The Bearable Lightness of Low-T

Back in simpler times, doctors might have told their older male patients that the most likely cause of their malaise was nothing a little man-to-man conversation with their peers over brandy and cigars couldn’t cure.  Nowadays, doctors peer into a computer screen at a bank of numbers and pronounce judgment on a patient’s general state of health with more assurance of being right than a phalanx of Ivy League economists, armed with a stack of charts and tables, predicting next month’s employment figures.  In my case, the number under consideration was my testosterone, which was so low that when my doctor mentioned it, a treble of disbelief escaped his lips in the form of a low whistle.  When he looked up, there was a brief flicker of surprise in his eyes, as if he’d expected to find me slumped on the floor.  “Have you ever tried to dribble a deflated basketball?” he asked.

I had just spent a few days before my visit scouring the Internet for a deal on a used whitewater kayak, and this was not a question I wanted to hear.  For it was not, of course, a question about my basketball prowess, but a declaration of war against the declining powers of what, for lack of a better word, is called manhood.  Yes, mine.  And, yes, I know, manhood is a sometime euphemism for the male reproductive organ; more generally, it helps us tell the difference between NFL linebackers and English professors like me.  But I took it literally, or at least literally enough to picture a depilated, atrophied shell of a former man, looking every year of his three score and three, sprawled across the free-throw line like a flung-away gym towel, the word VOIT stamped across his forehead, the T tending in shape toward a D.  I am in decline.  The number, almost too weak to cling to the screen, says so.

Testosterone is produced in the testicles, though the amount that’s actually delivered into the blood stream is regulated by the hypothalamus and pituitary gland.  Like almost everything that goes on in the body, the process is controlled by the brain, which signals the testicles to go to work, or to suspend operations, as need and circumstances dictate.  When the system is working the way it’s supposed to—when, that is, the amount of testosterone in the blood comes in at between 300 and 1000 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl)—then a startling and rare phenomenon occurs: the male sex organs are actually listening to what the brain is telling them.  Mine, apparently, were in open rebellion, chemical-wise.  I was mired a few clicks south of 200 ng/dl, which means I should have been staggering into my doctor’s office like an old prospector who’d been lost in the mountains and couldn’t remember where he’d tied his mule, utterly uninterested, even after months alone in the wilderness, in worldly pleasures.  But all things considered, I was feeling fine.  I got a little tired in the afternoons, and sometimes I gave in to a short nap, but usually a vigorous bike ride and a power bar were sufficient to punch through the three o’clock doldrums.  More importantly, my wife’s complaints were in the range of the usual: Isn’t it about time I changed the oil in that t-shirt I’d been wearing for three days?  And what about the batteries in the smoke alarms.  And the front yard is starting to look like a Nebraska corn field in July.

Abysmally low-T is not the end of the world, unless you’ve just married one of the Kardashians, in which case the ship of matrimony is already foundering.  The hatch could swing shut at a moment’s notice.  Nor is it the kind of news that will give a wife or partner cause for alarm (and it might answer a question that’s been nagging them for months on end).  It’s provided the spark to the gunpowder of many a proctologist joke, a genre of humor that seems to have begun with Johnny Carson.  Nonetheless, when it comes to aging, we baby boomers are short on humor and long on fixes, and in our opinion there is nothing good about that night we are going ungently into.  We guys are known for doing crazy things, like riding motorcycles or developing a sudden interest in extreme sports; the midlife crisis, if it’s been delayed a decade or so, takes the form of a subscription to Men’s Journal and lingering, lustful gazes at a Dagger Mamba 8.1 kayak, accompanied by heavy breathing and palpitations of the heart.  In one commercial, a buff older guy in a tight-fitting t-shirt—the resemblance to Marlon Brando or James Dean seems deliberate--pops a Viagra (since you asked: no) and then, by himself, drives his vintage Camaro, top down and unmuffled, deep into the Mojave Desert, Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’” playing in his head.  Like all of the commercials for erectile dysfunction, this one is more style than substance: there’s no tension to speak of, the narrative arc dissipates about five seconds in, and a great car and a blue pill go to waste.  But the guy looks like he could plant smiles in a single weekend up and down the Pacific Coast and still get in a round of golf.  That’s the message the commercial is selling.

Before we baby boomers admit the inevitable, it’s off to the pharmacy we go, prescription in hand, in my case for a bottle of pump-activated Axiron.  The very name conjures bare-chested, loin-clothed beefcake actors speaking dubbed English in 1950s Hercules movies.  I promise, I’ll keep my shirt (clean) on and stay clear of stables, but I’m no less caught up in the vanities of my generation than the square-jawed, steely-eyed sexagenarian in the commercial, and I would like to keep my sinews strong enough to draw the bow for a few more years.  Sixty three is thirty.  At seventy I just might pick up and follow Muddy Waters’ advice and go to New Orleans to get my mojo working.   My wife would love the Crawfish Etouffee at Drago’s.  The Me Generation is but a feather landing softly to our vigorous stomp upon the earth, and Generation X is the fragile scree left behind by our glaciated advance across the landscape of time.  I am man; hear me belch above the pulsating roar of a V-8.

But according to one student of the condition, a fitness writer named Lee Myer, who blogs at peaktestosterone.com, low-T is the gateway to a life flat-lined by every conceivable malady, mental and physical, to which the human male is prone; it is a slippery slope, deceptively gentle at first, that ends in a droopy existence devoid of all signs of life and is relieved only by a long, slow, foot-dragging limp to an early and submissive death.  Among the symptoms of low-T, which “can also fool a guy because they are so ubiquitous,” are “depression, mental fogginess/fuzziness, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, loss of muscle, increased weight gain, decreased facial hair and a general feeling of not caring about anything.”  Yes, these are, like, soooo ubiquitous, but guys are just as easily fooled by the rare and remarkable.

Included in that not-cared-about anything, it should come as no surprise, is sex.  Mr. Myer most definitely does not wish to be counted among that fraternity, for the pains he takes to tell us how deeply he cares about sex are truly extraordinary.  “Of course,” he writes, those two little words performing above and beyond the rustic duties of transition, “the number one thing in most guys' mind is how it [low-T] affects their sex life.”  I don’t have a clue to what that thing might be, but, whatever it is, there is only one of them, as well as only one mind to contemplate it, and in the next sentence we are told, for the second time, that the scarcity of sexual commodities extends to…well, let’s hear Myer explain it: “Low testosterone affects both libido and erectile strength to varying degrees and that obviously isn't too good for the ol' sex life” (emphasis added).  No, it is not, although I have no personal knowledge to verify this, but what gets me is that it appears that there is only one of those ol’ sex lives to go around for the entire male population.  What an abominable pity.  One thing, one mind, one sex life: Myer is coming very close to saying that low-T is the natural condition of all men and that we are disturbing the balance of the universe with our pumps and our creams and our dietary supplements.

Myer is the author of two e-books on erectile dysfunction.  (The online Merriam-Webster dictionary gives two definitions of dysfunction: 1. “impaired or abnormal functioning,” the example given being “gastrointestinal dysfunction,” which, I’m sorry to say, confirmation-wise, is ubiquitous among my generation; and 2. “abnormal or unhealthy interpersonal behavior or interaction within a group.”  Oh.)  In the interest of full scholarly disclosure, I present the books’ titles, without a word left out or any missing punctuation marks silently added: Peak Erectile Strength Diet: Become an Orgasmatarian [sic] Let Science Improve Your Hardness Factor Through Diet, and 15 Natural Erectile Dysfunction Cures: Research-Backed Solutions to Troubleshoot and Heal Your Erections.  The thought of troubleshooting an erection bothers me somehow, but apart from this, what else can we conclude from these titles?  I think it’s that Mr. Myer has watched a lot of 1930s B-grade movies about mad scientists.  (Can anyone forget Edward G. Robinson’s scene-stealing portrayal of the criminal mind in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, which includes Humphrey Bogart in the role of, I swear, Rocks Valentine?)  Like all books published in the United States, PESD and 15NEDC will find their way to the shelves of the Library of Congress, and I think I’m on safe ground in saying that more than a few of our legislators in Washington will read them with keen interest and a common purpose.  I’ll bet Myer gets invited to a lot of parties.

Axiron is self-applied to the axillary fossa, which is bounded laterally by the coracobrachialis, located at the upper part of the arm where the biceps brachii and triceps brachii join, and medially by the serratus anterior, found at the upper part of the coracoid process.  The instructions that come with Axiron call this the armpit.  (In Great Britain and Ireland, the word is oxter, whose origins appear to be Celtic, which may suggest that the armpit was once the site of a potent magic that has been lost to all but those few who have been initiated into the craft).  The actual applying of the stuff is unproblematic.  You squirt a little into the rubber cup, raise your arm, lean over the sink (you’ll spill some), swab until the cup is empty, wait a few minutes for the application to dry, get dressed, and off you go.  If you know how to apply deodorant, you can have yourself a ball with Axiron.

But don’t have too much of a ball, even if you’re taking the stuff for precisely that reason.  Side effects include lower sperm count, swelling (especially at the feet and ankles), sleep apnea, and blood clots in the lower extremities.  Men who take large doses (well in excess of the 60 mg /day maximum prescribed dosage) might grow breasts.  Their PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) might skyrocket, potentially indicating benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) or cancer.  Under no circumstances should the product get into the hands of children.  Do not apply it before, the instructions delicately put it, “intimacy” with another person.  Unquestionably, the most embarrassing—particularly if you ride crowded buses a lot—and, I would imagine, supremely uncomfortable, but thankfully rare, side effect would have to be priapism—frequent and prolonged erections.  There are urban legends handed down since the fifth-century that Atilla the Hun died during a night of rough sex with his new, and seventh, bride, after an evening of heavy eating and drinking.  The official cause of death is given as a nose bleed, possibly inflicted by his beleaguered spouse, who may have been armed with a knife, and his subsequent drowning on his own blood.  A second theory points to esophageal varices, caused when high quantities of alcohol dilate the sub-mucosal veins in the lower third of the esophagus to the point that they rupture and the victim hemorrhages to death.   Priapism is implicated in the first cause, but distantly, and is statistically relevant in the second, for it is known that 21 percent of cases of priapism are associated with alcohol abuse.  By whatever cause, it sounds like the bastard got what he deserved.

Before there was Axiron, before there was Viagra, before there was supplemental DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone, a substance that aids sugar metabolism), there was Mr. Reese, my tenth-grade health teacher.  His remedy for low-T was, I’m pretty sure, an artfully disguised memoir of his college-day love affairs.  I remember him as a tall, suave man, nattily dressed, with a trim figure and a surf wave of red hair flecked with gray.  It embarrasses me to say this—I was sixteen at the time—but it is possibly from Mr. Reese that I learned for the first time that a boy and a girl could do more after a movie than walk home holding hands.  This would have been in 1965.  The Women’s Movement was well into its second wave; two years before, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, a fact unknown to us teenagers and apparently a matter of supreme indifference to an operator like Mr. Reese, for his remedy sounds like it came straight out of the Playboy Advisor.  (I can say this now, out of a concern for historical accuracy.)  I don’t remember his exact words—poor memory is one symptom of low-T—but they went something like this: “If you want to get a girl in the mood, put on some soft music and dim the lights.”

He delivered this to a class of all boys.  I can’t imagine what his colleague, Mrs. Darby, who taught the girls, was saying.  I would not give anything, but I would give more than the change in my penny jar, to have overheard their conversations in the faculty lounge.  To give his advice the necessary rhetorical kick, Mr. Reese glided imperiously from behind his desk to a spot beside the lectern.  Behind him, on the chalkboard, were diagrams, poorly drawn but graphic.  All snickering stopped when he glared at us.  A reverent hush fell over the room.  We were in the aura of a man in possession of vast experience with the mysterious ways of women, the mere thought of which had us swimming in pools of saliva, of forgotten and esoteric knowledge of the arts of love-making, for if anyone knew more than one, it was he, and he was about to deliver the hammer blow of truth.  Leaning against the lectern in a pose of courtly insouciance, he interlocked his fingers, rested an elbow casually on the lectern’s surface, and spoke in an earnest, measured tone, like a Scout Master lecturing on campfire safety.

I have no idea what Mr. Reese’s tastes in music were.  I picture a cabinet stereo in his dorm room with half a dozen albums spread out on the floor, but not where they are likely to get broken in the ensuing mayhem.  They have titles like For Lovers Only and Seduction by Candlelight, and the dominant colors on the cover are the wine red of satin sheets and the velvety yellow of a candle’s flame.  For lighting, a Coleman camp lantern glows under a pillowcase on a rickety card table.  Such are the rituals of blossoming manhood.

And thus the wise and ancient Mr. Reese, Socrates to our hormone-addled Phaedrus.  Right.  Romantic music.  Soft lighting.  Maybe a silk robe loosely tied at the waist.  To a tenth grader the sheer logistics of the thing would have been insurmountable—one did not simply give his parents fifty dollars and tell them to go out and have a good time--and ten years later, when we were married with kids, the logistics were laughably impractical.  Public school education, then as now, was geared toward making students pragmatists anyway, so our interpretation of Mr. Reese’s remedy was by necessity instrumentalist.  Romantic music equaled The Four Seasons’ “Candy Girl” on the dashboard radio; soft lighting came from the flashlight in the glove box of our father’s Pontiac.  There was little subtlety involved, or required.  If the cops put an early halt to the proceedings, a sheepish smile, a profusion of humble Yes, Sirs and No, Sirs, and a hasty but fumble-fingered rebuttoning of garments were generally sufficient to get you home early, with only a warning, in time to take a cold shower (also recommended by Mr. Reese) before bed.  I have a son who’s a cop, and he assures me that most of them remember when they were young.

A few months before he died, my father, a man with a waggish sense of humor to the very end, told me that he had a theory to explain how he came down with prostate cancer.  He was mindful, I think, that if he didn’t tell someone before it was too late, the truth would expire with him.  By then the cancer had invaded virtually every corner of his body, and he was confined to bed, too brittle and weak even to lie propped up on pillows.  The best he could do was talk for a few minutes on the phone.  His wife, my stepmother, would hold it to his ear.  Even under those conditions, even with the undertaker practically parked in his driveway checking his watch every few minutes, my father knew how to tell a good story, and as far back as I can remember he always got me to believe them.

He had dated a girl in El Paso, when he was in the army, and adopting a strategy of narrative indirection he made it pretty clear me that his transition from adolescence to adulthood had involved more than enduring the stresses and indignities of army life.  He then referred me to a photograph, which my stepmother later gave to me, of him and three army buddies and the girls they were out with, taken in September, 1944, on a night out in Paris.  The eight of them are sitting around a table in a crowded night club, drinks in their hands, empty glasses spread out all around them.  Everyone is laughing, but it is the women who are laughing most of all.  Their whole bodies seem to be laughing, as if liberated from some restraint in their lives and allowed to think that, at last, the promise of a brighter and unencumbered future might be kept.  And who better to laugh with than four American soldiers who came calling with liberation, and with chocolate and nylons and condoms.  Alone of the four women, my father’s girl is sitting in his lap, her arms draped around his neck.

“Well, dad, you were young, you were a soldier, you were overseas, and you were going off to battle.  And it was Paris.  But what’s that got to do with getting prostate cancer?”

I heard his chuckle through the earpiece.  “Well, they say men who have sex regularly are less likely to get it.”

Okay, I thought, I’ll keep that in mind.

“I suppose you want to know what they mean by ‘regularly’,” he added.

“Not particularly,” I said.

“Good, because the answer won’t do me a damn bit of good anymore, and it’s not the kind of advice a father should be giving his son.”

That was reassuring, I told him, what with twenty years of marriage and three kids behind me.  Then his voice turned serious.  “But I will tell you this.”  He was silent for a moment.  “No matter where you are or what you’re doing, if you have to take a piss, do it.  Don’t hold it in.  Just go.  I think that was my mistake.”

What?

Here’s how he explained it.  As part of the training for the rigors of combat, the drill sergeants wouldn’t allow the men to relieve themselves.  My father told of how, after working outside all day in a cold January at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he took basic, the whole company had warmed themselves with cup after cup of coffee.  My father liked his coffee strong, without milk or sugar, and he drank it by the quart.  After the evening meal, and still more coffee, they were made to stand at attention out on the concrete expanse of the parade grounds.  One hour passed, and then another, and then another.  Traffic on the highway gradually subsided; lights in homes and businesses one after another winked out.  And as the night dragged on and the silence grew deeper and the temperature fell, one-by-one the men began to crack.

“God, I gotta go.”

“It feels like there’s a razor blade in my bladder.”

“I’m gonna shoot that bastard, Sergeant Walinski, and then I’m gonna piss all over his body.”

By three o’clock in the morning, the complaints and imprecations directed at Sergeant Walinski, at the army, at the United States, the Nazis, and the gods had been replaced by loud groans and a few genuine screams of pain and the sound of men hitting the concrete.  By dawn fully half of the men were writhing in pain on the ground like snakes struck by lightning, and the rest, my father among them, were actually hopping from one foot to another.  But not a single one had peed as much as a drop.

Like almost all soldiers, my father took what he had learned in the army with him into civilian life, including this regimen of urinary self-discipline.  He adhered to it his entire adult life, until, he was convinced, it was too late.

A son does not argue with his dying father.  There is, so far as I know, nothing in the medical literature to support my father’s theory, but I just had to know.  Prostate cancer killed him; his older brother, my uncle Dan, survived it.  (In fact, he lived another ten years after his prostatectomy and then died in an automobile accident.  His wife was at the wheel.)  This automatically places me in that population of men who are three times more likely to get prostate cancer than men who don’t boast the family history I have.  My doctor, it turns out, is in the same risk population as I, and, like me, he is on Axiron, and Axiron, essentially bottled testosterone, elevates that risk even more, if only slightly.  Restoring one’s manhood, it appears, comes with a price.

When I mentioned my father’s theory to my doctor, he shook his head.  “There’s no connection.  The only reason to piss is that it’s damned uncomfortable if you don’t.  The trouble is, with us old guys, we just have to go more often.”

Like me, he’s a whitewater enthusiast, and before I left he told me that he had recently bought a Mad River Legend 15 canoe.  In skillful hands, it’s capable of navigating the moderate rapids so common to rivers in the Southeast and that can fool even the experienced paddler.  About the same time he bought the canoe, he began taking Axiron.  Among other things, he joked, it has improved his paddling skills.

“Next to marrying my wife, getting that canoe and going on Axiron are the best decisions I ever made.”

I mulled this over.  “That settles it.  I’m getting a Dagger Mamba 8.1.  See you on the river.”

“Now you’re talking,” he said.  “But you still have to take your Axiron."

Oofty Goofty and the Poet of North Beach

                                   

                                     Frank Walters

Oofty Goofty once played Romeo opposite Big Bertha’s Juliet.  This happened sometime in the 1880s, at the Bella Union Theater on Kearny Street in Chinatown.  Before that he was the Wild Man of Borneo.  He smeared himself in tar and covered himself in horsehair, then climbed into a cage that someone locked behind him, clamped a big hunk of raw meat between his teeth, and jumped up and down yelling “Oofty Goofty Oofty Goofty” while animal blood ran down his chin.  He did this everyday down on Market Street until he got sick and lost his job.  The doctors labored for days to remove the tar and horsehair, but they gave up.  Then they carried him to the roof of the Receivers Hospital and left him there to die.  But Oofty Goofty was one tough motherfucker.  While he lay there delivering up his lamentations to the San Francisco sky, some unnamed benefactor poured a bucket of paint solvent on him.  This saved his life, and then he came down from the roof like Moses from the mountain to tread the boards as a Shakespearean actor.  It was a short career.  It began a little after sunset and ended before midnight of the same day.

You can probably tell by now that here was a man who knew he wanted to be in the entertainment business, but who hadn’t quite figured out the exact nature of his calling.  The cage, the stage: he was like a moon in search of a planet.  One night he got thrown out of a saloon up on the Barbary Coast.  It’s said that when he picked himself up from the cobblestones, he found his calling the minute he realized he didn’t feel any pain.  It was like the heavens had opened up and an angel had come down and read to him from the Big Book of Careers in Entertainment.  “Thou shalt submit thyself to the abuse perpetrated upon thee by others,” the angel said.  And so for the next few years Oofty Goofty walked all over San Francisco carrying a walking stick and a baseball bat.  He would approach one of the good citizens of the city, hand him the stick and the bat, and stand stoically in one spot, waiting for the perplexed passerby to do his worst.  For a dime he could beat Oofty Goofty with the walking stick.  For a quarter he got one, good swing with the baseball bat.  The destitute weren’t forgotten, either.  For a nickel they could kick him between the legs.  Oofty Goofty’s career ended when the Heavyweight Champion of the World, John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy they called him, hit him in the back with the bat so hard that he broke three of his vertebrae.  From then on Oofty Goofty was a broken man.  He spent the rest of his life out of work, walking with a painful limp, one of San Francisco’s homeless.  Within a few years he was dead.

Stories like this are how you know you’re in North Beach.

It used to be you could come here on a Saturday night, when it was called the Barbary Coast, get shitfaced on rum and opium, catch a burlesque show, and wake up the next morning in the bottom of a ship, chained to the timbers, bound for Hong Kong or Shanghai.  Knock back a few, smoke a bowl, get laid, take a boat ride.  It was a rough place, crawling with wild men and wild women from just about everywhere.  One chronicler, Albert Evans, in 1871, called the Barbary Coast “the maelstrom of vice and iniquity, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity.”  A contemporary of Evans, Benjamin Lloyd, wrote that 

The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.

Lloyd must have spent a lot of time there.  But these were Oofty Goofty’s people, his audience, his natural constituency, and they loved him, and he loved them.  But they’re mostly all gone now, and I feel a kind of sadness in that.

What I’m looking for is evidence that Oofty Goofty’s world hasn’t all gone away.  I’ve just made the long climb up Grant Street, through Chinatown, and have turned on to Columbus, the main thoroughfare through North Beach, into the teeth of a stiff, cold breeze.  The sun, just past noon, provides some warmth, but I’ve worked up a light sweat in four miles of walking.  Behind me is the city’s Financial District, all steel and glass and cutthroat Mad Men deals that may be the only legacy the Barbary Coast has left.  The most prominent building I’m leaving behind is the Trans America Tower, the tapering pyramid featured in the commercials.  It looks like a missile poised for takeoff, potent, explosive, but when I look back at it, all I see is an inert, dull-pointed needle stuck permanently in delayed countdown.  Ahead of me is the nineteenth century, quaint, touristy, trendy, the Victorian Age sucked through YouTube like a raspberry through a straw.  I walk through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students.  More of them are sitting at tables outside of cafes and coffee shops tapping into iPhones and laptops and draining lattes and mochas.
Some things never change.  The homeless weave among the hurrying mass like dark splotches on a chest x-ray.  Some are pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags.  The way they fill the volume of the urban world, scavenge cigarette butts from the gutter, bend over head-first into dumpsters, all legs and buttocks in the air, relieve themselves in public: this can be unsettling.  It exposes my own vulnerability to a cutting inward gaze.  I walk right through them.  I tune them out.  I try to talk to them, drawing suspicious gazes from people sitting at the outdoor cafes.  They bear the scars of numerous beatings, but there isn’t a baseball bat in sight.  I walk past the Victorian Bakery on Stockton Street and a man approaches me.  He’s tall, lanky, sports a few days’ growth of beard, an animal look in his eyes.  He looks like he hasn’t slept in a bed in days, but there’s a Bluetooth device in his ear.  When he passes me, I hear him say, “If you don’t give me half of what’s in your savings account by tomorrow, I’ll kill your fuckin’ wife.”  A woman sitting outside the bakery drops her strawberry Danish on the sidewalk.  It lies there, split open like a gutted rabbit.

Literally, the Barbary Coast is gone.  Landfill has extended the original shoreline half a mile into the bay, a highly dubious bit of geological finagling, as the 1989 Loma Prima earthquake demonstrated, to create some additional acreage of expensive real estate.  Families promenade on the streets.  The city’s affluent buy and rent and shop and dine at prices that are instructive of the limits of a third mate’s wages.  Poetry sails forth from upper rooms.  (In fact, I’m about to pass City Lights, where Ginsberg read Howl.)  Genteel nightlife abounds.  It is generally agreed that the 1906 earthquake is responsible for this tepid state of affairs.   In the decade following, the city government, the police department, civic leaders, and The San Francisco Examiner conspired to clean up the district, and by the 1920s almost nothing distinctly Barbary about the area remained.  Riot yielded to order.  Debauchery succumbed to domestication.  Hell yawned, bored.  An age had passed.

There are two stops I want to make.

 The first is Washington Square Park, which sits at the base of Russian Hill, whose eastern face is covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes.   On the western edge of the park is the statue of that old Deist, Benjamin Franklin.  It was here that Richard Brautigan posed with Michaela Le Grand for the cover of Trout Fishing in America.  And it’s the setting for Brautigan’s story of Trout Fishing in America Shorty, the “legless, screaming middle-aged wino,” he calls him, who would wheel himself over to the statue, wine bottle clutched in one hand, and drink until he passed out and fell out of his chair, face first in the grass, Ben Franklin looming above him like a scowling iron cloud.  Trout Fishing in America is a brilliant, rambling, and troubled book, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, after he had been beaten into submission by the baseball bat of the Me Generation’s indifference.  In it lurk the ghosts of the Beat Poets of a decade earlier, when times were flush, who chronicled in mystical tantric verse the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach.  The best of Brautigan’s generation got old, drank too much, got the clap, and turned the music over to the hair bands.

The second is a stretch of Columbus Street between Valejo and Broadway, in front of an art store.  This is the best place to observe two more vestiges of the Barbary Coast.  Directly across the street is the Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi, originally a parish church founded in 1859.  Its twin ivory spires float above the trees and a row of Victorian houses against a blue sky, reaching upward to the source of a different kind of wealth from that down the street.  A block over, to my right, where Columbus intersects Broadway, sits the infamous Condor Club, which opened in 1964 but occupies an eyesore of a building that’s been in existence since the 1870s.  There’s one way to measure the distance between the shrine and the club: I could throw a softball, even with my arthritic shoulder, from one building to the other.  But this is the Barbary Coast, and what happened at the Condor Club seems oddly appropriate, even in the vicinity of the shrine.  On the night of June 19, 1964, a stripper named Carol Doda bared her enormous breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers.  It was a Friday night, start of a summer weekend, and by this act alone the redoubtable Ms. Doda became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment.  (Five years later she went bottomless.)  A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.”  She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented anyway when no less an authority than the State of California honored her with a plaque (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the club’s entrance to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.

I cross the street and walk down Valejo, past the shrine, through shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, my destination Telegraph Hill.  Across the street there’s a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, where Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti took their coffee.  When I reach the corner at Grant, I’m stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.”  In truth, I cannot say for certain that these are his exact words.  There is a tree and a mother’s dress, and he speaks in a low, almost inaudible, tone.  One sentence follows another, a random and private litany of recollections.  “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.”  “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.”  There is nonsense and lucidity.  He recalls the corrupting influence of money.  His mother again.  I’ve read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses.  He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a distracted and bedazzled poet.  He sits on the pavement, back against the brick wall of the shrine, his legs stretched out in front of him.  He wears a tattered brown jacket, spotted with dirt and spills, torn, gray pants and shredded work boots.  And he has the unshowered look and smell of the street life.  His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age.  The lines in his face, the crow’s feet, furrows above his eyes, a pocked, crooked nose that looks like it had been broken: I’m guessing sixties.  I listen to him, but he seems oblivious to my presence.  Next to him are a backpack and a canvas Wal-Mart bag, and spread out around him like satellites are 5 by 7 photographs of San Francisco.  There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no dollar bills stuffed into a cup, no sign with prices.  He weaves tales that might have an origin but might not, and that have no destination.  I have been told that he might have come from a moneyed family and that there is a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly squanders.

At the café I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice and bring them back to him.  Without interrupting himself, he motions for me to set them down next to him.  “Do we step on what we can’t see?”, but this is not asked of me.  I ask him if he has a name, but except for a momentary pause in his delivery, he doesn’t acknowledge me.  I’m not even here.  He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning.  Hunger?  Love?  Beauty?   The sunlight comes through the trees, and shadows play across his craggy face.  In it I see pain and years, or possibly nothing more than the long weary toil of life against time’s walking stick and baseball bat.

Two days later, I was walking up Market Street.  I had forgotten about him.  But when I passed the Starbuck’s at Eddie Street, I saw him.  He was sitting at a table by the window, the same clothes, the same bags, the same photographs.  Opened before him was a journal.  He was lost in thought, writing.

Revelation in a Cup of Coffee

One day my doorbell rang.  There were two things I knew for certain about answering doorbells.  The first was that the day would surely come when I'd be thankful I wasn't wearing that t-shirt I bought at the bookstore at Ball State University, the one with BALL U emblazoned in red letters across the chest.  The second was that drinking coffee is not a sin.

I had just poured my second cup and was returning to my desk, where the same long string of gray sentences waited for me like sagging fence posts. Mostly I’d been staring out my window, watching storm clouds through the breaks in the trees. Whoever it was at the door could be peddling sex toys for all I cared.  I welcomed the interruption.

I was greeted by two black women with friendly, handsome faces and silver hair. Both appeared to be in their 60s. They were conservatively dressed in dark suits and wore light coats against a cold, windy rain that had been falling since early morning. Perfume hung heavily in the air. My own tattered appearance stood in embarrassing contrast: unshaven and unshowered, cargo shorts with a rip in one thigh, a black, oil-stained Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt I wore inside-out, old sneakers impervious to the neutralizing effects of baking soda. It was a Saturday morning, and I was writing, not another soul in the house. Who prepares for visitors?

One of them—she wore glasses with silver frames--sang out, “Hello, sir!” Her voice carried like a bell. “Would you mind if we took a few moments of your time to talk about your salvation?” I don’t often get this question.  I felt like saying, Well, that will take some doing. But I don’t do brush offs very well, and I didn’t want to leave them standing in the cold, and I sensed, I admit it, an interesting story. I invited them in and they followed me into the living room. The one who had spoken to me walked with a slight limp, so I cleared some newspapers from the sofa and steadied her by the elbow as she sat down. She placed a canvas book bag at her feet. It was filled with glossy, printed religious material. Her partner, who hadn’t said a word, glided to the loveseat, where she sat prim and silent.

I asked them if they would like some coffee. The pot was still fresh. The silent one—I learned her name was Mrs. Forrester--smiled demurely and shook her head, a movement I almost didn’t notice. The other woman, Mrs. Helms, held up her hand as if warding off an attack by wolves, but she said politely, “No, thank you. We don’t drink coffee. It’s against God’s commandment.” I looked at my own cup, steam still rising, a faint whiff of peppermint, decadence in my favorite pottery mug. I set it down on the end table and tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Mrs. Helms got down to business. “Jesus is coming. Armageddon is here.” Reflexively, I mentally parsed her sentences. Jesus is descending from the heavens now?  This would fulfill a yearning that has been a fixture of Christian belief for two thousand years. But what the sentence really speaks to is his immanence, his eternal presence, more spiritual than material, and it’s a belief that has shown remarkable resilience down through the ages, even though it’s mostly treated as a metaphor. But the second sentence was a bald assertion of fact: the imminence, the right-nowness, of the end times. I stole a glance out the front window; I couldn’t help it. A stiff wind buffeted the dogwoods along the driveway. They seemed to be whispering: any minute now.

She cited the evidence. Earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan. Hurricanes from Texas to Virginia. The tornado that ripped through my own neighborhood in Auburn, Alabama, the previous November. More twisters in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, last April and May, where dozens of lives were lost. Meteorology and plate tectonics have been staples of end-of-the-world prophecies for as long as anyone can remember. But by now, I thought, we’d be taking them for what they are. “The prophecies of the Bible are coming true,” she went on. “The signs are everywhere.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way, like a Yankees fan citing A-Rod and Jeter as proof of a forthcoming World Series title. Her smile was gentle, not the self-righteous smirk so common among the true believers. But she didn’t cut corners. “Are you prepared?” It wasn’t a plea. Mrs. Forrester nodded in vigorous agreement.

I confessed that, no, I wasn’t, and that I doubted strongly that most people were. Earthquakes are common, I said. Lisbon in 1775. San Francisco in 1906. The last serious hurricane to hit the United States was in 2005. Sometimes signs are nothing more than the chaotic, occasionally destructive noise of a dynamic system. We want them to mean something because we can’t tolerate randomness and uncertainty. We want trajectory and closure, connections and patterns, and, more than these, we want our narrative to be the only true one.

 “Ah,” she said, as if her mission had taken on a new urgency. When I told her I’d been raised a Catholic, she said “Ah” again, but in a tone that suggested the difficulty of the task God had put before her. Not only must she save me from the runaway secularism of the age (I also told her I was an English professor), but from the benighted ignorance of theological error.

Where to begin?

None of us was a trained theologian, so while my coffee grew cold we told stories. Mrs. Helms told me she had a son who’d lost his legs to an IED in Iraq, and now, unable to find work, he was under treatment for alcoholism and depression. Mrs. Forrester, who looked intently at both of us as we talked, remained silent. It was through Mrs. Helms that I learned that Mrs. Forrester had lost her husband to cancer three years ago. About the same time she had been a high school social studies teacher in Enterprise, Alabama, and had watched a tornado kill ten students and a colleague. I was silent. Here were two women who had already seen the world come to an end.

“Please don’t mistake our intentions,” Mrs. Helms said. “We don’t wish these things on anyone, but God has a way of getting people’s attention.” Mrs. Forrester’s eyes glistened.

“Is the world really about to come to an end?” I asked. I apologized for sounding skeptical; I didn’t want to offend them. Personal tragedy does get our attention, but what does it tell us? I told them that in Catholic school I had been taught that imminence, the belief that the end of the world is on the verge of happening, came dangerously close to the sin of presumption, wherein one claims to possess knowledge of things known only to God. Surely at the top of the list of things only God knows is the precise hour of Armageddon. Mrs. Helms agreed. To claim to know that would be presumptuous. “Pride,” she put it, “before God.”

The conversation turned to the mad cleric from California, whose fee-for-service business model included scaring his flock with predictions of the Rapture. Suitably frightened, they gave away all they had, most of it to him. It so happens that on the day a tornado destroyed much of Joplin—May 22, 2011—the Great Sucking Up was twenty-four hours past due. Calling the apocalyptic shots has been a cottage industry for two thousand years, and the broken shards of past failures are littered everywhere down through the ages. He missed again when he rescheduled it for October 21. Like free throws, he only got two. A few months later he had a stroke. Mrs. Helms thought it wiser to avoid calling the dates. “You’ll notice I said Armageddon is here. That’s a place. I didn’t say when.”

I told a story of my own, though not as tragic as theirs. When I was in the fifth grade, a boy in our school was crushed to death beneath a five-ton dump truck. No counselors were brought in to comfort us—they didn’t do those things in 1960--but our teacher, a nun we firmly believed had gone the whole three minutes in the ring with an orangutan at the county fair, had a lesson for us. Personal Armageddon can happen anytime. You just never know. In place of presumption there is hope, some distant time, not measured by the calendar, of promise and light, and for this you must always be ready. She didn’t say it in these words. She put it in terms an eleven-year old could understand. Say our prayers before bedtime, but we still better have our homework done for the next day.

The Church does, however, profess the doctrine of immanence, which comes in two parts. In the absolute formulation, all of creation is by necessity a manifestation of God’s infinite plenitude; the unmoved mover is all over the place all of the time. In the relative formulation, human beings are independent agents who act freely within the created order. This is hard enough for an adult to understand, but to a fifth-grader it’s a mind-bender. During the funeral Mass, I expected Jesus to jump down from the cross hanging above the altar, stride like Charlton Heston to the casket, tap the lid with his staff, and raise the dead boy back to life. But he’s still buried in the cemetery next to the church across the street. I can’t say I was disappointed in Jesus’s stoic indifference, though. I was eleven and starting to question things. I knew Jesus didn’t drive dump trucks.

Here is something I wanted to know, I told Mrs. Helms. Whom do you listen to? Whose narrative can be safely ignored? I had another story. One warm, muggy afternoon in spring an itinerant preacher suddenly appeared on the campus of Auburn University, where I teach. Students were stripped down to the necessary minimum of gym shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. In this sea of bare legs and arms, he took his stand in one of the university’s open spaces, under the white disc of a punishing sun. He wore cotton khakis, a bit tight at the waist, a white shirt that clung to him like a sticky film, and a print tie pulled tightly against his neck. His hair was neatly trimmed and he was clean-shaven, not so much as a pencil-thin mustache or pale stubble on the chin to rough up his smooth exterior. And then, in a voice loud enough to be heard across half the campus, he declaimed the word of God with a fervor that was almost demonic.

Ostensibly, the word was literal: six twenty-four hour days from start to finish for creation; two, male and female, of each kind of animal—giraffe, garden slug, grizzly bear; Lazarus, dead as old Marley, moldering like John Brown, called back to life. Mostly, though, he dwelt on the sex lives of college women, about whom he seemed to know an unseemly amount. They were, by his account, far more experienced than anyone thought possible for being so young, and they engaged in “activities”—he used this word with alarming frequency—that would send a sailor back to sea for fear of his virtue.  To hear him talk, you would think Jesus had never met a blind man or a beggar, never offered his suggestions for treating the poor and the sick.

What kind of sorcery was this? How did he know so much about these kids’ private lives? How did he find out about these…"activities"? And where did he park his car? All of a sudden he was just there. Encountering him was like coming around the bend in a trail and finding a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock you’re about to step over. I listened to him for a few minutes before going to my classroom.  A few minutes later a women taking the class stomped angrily into the room, her flip-flops slapping the floor as she crossed to her seat. I could tell she’d been crying by the redness around her eyes. “He called me a slut! He said I should put some clothes on! He said I was going to hell! What a bastard!” On her t-shirt was printed the name of the university. The print was small, so it had taken him a second or two of hard staring to make out the word in the glaring sunlight, but once he did he told her that the Bible commanded her to quit college and get married. “So he’s looking at my boobs, too! Jeez!” A few weeks before this confrontation she had written about a mission trip she’d taken with her Methodist Church group to Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.  It was during the hot, dry summer after she’d graduated from high school. Drug gangs were killing innocent people every day.  But she built houses and cared for sick children anyway. And she had now been told that there was no place in heaven for the educated and near-naked with a giving heart.

A look of disapproval crossed Mrs. Forrester’s face, but it was Mrs. Helms, suddenly stiffening and looking agitated, who had something to say. “Sometimes we wish they spent more time forgiving and less time condemning.” She was shaking. Then she reached into her bag and brought out two magazines and handed them to me. “Perhaps these will explain what we mean.”

I know. The zealots and crazies are out in full force, and I’m just encouraging them by taking their literature. But I’m a sucker for the written word, and the ladies were nice, and the cover of The Watchtower (“Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom,” which it’s been doing continuously since 1931) showed an exploding atomic bomb.  It was all yellows, reds, and oranges, and the word ARMAGEDDON was stretched across the mushroom cap in solid black letters. This is the lurid iconography of the overactive apocalyptic imagination that trips most people’s fringe lunatic detector, and I tried not to let my reaction—a mixture of disdain and “Oh, come on!”—show. Beneath ARMAGEDDON, but in smaller type, was printed:

                             WHAT IS IT?

and

                      WHEN WILL IT COME?

The message was unmistakable, and wrong. Whatever it is, Armageddon, according to the Watchtower, will not usher in the eternal peace and light to come after the end of history, but the eternal lake of fire that awaits all of us. What, I wondered, had past editors used for visual reinforcement before the atomic age? As to the question, WHEN WILL IT COME?, aside from pointing to the obvious need for a better copy editor, the text was reassuring in one sense. No one knows, but it will happen. For the millenarian restorationist, the right-now is everywhere and always.

I was drawn more to the second magazine, called Awake!, which has been around under one title or another since 1919 and claims a circulation of nearly 42 million per month. This is Wikipedia, always a chancy source, and it’s pretty clear whose interests are being served by the self-congratulatory tone of the entry. (The magazine’s mission statement is repeated verbatim on its Wikipedia entry.) So when I saw the cover, I got excited. It showed a teenage girl punching a text message into a cell phone. In the background was an enlarged shadowy image of the very phone she’s holding (a Samsung Galaxy S2, by the looks of it), and what she was doing was visible for all to see: looking at photographs on a Pinterest-like website. The dominant color was a restful light blue, right down to her eyes and earrings. The headline read, “What Should You Know About Social Networking?” Given Awake!’s self-assigned mission of building confidence in a new world “about to replace the present wicked, lawless system of things,” I expected an answer that would reveal the wicked and lawless reality behind the seemingly innocent appeal of technology. (I once heard a Baptist pastor declare bar codes to be the sign of the beast.) Instead, what I found were the standard-issue warnings for anyone who uses social media: watch out for predators, friend only people you know in real life, don’t cyberbully, and don’t post photos of you in your underwear. For the most part, the story took a neutral position on social networking, neither endorsing nor condemning “any particular social networking site.” True, there was a smattering of Biblical grounding here and there—we learn in Proverbs 10:19 that “In the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression, but the one keeping his lips in check is acting discreetly”--but this is just another way of saying that loose lips can sink a reputation as easily on Facebook as they could years ago in a whisper campaign. It’s wisdom literature at its most banal.

But I did notice one thing that made me think the millenarian’s editorial eye had blinked, and that was the author’s implicit belief that the future still awaits us. That neutral, nonjudgmental approach to any particular social networking site actually disguised a pretty optimistic vision of what the world will look like—wicked and lawless, no doubt, but interesting and full of promise, too—a few exits down the information highway. It’s easy to imagine the girl on the cover marrying a start-up entrepreneur and someday having teenagers of her own, and implanted in their brains will be nano devices, invented by her husband, that can convert a mere thought into a status update on the heads-up display of some as yet undreamed-up Facebook. Nowhere in the story did I detect any thought that the end is about to slam down on us like the display screen of a laptop. Instead, we seem to be inching our way toward acquiring the omniscience of the gods.

Mrs. Helms and Mrs. Forrester got up to leave, and I helped them on with their coats. And then, for the first and only time, Mrs. Forrester spoke. She placed her hand on my arm. “You didn’t have to let your coffee grow cold, you know. We wouldn’t have minded. Why, Lord, I remember when I was teaching school, I just had to have my coffee before I faced all those kids. I couldn’t have made it through the day without it.”

It was still raining when I escorted them, one on each arm, up the driveway past the quivering dogwoods. The women were bundled against the wind, which is a near constant presence around here. We usually don’t notice it, except when a storm comes through. We came to the street and they turned to face uphill.  "We can take it from here," Mrs. Forrester said.  They shook my hand and started up the hill.  I wondered: Where had they parked their car?

Medifestos: Notes on Writing Memoirs

Frank Walters

January 4, 2012


Medifesto combines the words meditation and manifesto. Meditation is often defined as focused, private thought, usually associated with intense religious contemplation and a desire for enlightenment. Most westerners, especially Americans, think of Buddhism when they hear the word, though the earliest occurrences of the practice can be traced to ritual chants and offerings going back at least a thousand years before organized religion domesticated the practice and thereby ruined it. In the Catholic tradition, one objective of meditation is to come face-to-face with the true nature of one’s sinful self, the “dark night of the soul,” as Ignatius of Loyola so charmingly put it. A manifesto is a public declaration of principles, usually, though not always, of a political nature. The most famous, at least by name, is Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, though The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (France, 1789) are equally as famous, if not more influential. The list also includes Mein Kampf, The Southern Manifesto (a diatribe against the Brown decision), The Port Huron Statement, and Ron Paul’s Revolution: A Manifesto. Definitely treacherous terrain to cross. What interests me is the fertile meeting ground of the two: the inward search for truth, where there are no restraints, and the outward expression of meaning, which is governed, like Plato’s Republic, by self-annointed philosopher-kings.


***

I propose not to write a memoir of my life, but memoirs of the lives I remember living. Why the plural? Don’t we just live the one life, an unbroken reality arc from birth to death, between which occur a finite number of events neatly lined up, like soldiers, one after another? Not if we have memories. Does this mean that the lives we recreate in writing, shaped by memories, are all invention and no facts? Not at all. We remember facts, but in remembering them we also reshape them, making them new and something other. We can’t help it. We invent our past every time we set it down in words. Yes, we write the facts as we remember them—we are obligated to do nothing less--accepting that our memories might get them wrong. But if we’re honest about this obligation we’ll do more: we’ll write truth, which is not bound by the facts and escapes mere quibbling over pointillist fidelity. Leave that for Oprah and Fox News. And if the truth contradicts the facts? I’ll stick with the truth every time. Facts are the alpha, truth is the omega, memories bind the two. Most of the time, facts are other people’s excuses for calling you a liar.


***

We are told to provide motives for our characters, including ourselves, but how many times do our readers know the motives for their own actions? They want to read about a stable, predictable, cause-and-effect universe, but actually living in such a universe would drive them insane. Suppose we want to show our readers that people often times do things without motives or with conflicting motives. We want to show them a universe where people can’t explain their actions, or won’t, or change the explanation at each telling: in other words, a world where all explanation beggars the reader’s credulity and experience. Indirection and undecidability reveal a more authentic, a more persuasive, a more truthful story than any plain recitation of cause and effect ever could.

On Christmas Eve in 1964, my father pulled out of his pocket two tickets to the NFL championship game, which would be played the coming Sunday in Cleveland, a few hours’ drive from our home in Pittsburgh. All that fall I had ushered the home games for the University of Pittsburgh, a job my father had gotten for me through a business contact. Every Sunday I would pore over the sports section like a Talmudic scholar, writing down the scores of every college game played the day before. On Mondays I filled out the contest forms for picking winners for the coming week’s games and mailed them in to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. I’m sure my father saw the trip as a chance to bond with his son over a common interest. He also wanted to see the game, which would feature stars like Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas. But the fact is I cared little for professional football. And my obsessive attention to college football was less an interest in the sport or games per se than a means of imagining worlds in far off places: Towson State v. Furman, New Mexico v. Colorado State, Maine v. the Coast Guard Academy, USC v. UCLA. On the day of the game we got up at six o’clock to attend seven o’clock Mass. The drive to Cleveland took about three hours. Our seats were in the top row of the upper deck of the old Lakefront Stadium, and for more than four hours we sat in the teeth of a fierce and icy wind coming off Lake Erie. By the end of the game my feet and hands and face were numb and I was shivering uncontrollably. On the walk back to the parking lot, inadequately bundled against the blue-steel twilight sky, my breath a helmet of fog, I secretly wished he would crash on the ice-slicked roads while driving to work the next morning. Memory, it’s been said, is a huntress that works best in the dark.



***

I once saw a man in tattered clothes sitting on the sidewalk outside a church on Vallejo Street in San Francisco, proclaiming strange gospels with the fervor of an evangelist. I bought him a sandwich and tried to engage him in conversation, but he would neither eat nor speak to me. Two days later I saw him sitting in a Starbucks on Market Street, drinking coffee and writing feverishly in a notebook. Now everything I imagine about him suddenly makes no sense whatsoever. And that makes him one of us and therefore fit for the page.


***

Sign on the door of a porn theater: Beyond This Point, You’re On Your Own.


***

Is America a safe place to be an essayist? No more than it is to be a witch. Consider this: one of the first European immigrants to arrive on the continent, John Winthrop—the one who proclaimed the New World to be the “city upon a hill”—believed that, at long last, God had brought his people home: the beleaguered, the persecuted faithful, after long trial and endurance, ostracism, death, dismemberment, humiliation, had been led to the gateway of the New Jerusalem, the true city upon the hill, the one and only Civitate Dei contra Paganos, threshold of the true and only Heaven, where God’s justice and man’s justice would finally merge into one, where nature, man’s especially, would be tamed into submission by divine law. The essayist would be forbidden to enter the realm and would be hunted down like the very devil himself if she so much as cast a shadow across its consecrated borders. In fact, you didn’t need to be an essayist to suffer that fate, just a woman whose behavior and words departed from the community norm. They were called witches. Let us therefore call essayists witches and witches essayists: bedazzlers both, conjurors, questioners and explorers of the canonical norms of belief and representation, norms whose purpose is to enforce silence and the rigid code of conformity. They are the true assayists in every sense of the word. Both, essayist and witch, seem not so much to be mirror images or flip sides of the same coin, but each other’s double, partner-creators of a shared vision, as sacred and welcoming in their realm as it is profane and unwelcome in all others.

American culture is still permeated by Winthrop’s vision, which by inclination is hostile to the essayist’s project. And we know what it meant, and still means, for witches. True, the vision has suffered somewhat by virtue of its association with modern-day ne’er-do-wells whose acts belie their words. Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, a professed Christian, said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, when in reality he was dallying with his Argentinian mistress. OK, you say, just another typical, even touching, instance of one man’s depravity and hypocrisy, and Sanford can always curry favor with the unsexed Christianists of his realm by calling upon the tender mercies of a forgiving Christ, a call which, take note, he will have to make with words gathered from the fields of memories. But having bitten deep into the forbidden flesh, having confessed and humiliated himself before a drooling media and sanctimonious priesthood, to the essayist he will never be anything more than depressingly, lovingly, and recognizably human. On something less than the whole, then, Winthrop’s idea has endured, a testament to its staying power, strange considering that it originated with a man who had no clue that west of him lay 2500 miles of what he and his progeny would call the dark wood of Satan, but what its native inhabitants had long called home, which in their tongues translates into “where the spirit dwells.”

So, now, here we are, nearly four centuries later, still assaying that city upon a hill, which, if truth be known, has been crumbling around the edges for some time now. God lit out for the wilderness, left the key, but changed the lock. Clever move, pointing the way to the city but never letting us in to eat in the fire-lit rooms, sleep in the warm and cozy corners. And what did we do when the way into them was barred? We destroyed them. They were occupied, you know, by witches and essayists. What, you’ve never heard a real native American tell a story? A pity, because there are so few left, and their stories weave magic and truth together. So we essayists and witches do what we can, bewitching and bewildering, conjuring and confusing, fact-checking and truth-building, our callings. Is America a safe place to be an essayist, a witch? No. But I know it’s a good place, the right place, to be a witch, an essayist, because it needs us. I think that these two callings are the only decent things there are left to be in this dark and unsafe place that is not, and was never intended to be, our home.

Cities built upon hills are places where the inhabitants can throw you off a cliff. I prefer the wilderness, because that is my home. Because that is where the spirit dwells.


***

At the door of every morgue there should be a welcome mat, and each time you step over it to go outside, there should be a comedian behind you calling out, “I’ll be seeing you!” Until then, do something good, if for no other reason than to deserve the laughter that’s been reserved for you.


***

The wages of sin are almost never commensurate with the labor, but the Protestant work ethic demands that we keep trying to equalize the two.


***

From Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartan Women: A Spartan mother’s son ran away during battle and returned home to her. “Vile snake,” she berated him, “cowardly in flight, why have you come here? Do you think that you might slink back in through this cunt that expelled you and find safety?” With that she lifted up her garment and spread her legs. In other versions the mother slays her son or banishes him. The message seems to be that there is nothing more uncompromising and more unconditional than a mother’s love.


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Faith demands the doubt that contradiction breeds. It’s what saves us from a life of servitude to the certainties of others. The real reason Pontius Pilate asks, “What is Truth?” (John 18:38), isn’t because he was trained in philosophy and sitting in judgment of the Son of God, but because he was trained in the law and sitting in judgment of a man. Pilate was, after all, a loyal Roman and a consummate bureaucrat, and John allows his respect for the law to override his ignorance of the truth. But there’s a hidden danger to John’s words, which speaks to the ambiguous circumstances that surround truth whenever it’s translated into meaningful sentences. Pilate tells the Jews that he sees no guilt in the man before him, which places Jesus but one brief utterance away from salvation. Imagine if Pilate, a stickler for the law, had pronounced Jesus innocent and set him free. But Jesus said he had come to replace the Old Law with the New Law, to tear down the temple and rebuild it, and his instrument for doing this was a Roman prefect who, in a moment of doubt, abdicated his judicial responsibility but fulfilled his divine mission. And so Pilate washed his hands and turned Jesus over to the throng. Thus does history turn on the unuttered word. John the Evangelist: ironist. Typical of most religions, Christianity calls upon us to have faith in something that was never said.

The roots of the word evangelize can be traced back to the koine Greek verb kerusso, “to proclaim.” The word rarely appears in Greek outside the canonical New Testament. The Latin evalgelium comes from the Greek εὐάγγελος , which originally meant a reward given to bearers of good news. The Greek term combines the words ἄγγελος,(messenger; cf. Latin angelos) and εὖ, (L: good), hence “bringer of good news,” later shortened to “good news,” whose Old English godspel also meant “good news.” This seems to be an adequate summary of the career of a propagandist who never doubted his own certainties. And yet we know so little about the historical John, whose name comes from the Hebrew Yohanan, “God is Gracious,” that we’re forced to choose between several possible career tracks. John might have been the “Beloved Disciple” of his eponymous gospel, the younger brother of James the Greater, sons of Zebedee and Salome. He might have been the John who retired to Ephesus, where he wrote the Gospel and died of old age, the only Apostle not to die a martyr. Ephesus was the birthplace of Heraclitus (c. 535-c. 475 BCE), the pre-Socratic philosopher whose theory of flux, or change, proclaimed that all existing things were made up of contrary properties, and who is famous for saying that “no man steps in the same river twice,” that “the path up and down are one and the same,” and that “all things come into existence through the word [logos].” John’s Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the word [logos].” He might have been the John who was exiled to Patmos, an island in the Aegean, where he wrote Revelations.

In many ways, the Gospel of John is a memoir, recording what can only be called the author’s pride of place in the presence of the Lord. And what prodigious pride John had! He sat next to Christ at the Last Supper and placed his head on Christ’s breast (13:23, 25); he (with Peter) followed Christ upon his arrest into the palace of the high priest (18:15); he alone of the Apostles remained at the Cross, with Mary and the pious women, and took Mary into his care (19:25-27); he (with Peter) was the first to arrive at Jesus’s tomb and the first to proclaim the risen Christ (20: 2-10); he was the first to recognize the risen Christ on the shore of the Lake of Genesareth (21: 7); he refers to himself throughout as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” The full text of John 18:38 in the King James Bible reads: “Pilate saith unto [Jesus], What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.” At all: so like a judge of men, so like a Roman prince. It is also possible that King James could not imagine an evangelist who would create a prince who spoke in equivocations.


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The war memoir has been in existence since early humans documented the hunt on cave walls and told stories about their battles with other men around the fire. Some of the earliest stories on record are about war. Conflict is not in our nature; it is our nature. Let’s be truthful here. Seeping from between the lines of every war memoir, no matter how somber the tone, even if written to remind us of the horrors of war, like blood from a thousand cuts, is an incomparable joy in battle, in killing, that the writer can’t disguise, and the writer who tries would be committing an act of singular betrayal of the reader. But what also gushes out, like blood from a cut artery, is the love of life, a true celebration of life, not just because the memoirist has survived to tell his tale, but because life doesn’t come fully to life—ask any combat veteran—until the moment when it seems to hang from its slenderest thread. Once, during an artillery barrage at An Hoa, I heard music. A Marine from H&S Company had turned his reel-to-reel tape player up full blast and was dancing on a pile of sandbags to the Temptations’s “Cloud Nine” while brown mushrooms sprouted among the barracks full of frightened, vulnerable men. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an officer in the Union army, wrote in his memoirs, “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched by fire.” This is a fine sentiment, an old man’s sentiment, the consummation of memory and imagination, and it is true, every word of it, but it is only one truth. Here’s another. John Del Vecchio, in The Thirteenth Valley, tells the story of Cherry, a young soldier in Vietnam, whose heart smolders with a different sentiment. At the very end, while being borne to safety in a helicopter, Cherry learns that his best friend, Egan, who had been left for dead on the battlefield, is still alive, the enemy closing in, and he says, “Fuck it. It don’t mean nuthin’.” But the whole point of the story is that it does. It does. It does.