Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

“We’ll buy it,” I said. I was going on sheer nerve, because we had no money.

“This is what you have to do.” The fisherman explained the process.

We did what we had to do, and that was how we washed up on the shores of Rockefeller Center. Fast elevator took us to the offices of Gilbert Oil on, I think, the sixty-sixth floor, just under the Rainbow Room. We were directed down several corridors, and eventually invited in to an enormous office paneled in brown woods, lit around by deco wall lamps, cushy leather chairs and couches against the walls. It was like stepping into a Forties movie. We could expect The Marx Brothers; we could anticipate Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Across the room, behind a massive mahogany desk, sat a grey, spectral officer of Gilbert Oil. He looked like someone emulated by William Burroughs, but held together in his dark suit and tie with real starch. He motioned us with his bony hand to sit down on the straight-backed chairs across the desk from him. On his ring finger was a figment of his Yale graduation. He kept silent as he looked us over. I thought, this is pretty high up to have to go for a tiny fleck of Rockefeller land. “So you have an interest in the ten acres on the Broad Cove Banks road in Cape Breton?”

“Yes sir,” we said. It couldn’t have been any more intimidating if we were buying thousands of acres. This was like living out a scene from Bleak House .

He stroked his beardless chin and regarded us through the grey slits of his eyes. He was as old and laconic as the stones of Rockefeller Center. “It’s $2500, and we won’t haggle.”

“No sir,” we said. “$2500 is fine.” At the time I had $250 for earnest money. I knew I would have to steal the rest somewhere. Not a human smile showed up during the whole exchange.

We signed the agreement, and took the elevator down, papers in hand. A wind had come up, and the waves beat against the stones of Rockefeller Center. We untied our twelve-foot boat, and we shoved off. The small outboard started at the first pull, and we slowly steered into the waves, away from the towering Rockefeller Center, and downtown between the cliffs of Fifth Avenue.

Josh Reynolds helped Adnan buy a small camp in the Sandia Mountains, south of Albuquerque, near the village of Torreon. It was remotely situated, off a dirt road, at the foot of the mountains. I pitched my tent across the gulch from the work hall and spent much of my free time gazing through the limpid New Mexico light, across the Estancia Valley. Adnan asked me to take on the responsibility of walking Josh Reynolds. Josh, in his fifties, was suffering serious heart problems. He was devoted to Adnan and his work, but he rarely participated. He watched us from a chair in the back of the room, paternal and benign. He certainly wouldn’t do the calisthenics. Belly dancing, not. Chanting, no. My job was to accompany him on walks around the grounds, and engage him in conversation. He was one of several brothers, inheritors of the Reynolds fortune. The other brothers were spoiled biker rednecks, all of whom died young. He was the “white sheep” of the family. He was big enough to be a biker, but his interests were in the arts, and he was committed to supporting this spiritual practice. He had divested himself of a share in the tobacco side of his family fortune, as a matter of conscience. His own health seemed not to interest him, and he resisted any path to recovery, bent on his own destruction it seemed. I found conversation with him interesting, though I don’t recall particulars. His attitude towards me was only slightly condescending, a common affliction of people with enormous wealth. They are constrained, some more, some less, to speak down. Some are not even aware of their altitude.

I turned the Josh-walking over to someone else when I decided to fast. Adnan encouraged fasting. With everyone eating one meal a day, and many people fasting, the situation sometimes seemed like a communal eating disorder. Long fasts were celebrated like heroic odysseys. So and so fasted for 16, 19, 22 days — Hooray! Mine lasted only ten days. The first few days were somewhat difficult, as described by the veterans, and the rest of the days were only slightly better, though they did get interesting. It was sometimes even delightful, how the process slowed me down physically, and heightened my perceptions. It seemed to take forever for me to cross the gulch to my tent. On my way every day I was greeted by the same horned toad pressed against the same rock. It seemed to know me, to be saying, “wait, wait.” I felt as if I was in a Carlos Casteneda fantasy. The New Mexico breezes felt like delicate feathers of light. The fields and clouds and distant buttes all seemed to fold close around me like a dream tapestry. I had never before experienced this variety of smells of the earth. They entered me as a phase of nourishment. Food began to seem like an addiction it was easy to resist. I was proud of that. The ninth day was my favorite, just before I quit. Clouds laden with moisture nudged through the thick azure overhead all day. They released only intermittent drops of rain, heavy enough to volatilize new scents from the arid ground. I sat on a large stone. Everything was gorgeous. I was deliriously weak from nine days without food. The heavy drops occasionally hit the stone I sat on, spread across the umber, and evaporated. It was indescribably beautiful, ineffably profound. Hit the stone, spread, evaporate. I watched for hours as universes splashed into existence, diffused, disappeared. I didn’t want to leave the stone my butt rested on. Every cell of me was cognitive. Me. Stone. Water drop and drop and drop. Hit, seep, evaporate.

How is fasting different from starvation? The experience of fasting can be pleasant, and enlightening. The process of starvation is always desperate. Is the hunger of one different from the hungers of the other? I’ve been hungry, but I’ve never starved. Is it that the one is voluntary, and the other, obviously, not? Is it that no matter how long the fast, there is always the promise of food at the end of it; but you can’t see the end of starvation. Perhaps death is the only promise that starvation can fulfill.

The day after I came out of the fast was dedicated to drumming. Boom taka taka taka boom boom tak. Al illaha il allah. This went on all day, twelve hours of the same beat. My head, my chest, my shoulders, my spine, my whole body filled with it. Towards evening we tapered off. I stepped outside to sit on the porch and look across the gully at my tent and the Sandia mountains rising behind it. No thoughts. No mind. I couldn’t have had a thought if I’d wanted to. It was delicious, skull replete and empty of thought, wallowing in the reverberations of the drums, satisfied just to be present. So many meditation practices I’d tried seemed to aim for release from an attachment to mind. Here I was, mind spontaneously unwound from the webs of thought, released, adrift in a pre-thought sensorium. It was an enormous relief, a relaxation into the moment that allowed every immediate sensation to ring with clarity. I have retained the memory of that experience, and have tried to return to it, but I don’t think I can get there again without the process — eighty people drumming together for twelve hours.

In the next year Josh Reynolds died. Even the wealthy kick the bucket, I found myself thinking, meanly. I don’t know where the funeral was held. He was the last of his brothers. I went back to Adnan’s camp a couple of times, but drifted away from the practice. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was fear. Perhaps it was foolishness.

“There are some inverted pyramids, which are concentric circles carved into the ground. A colleague of mine, great archaeologist, has been working on them for years. He chews a lot of coca leaf. That’s a story. Helps him breathe at altitude. Keeps the mind clicking. My village is a few miles up the mountain above that site.”