Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

My dad lives in this time and space, riding his motorcycle about the neighborhood barefooted, in cutoff jeans and old t-shirt, black curls blowing high above his forehead in the breeze, round sunglasses flashing sepia light shining through 1970’s Polaroids. Thanks to him, I have the impression all life began here.

Within a few years immoderate facial hair will absorb his features, cutoff jeans will grow into filthy dungarees, heavy work boots will cover his bare feet. The body will grow puffier - caked in bits of drywall mud - on his trousers, on a sweatshirt pocket, spackled over boots, clinging to one luxurious clump of mustache.

Yet in this photo I’m staring at right now - Berkeley circa 1973 or 1974 - the vision is less Godspell, more Godard - the facial hair limited to a neat mustache, hollows still shadowed in joyous cheeks; pretty, pouty lips. Youthful indiscretion still reading as charming, even ensorcelling upon his rakish grin.

According to my dad we led a raucous and bohemian life in this place. He worked construction, my mom took care of Cassie and me, Glenn stayed in the step van out front. He said this is where he discovered how dull and controlling my mom was.

‘I was having fun - life was fun. I found a new scene at Alice Waters’ place over on Shattuck. I tried to bring your mom into it with me - but she just didn’t get it - she didn’t want anything to do with it. Your mom was starting to get wrapped up in all that New Age crap - Ram Dass and all that. She just wasn’t interested in fun anymore.’

I had called my dad from an economy hotel room, gazing out my window toward an expansive view of the East Bay. I’d taken a Southwest flight into Oakland, and I was going to take a rental over to Berkeley in the morning.

‘I loved it out there Marion. Call me when you get to the old block and tell me what you see.’

’I will dad. I love you dad.’

‘I love you too Parsley. Bye bye.’ Even now I can call up the happiness I felt as we hung up the phone.

*****

My mom and I weren’t close then. I’d left home just a few years before. I was bitter that she and my stepdad wouldn’t help me pay for college.

She had taken up with my stepdad when I was just a baby. He had been a charismatic East Bay striver, building a brand as a mystic and a self-help guru. Within that thriving hippie community his visions were gaining an energetic following. His brand was attractive to young dreamers and wanderers and idealists. I think they liked the way he divined messages hidden in everyday misfortunes. He evinced a casual ability to interpret dreams. He had a charismatic facility for cutting through the bullshit. He was the way and the truth and the life. I grew up believing in his omniscience, a puppet living in fear of losing some special grace attributable to my proximity to the magician himself.

Even nowadays, 35 years since I left home and several grown children of my own in the world, I occasionally find myself believing in my own imperviousness to entropy, and I realize that this sense is derived from my childhood proximity to the magician. At such times I tend to recount the myriad ways my life has come apart. I am writing this, after all, on my cell phone in some buzzing cold ER waiting room. I’m not sure exactly how I got here. It feels like days since I’ve slept. Hungry and atrung out. Maybe my problem is that I have strayed so far from the magician’s despotic presence.

In any event, he had done some muscle testing or thrown an i Ching or something and determined that I was better off not going to school. He left it to my mom to call me up and give me that news. They wouldn't be paying for school, nor would they emancipate me such that I could apply for financial aid on my own. Something to do with tax deductions. Given all of this, I wasn’t then prepared to see the past from my mom’s perspective.

*****

I guess that’s why I had laughed, and made a dumb joke when my dad mentioned Ram Dass. ‘Would that you could be here now, Dad.’ Or maybe I laughed and joked because I was pretty much constantly on edge around my dad. I admired him, and I feared him. I knew, in a way I knew few other things for certain, that I was an enormous disappointment to him. I can recall each time he was genuinely kind to me, in the same way I can recall each time a man took me to bed. And in the same way that I am nervous, and foolish, around men who could conceivably take me to bed, I was nervous and foolish around my dad.

Even though much of what my dad said - that my mom was just sort of dumb, for instance - caused me some cognitive dissonance, I accepted it all because I had not yet developed the skill of holding more than one idea in my mind at a time. My brain didn’t lack the capacity, my consciousness did. I believed, fundamentally, that I alone held space in the universe, that time was only meaningful outside of myself, and that my flowing life, and consequently all the life that encountered my own, was but a manifestation of my own consciousness.

It’s funny to me now that I spent so much of my life convinced of my rightness, irrespective of the question at hand or how I had answered it, or whether that answer was contradicted by a view I had previously held, or I would eventually hold. The brilliance of this adaptability lay in the fact that I needn’t disavow a prior, contradictory view - if I had once thought it, then, ipso facto, it was true. That I now held a contradictory view meant that I was now right in this view, as well. This is the genius of a puppet through whom the revealed wisdom flows. It was the magician’s special gift to me.

*****

Perhaps most people are born all at once.

One isn’t given much time. To emerge. To gasp for air. To cry out in horror before dawn’s antiseptic, searing dryness steals one’s breath.

A sharp slap on the ass. One cries. One is comforted. It is done.

In my case, it all occurred very slowly. Although I had been endowed with life, I somehow wasn’t real.

Only painfully did I emerge from the birthing canal. It wasn’t Natural. A pupa forced too soon from the infinite embrace, unable to come to terms with the shocking, cold, disorienting bright. Over and over, I experienced the moment when the newborn will die if he does not give voice to his defiant scream.

I screamed. The furious noise I emitted, levering open my soft puppet jaws, was so dissonant, so overwhelming, that the hospital staff screamed back in menacing tones.

*****

I once had a conversation with my manager in the basement after a trying shift. A bitchy older waiter was giving me grief. Curtis was himself an old queen, of the sort that wore crisp button-down shirts tucked into prim polyester slacks, his hair pomaded back against his small, aquiline skull. ‘Just remember,’ he said to me that night, ‘they all look the same with their legs in the air.’

When one morning I woke up to discover I had become a real boy, I was struck with a sudden realization: I had been one of those bitch queens all along, chained to the revealed wisdom just as surely as anyone else convinced of his own rightness, lacking the capacity to elevate above myself, to notice that it is possible there is some sort of truth other than that currently occupying one’s consciousness. I recognize many people make this realization more easily. Hell, some people are born to it. My path to self-discovery has been the painful, long, tedious and, in fact, ridiculous journey of a puppet learning to become a real boy.

Looking back on that time today, which I do with a sort of tenderhearted laughter for my pupa self, I realize that I had fully absorbed my stepdad’s vision of metaphysical power, if not his insights and wisdom regarding the true meaning, and mechanics, of the spiritual universe. Clothed in this sense of inevitability, I had somehow misplaced my self entirely, finding in that place where an ego ought to have been a soft felt body stuffed with straw and old rags.

*****

After my dad died, my mom came to his memorial service, and we had a chance to speak. After that we started corresponding some.

Dearest Marion,

I was just a mess after your dad left me for Meredith. He had always done his own thing, and I had always made space for him to just be himself. I was very liberated, you know.

But after I got pregnant with you, his attitude changed. He started coming in later and later. If I asked too many questions he would get irritated with me. Once or twice, he stormed back out of the home, and he didn’t come back all night - I didn’t see him until after work the next day. He just wasn’t as joyful in our marriage anymore. I could tell that he was hiding things from me, and that was making me distrustful and resentful of him. And of course he could sense that, and he just avoided the house more and more.

A couple of years before I'd gone with Glenn to see a University production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I was struck by the way Blanche was such a victim of circumstance, compounded by her own delusions. I told Glenn that I was tired of living in a delusion. I had such clarity that night. I told Glenn how unhappy I had become in my marriage, and he was really surprised. Things always look different from the outside.

Even then - before I really had the tools to know - I felt that I wanted something more real in my life. Your dad was happy chasing intellectual ghosts and drinking too much and having fun with his friends. When I think about that time now, I realize that your dad wasn’t wrong - that’s just where he was in his life - but that it was crazy to bring another child into that marriage.

And then one day he just never came home - you were maybe six months old, and he just never came back home. I didn’t hear from him, and we were running short of funds, and he had just disappeared. Glenn was in shock. He gave me some money for groceries, to cover the rent, keep the lights on and so forth.

I heard that he had taken up with Meredith. I went to see Meredith one day, to confront them. They came to the door when I knocked. I was struck by how ordinary they seemed. They were contrite. They said they would end the relationship. Your dad came back home.

About that time Glenn heard that Ram Dass was coming to town to give a talk over at the KPFA studios. I went along with him. I had never experienced something like that. Most of what he said was just way beyond me, but there was something about his presence in that room, which I could sense - even though I wasn’t ready yet to take in, or to fully understand, his teaching. As we left the theater that evening I felt a kind of presence of mind that I hadn’t experienced before. I realized then that I was just done with your dad, that I didn’t need him. I realized that what really mattered for me - everything that really mattered - existed in the present moment. I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge - but I did know that I didn’t need, or want, your dad in my life anymore.

We went back and forth for a while. He would turn up at the house and beg to come back and promise to be different. He would tell me that his family was the only thing he needed or wanted in life and a couple times I let him back - but it would always end up in the same way and eventually I just said, ‘Look - this is it. This is the last time. Don’t ever ask to come back here again.’ I filed for a divorce and that was the end of our marriage.

I know how much you loved your father, and this is not meant to cast aspirations on the dead. I think that your dad was a good person, and that we were just young when we were together. I don’t regret any of it - after all he gave me Cassie and you. But since you asked, I wanted to be honest with you in my memories of that time.

Let’s speak again soon.

Love,

Mama Sahar

*****

I took my rental over to Berkeley so I could see the old neighborhood for myself. I parked in front of a little coffee shop and bookstore around the corner. I could walk up the block and take my time exploring the old neighborhood. I found the building where we all had once lived, but there was no step van parked out front. I knocked on a few doors, and I found some old-timers from the neighborhood, but none of them remembered an old step van, or the tall black man named Glenn, with flowing dreadlocks, who once lived there.

Five generations of university students had passed through the neighborhood since it had been our stage. A generation of babies had grown into real people, a thousand flower beds had lain fallow since our origin story occurred. None could place our clan.

I called my dad, but he didn’t answer.