Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

and some of the marginal women… all the Beat women were marginal, all of the women and most of the men! Except Carolyn — Cassady — who’s never going to die, not as long as she’s pawning Jack’s and Neal’s bones for cash money. What a piece of work! There’s Joanne Kyger, Snyder’s ex (I think she still lives up in Bolinas, a lot of them did, Creeley and Whalen lived up there, Lewis Warsh, a whole slew), there’s di Prima and Annie Waldman… anyway, what popped into my head when I was up on the hill was, Snyder’s pseudonym in The Dharma Bums is Ryder —“Japhy Ryder,” remember? And all this time I’ve been thinking Djuna Barnes and her novel when it almost had to be Japhy Ryder who gave my son his name! Well, how do you like that? Which just shows to go you the fallibility of the proverbial eyewitness. Makes you really start to wonder. It’s all a dream, anyway, no? A broken mirror-puzzle. We just reshuffle the pieces. Who was it that said, “Reality is a possibility I cannot afford to ignore”? Leonard Cohen? Or maybe it was Lily Tomlin.

Kerouac and Snyder were close. Jack looked up to him. Snyder was older and became Jack’s mentor in all things Zen. I haven’t thought about any of this in a long time, Bruce, you’re bringing it all to the surface… You know, Kerouac’s a god of mine, that’s why I go on about him. And I know my Kerouac! What’s disgusting is when the fancy literary folk write their essays for the Sunday book reviews, bloviating on how in love they were with Jack when they were kids , how On the Road changed their lives, yadda yadda — or should I say Yaddo Yaddo! You’ll notice how they usually grace us with their perfect opinions on the anniversary of the man’s death or when they have a new book out, and you’re reading about how much they loved him and thinking it’s a tribute when suddenly they turn on him. These tributes to the man who changed their lives suddenly become snarky critical refutations of his work! O they confess to loving and emulating him back in the day when they were feckless undergrads or during their own bullshitty rucksack moment —but then they grew up and put away childish things and destroyed whole forests so as to grace us with their neutered, mannered, irrelevant oeuvres. Their hors d’oeuvres . Five paragraphs in they cut this giant down to size as a mere folly of their youth. See, with me it was the reverse! Exact opposite. Do you remember Capote saying that nasty thing about Jack’s methodology (he said a lot of nasty things), “That’s not writing, that’s typing”? In my own feckless youth, I happened to agree. Being the precocious kid I was, I’d have taken “A Tree of Night” over On the Road all day long. Because On the Road is rather terrible, kind of an awful book in terms of sheer writing, particularly if you measure it against his others, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, Windblown World, Lonesome Traveler . In a hundred years, Visions of Cody will be the one, that’s his Everest. And the poems! Better than Ikkyu. And the paintings! Blake looks like a child next to Jack… But you see, I was a little snot, a classicist, and it took me the longest time to come around. Then Big Sur —Jack’s beautiful, beautiful novel — sort of kicked the door down and in I ran. And I knew without a doubt this man will cast a shadow larger than Whitman, this man is Whitman. I don’t care too much for the others, sorry to say, not to cast aspersions, even on Mr. Snyder. I was never cool enough for Burroughs or Jewish enough for Ginsberg. None of the rest really matter — except the strange case of Neal Cassady, of course. He’s indispensible. I had a sort of divine vision once that if it were possible to exhume his body, one would find it transformed to vellum, in true Ginsbergian holiness, because at the end he was no longer human, Jack the princess had kissed Neal the frog and restored him to the original, magisterial state of what he was meant to be: a book, a book of life. If I could write, I might try a little Borgesian fairy tale along those lines… O, the Beats, the Beats, the Beats! If you took everyone away and were left with just Kerouac, you’d be just fine. All would be right with the windblown world.

All right. Okay . Good. Sorry.

I want to get back to my wife’s preoccupation with incarcerated living.

I never had a wonderful feeling about it — her teaching there. Not even the women’s jail. I’ve seen enough documentaries on MSNBC to know bad things happen on prison visits. You don’t hear about every incident, that’s all. Teachers raped in the prison library, raped and killed by lifers. Just because there’s a bunch of guards doesn’t mean a thing. These guys are barely making minimum wage. Most of them are crooks too, creeps and sadists. When Kelly was doing her thing at the Women’s Correctional in San Mateo I didn’t have too bad a vibe. But San Quentin took it to a new level.

Kelly hooked up with something called the Prison Dharma Network. The PDN went around the country giving meditation and mindfulness workshops to folks who were locked up. They called their teachings Path of Freedom. The Jewish mafia of the Middle Way sat on the board. You know, all the roshi — Rosh Hashanah machers —Ram Dass, Goldstein, Glassman, Kornfield, Salzburg. The PDN put Kelly through a fairly intense orientation but it was nothing like the one the staff gave her at San Q: what to do if a riot breaks out, what to do if you’re taken hostage, that sort of thing. Part of the allure was ego. It was kind of a trophy gig — frontline bodhisattva service. It was sexy. That as a woman she had the balls to suck it up and walk straight into the belly of the beast… for the enlightenment of others. I think she dug people at the Zen Center knowing too. Gave her a major uptick in the incestuous world of the sangha, where competition for humility was dog-eat-dog.

The tape recorder stopped but new batteries didn’t help. I had to go into town to buy a replacement so we broke for lunch.

I was raised in Santa Ana, California.

An altar boy.

You can see where this is going.

I was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. That’s why I was on disability. I had panic attacks for years, sometimes ten in a day. If you’ve ever had a full-blown panic attack, you know that means ten times a day you are one-hundred percent certain you are going to die. Like, immediately. Don’t have ’em anymore, thank God, and I’m not on meds either. When it comes to victims of child sex abuse, PTSD is pretty much guaranteed. You can set your watch by it. That means night terrors, bedwetting, cutting, bulimia — the whole package. We had wonderful lawyers. From the minute they filed, they made sure we had top-flight care, that we saw the best of the best. I got put on a prescription cocktail that settled my nerves. One of the side effects was weight gain (and excessive cocksucking). Hey, I’ll pick weight gain over night terrors and panic attacks all day long.

That’s what I was waiting for during the couch potato Zen years — the settlement. Took about five years. We had a few suicides along the way, oh yes. Some of the man-boys were just too damaged to hold out. Their hearts flew off like little boys after butterflies. You’d think it’d be easy to sit at the depot and wait for the money train. It wasn’t. The lawyers went for the gold but for all we knew, we’d get the call one morning telling us the gold had turned to brass, tin or dogshit. And there wouldn’t be a thing we could do about it. Settlements were coming in from churches all over the country, seemed like every day it was on the news or in the papers. And some of these payouts came in low, I’m talking very low five-figures, which was not the outcome our guys were shooting for. No one knew the formula, how they arrived at the numbers, it seemed so random. One fellow from Cincinnati used his money to go to Club Med — five times in one year. They found him in the bathtub of his room in Cancún. Overdosed. After he took the pills he slit his wrists and wrapped a plastic bag around his head. What they call overkill.