Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Mulligan said it was happening not just here but in former farms in Michigan and Oregon, Vermont and New Hampshire. Poets were raising their rhymes and sending them off to market in New York, or some of the smaller new local markets. There wasn’t too big a demand yet, that was the problem, the supply was so huge and the demand so small, but the poets hoped the public might develop more of a taste for their crop, get used to having this other kind of nourishment on their tables, find it good, and get hungry for more.

Gene liked the poets, and it was good he had some people he could be with if Lizzie wasn’t around, sometimes she liked to be with people her own age, that was cool too. Sometimes she probably went out with those other guys in town she mentioned she liked, and that was fine with Gene. He just didn’t think about it.

Only once did she mention the other guy, the one she was waiting for.

Staring out the window at the farmhouse, the fog rolling up, she looked suddenly sad. Her eyes got a little moist, but she didn’t cry.

“Why?” he asked.

“Him,” she said. “Wherever he is now. Things.”

“Cry,” he said.

She shook her head. Blew her nose. Took a tiny white pill from a little tin she kept in her pocket. Swallowed.

“What was it?” he asked.

“A White Cross.”

“What’s that?”

She shrugged.

“Just your ordinary garden-variety speed.”

In a little while she was fine.

That was the only time she ever mentioned him. Except for the last time, when she had to.

Till then it was beautiful.

Headlights of Lizzie’s truck on the rutted roads going back in the black nights from Mulligan’s farmhouse, the bumping up and down part of the pleasure, the giggling and gasps, then up the hill to Gene’s, getting out and looking up to see a brilliance of stars, the same old patterns since childhood but closer seeming, more part of the landscape, the land, the personal weather. Cracking up wood for a fire in the kitchen stove, and then to burrow under the old piled quilts and blankets of the ancient bed.

Him and Lizzie up till dawn talking to Mulligan and Mama, all the old tired stuff new in this new place these new people, sex and childraising, religion and politics. And no one getting mad!

Gene was surprised to learn about 4:00 A.M. one fine high morning that Mulligan and Mama were both Catholics even though they didn’t go anymore, that in fact there were lots of Catholics in Iowa, unlike most of the rest of the Midwest.

“Hell, Iowa was started by Catholics,” Mulligan said.

“Not started, darling, settled,” Mama corrected him.

“OK, I guess the Indians started it, if you wanna get technical. Anyway they both blew it. The Indians and the Catholics.”

Mulligan said he and Mama didn’t go to mass anymore since they started having it in English instead of Latin.

Gene asked why.

“The last time we went to mass,” Mulligan said, “they sang folk songs. Might as well have gone to a Joan Baez concert. The hell of it is they wanted to appeal to the young, and they did just the wrong thing.”

Mama nodded.

“They took the magic out,” she said.

A new kind of magic had come to town. It was all over Iowa City, posters announcing lectures about it, training programs, initiations.

The new magic was TM.

Transcendental Meditation.

As taught by the Maharishi. Or his Iowa disciples who had learned the magic from him in India and taken it back to spread among the magic-hungry youth of America.

Some people said it was just another rip-off. Some people said it had changed their whole lives for the better, that because of how they taught you to meditate just twice a day for three or four minutes apiece, you breathed easier, thought more clearly, digestion improved, and you just felt better all around. They even said when you got into doing the meditation you could stop drinking or doing any drugs. The meditating didn’t make you stop, it just made you feel so damned terrific all the time you didn’t have any desire to get high.

Gene found it hard to imagine such a state unless there was some hitch to it. Maybe they hypnotized you or the meditating itself was a sort of hypnosis that whacked out your mind and made it placid.

Still, for thirty-five bucks, learning how to whack out your mind like that was a bargain. If you got yourself in some spot where you couldn’t get a hold of any booze or dope you could just squat down and blow your mind through meditation.

He was tempted, but he didn’t want to do it alone, the initiation and all. He wasn’t scared, just embarrassed. He asked Lizzie if she’d do it with him. But Lizzie had already done it. Last year.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I wasn’t very good at meditating,” she said. “I kept seeing trucks when I closed my eyes.”

She told him he ought to try it, though, she knew some people who still were doing it and thought it was swell.

Gene went to a lecture about it. The lecturer told all the wonderful things it did for you, but he said there was no way to explain how to learn it without being initiated, it was one of those experiences that couldn’t be described by words. But he swore it was strictly scientific, there wasn’t any mystical religious stuff to it.

What the hell. Gene figured it couldn’t hurt.

The hard part was that even though the lecturer said there wasn’t anything religious about it, that the whole thing was purely scientific, when you went to get initiated you had to bring with you six fresh-cut flowers, a piece of fresh fruit, and a white handkerchief.

Gene slunk around Iowa City trying to get the stuff real casual-like so no one would know what he was up to. He hoped to hell he didn’t run into Mulligan, or anyone else he knew. He bought a package of three white handkerchiefs at the dime store, opened the package, and blew his nose on one so the salesgirl would figure he was buying them for ordinary purposes, not for anything weird. He got an orange at a little market without any trouble and tossed it a little way up in the air, just like a guy who felt like having himself an orange to eat later on. In the flower shop he pointed to a bunch of some rather anonymous-looking flowers and said to the lady, “I think I’ll have some of those. Make it about six of those.”

“Oh,” she said, “I see. Getting initiated.”

“What?” Gene said, feeling the blush come.

“Oh, we’ve had a stream of people in all morning getting their six flowers. We always know when there’s an initiation coming up, we sell ever so many bunches of six flowers.”

Gene mumbled something and got out of there as quick as he could, looking at the floor.

The initiation was held at an ordinary-looking white frame house on a little street in Iowa City.

When you went inside you had to take your shoes off. Gene hoped that was because it was raining, but it was because of the initiation rites. He wondered if the lecturer was on the level about it not being religious.

He wondered even more when he went into a little bedroom where a teacher was to give him his mantra, the word he would meditate with. On a dressing table was a little shrine sort of thing with a picture of the Maharishi. The teacher, a regular-looking guy in a tweed suit and tie—but no shoes—knelt down in front of the little shrine and said Gene had to do the same.

“I thought it wasn’t religious,” Gene said.

“It’s not,” the teacher said, folding his hands in the attitude of prayer and launching into a chant or prayer or something in Swahili or some damn thing. Gene was kind of pissed, for all he knew, the guy was selling his soul to some foreign devil. He could have just got up and left but then he’d have blown the thirty-five bucks.