth and finish the back nine at level par. On the sixteenth sister Sue finds her iron game and rips a series of fine shots. She is elated and her joy is gratifying. Robert reaches the greenside bunker in two but takes three to get out. His red haired temper flares and he gives his wedge a heave. It is a modified thrust which allows him to claim later that he was merely tossing it aside to retrieve his putter. The contrast in moods between Robert and Sue strikes me as hilarious and I have to fight my instinct to laugh.
To Robert’s credit he recovers his demeanor on the next hole and finishes a fine round. We have all played well. It is a fitting goodbye to golf in the valley of my upbringing. Tomorrow we are back on the road. Our first destiny is Wawona Golf Course in Yosemite National Park. It has been a wondrous visit and all that I could have asked for. Like a good round of golf, it will leave me with a yen to return.
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