Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (35 page)

Pause.

“By the way,” said I, “you never told me
your
name.”

“It’s not important,” he replied. “Nobody knows me. I use any name I like—if it pleases me.”

“That’s ducky. Just ducky. Tomorrow I am going to take the name Hounaman. Did you ever hear that name before? Tomorrow I’m going to call myself Sri Hounaman … and I’m going to have a hole cut in the seat of my trousers so that I can wag my tail if I feel like it. I want you to remember that!
Do you understand me?”

He put his head under water so as not to hear any more.

“Come on, Bob,” I said, “let’s go. I’ve got to deliver a barrel of oil to the Prince of Monaco.”

As we came alongside his tub he looked up, raised a forefinger, and with the solemnity of an ape, said: “You must not forget to go to India. I give you seven years to make up your mind. If you don’t go before that time you never will.”

On that dixit we exeunted.

“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
*

There are days when it all seems as simple and clear as that to me. What do I
mean? I mean with regard to the problem of
living on this earth without
becoming a slave, a drudge, a hack, a misfit, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a neurotic, a
schizophrenic, a glutton for punishment or an artist
manqué
.

Supposedly we have the highest standard of living of any country in the world.
Do we, though? It depends on what one means by high standards. Certainly nowhere does it cost
more to live than here in America. The cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and
blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the
most wonderful hospitals, the most gorgeous insane asylums, the most fabulous prisons, the
best equipped and the highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile
of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual
workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst. There are more automobiles
than one can count. And as for drugstores, where in the world will you find the like?

We have only one enemy we really fear: the microbe. But we are licking him on
every front. True, millions still suffer from cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, multiple
sclerosis, tuberculosis, epilepsy, colitis, cirrhosis of the liver, dermatitis, gall stones,
neuritis, Bright’s disease, bursitis, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, floating kidneys,
cerebral palsy, pernicious anaemia, encephalitis, locomotor ataxia, falling of the womb,
muscular distrophy, jaundice, rheumatic fever, polio, sinus and antrum troubles, halitosis,
St. Vitus’s Dance, narcolepsy, coryza, leucorrhea, nymphomania, phthisis, carcinoma, migraine,
dipsomania, malignant tumors, high blood pressure, duodenal ulcers, prostate troubles,
sciatica, goiter, catarrh, asthma, rickets, hepatitis, nephritis, melancholia, amoebic
dysentery, bleeding piles, quinsy, hiccoughs, shingles, frigidity and impotency, even
dandruff, and of course all the insanities, now legion,
but
—our men of science will
rectify all this within the next hundred years or so.
How?
Why, by destroying all the
nasty germs which provoke this havoc and disruption! By waging a great preventive war—not a
cold war!—wherein our poor, frail bodies will become a
battleground for
all the antibiotics yet to come. A game of hide and seek, so to speak, in which one germ
pursues another, tracks it down and slays it, all without the least disturbance to our usual
functioning. Until this victory is achieved, however, we may be obliged to continue swallowing
twenty or thirty vitamins, all of different strengths and colors, before breakfast, down our
tiger’s milk and brewer’s yeast, drink our orange
and
grapefruit juices, use
blackstrap molasses on our oatmeal, smear our bread (made of stone-ground flour) with peanut
butter, use raw honey or raw sugar with our coffee, poach our eggs rather than fry them,
follow this with an extra glass of superfortified milk, belch and burp a little, give
ourselves an injection, weigh ourselves to see if we are under or over, stand on our heads, do
our setting-up exercises—if we haven’t done them already—yawn, stretch, empty the bowels,
brush our teeth (if we have any left), say a prayer or two, then run like hell to catch the
bus or the subway which will carry us to work, and think no more about the state of our health
until we feel a cold coming on: the incurable coryza. But we are not to despair. Never
despair! Just take more vitamins, add an extra dose of calcium and phosphorus pills, drink a
hot toddy or two, take a high enema before retiring for the night, say another prayer, if we
can remember one, and call it a day.

If the foregoing seems too complicated, here is a simple regimen to follow:
Don’t overeat, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t work too much, don’t think
too much, don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t complain, above all, don’t get irritable. Don’t use a
car if you can walk to your destination; don’t walk if you can run; don’t listen to the radio
or watch television; don’t read newspapers, magazines, digests, stock market reports, comics,
mysteries or detective stories; don’t take sleeping pills or wakeup pills; don’t vote, don’t
buy on the instalment plan, don’t play cards either for recreation or to make a haul, don’t
invest your money, don’t mortgage your home, don’t get vaccinated or inoculated, don’t violate
the fish and game laws, don’t irritate your boss, don’t say
yes when you
mean no, don’t use bad language, don’t be brutal to your wife or children, don’t get
frightened if you are over or under weight, don’t sleep more than ten hours at a stretch,
don’t eat store bread if you can bake your own, don’t work at a job you loathe, don’t think
the world is coming to an end because the wrong man got elected, don’t believe you are insane
because you find yourself in a nut house, don’t do anything more than you’re asked to do but
do that well, don’t try to help your neighbor until you’ve learned how to help yourself, and
so on….

Simple, what?

In short, don’t create aerial dinosaurs with which to frighten field mice!

America has only one enemy, as I said before. The microbe. The trouble is, he
goes under a million different names. Just when you think you’ve got him licked he pops up
again in a new guise. He’s the pest personified.

When we were a young nation life was crude and simple. Our great enemy then
was the redskin. (He became our enemy when we took his land away from him.) In those early
days there were no chain stores, no delivery lines, no hired purchase plan, no vitamins, no
supersonic flying fortresses, no electronic computers; one could identify thugs and bandits
easily because they looked different from other citizens. All one needed for protection was a
musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. A dollar was a dollar, no more, no less. And a
gold dollar, or a silver dollar, was just as good as a paper dollar. Better than a check, in
fact. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were genuine figures, maybe not so romantic as
we imagine them today, but they were not screen heroes. The nation was expanding in all
directions because there was a genuine need for it—we already had two or three million people
and they needed elbow room. The Indians and the bison were soon crowded out of the picture,
along with a lot of other useless paraphernalia. Factories and mills were being built, and
colleges and prisons and insane asylums. Things were humming.
And then we
freed the slaves. That made everybody happy, except the Southerners. It also made us realize
that freedom is a precious thing. When we had recovered from the loss of blood we began to
think about freeing the rest of the world. To do it, we engaged in two world wars, not to
mention a little war like the one with Spain, and now we’ve entered upon a cold war which our
leaders warn us may last another forty or fifty years. We are almost at the point now where we
may be able to exterminate every man, woman and child thoughout the globe who is unwilling to
accept the kind of freedom we advocate. It should be said, in extenuation, that when we have
accomplished our purpose everybody will have enough to eat and drink, be properly clothed,
housed and entertained. An all-American program and no two ways about it! Our men of science
will then be able to give their undivided attention to other problems, such as disease,
insanity, excessive longevity, interplanetary voyages and the like. Everyone will be
inoculated, not only against real ailments but against imaginary ones too. War will have been
eliminated forever, thus making it unnecessary “in times of peace to prepare for war.” America
will go on expanding, progressing, providing. We will plant the Stars and Stripes on the moon,
and subsequently on all the planets within our comfy little universe. One world it will be,
and American through and through.
Strike up the band!

Now when I watch Howard Welch, a neighbor, going about his business I wonder
if the glorious future I have just depicted may not be the flip and froth of dream. I look at
Howard, who’s a plain, handsome, ordinary fellow from Missouri, a chap full of energy, full of
integrity, full of good will, and it seems to me that this program of progress and expansion
doesn’t jibe with his simple, sensible, straightforward view of things. Not that Howard isn’t
a hundred percent American. He’s more than that, indeed. He’s a hundred and twenty proof. But
his notion of an all-American program is somewhat different from the one I have just outlined.
It’s not as grandiose perhaps, but it’s more foolproof than the
star-spangled Utopia of our deluded dipsydoodlers.

When Howard came here, about four years ago, all he had in mind was to find
work for his two hands and a place to flop. He wasn’t choosy about the jobs that might be
offered him. Nor was he fussy about what he wore or what he ate. He needed only a pair of
pants, a shirt and a jacket; he knew how to get along on Mexican beans, squash, New Zealand
spinach, wild mustard greens and similar pabulum. What really drew Howard to Big Sur was the
hope of finding a small community of neighborly people in whose midst he could become
self-sustaining, self-sufficient. He had no bizarre
Weltanschauung
, no ideological
notions whatever, and no crusader’s itch. “A little land and a living”—that was his dream. He
came like a lone ranger in search of green pastures. Something just as simple and ordinary as
that.

Why do I single Howard out? Not because I regard him as unique but because, to
my way of thinking, he is a genuine American type. Tall, lean, muscular, alert, quick-witted,
eyes a-twinkle, toes sparkling, slow of speech, musical voice, dry, kindly humor, fond of the
banjo, the guitar, the harmonica, capable of working like a fiend if need be, spry as a
leprechaun, good-natured, peaceably inclined but quick to flare up if provoked, always minding
his own business, always pretending to be less than he is, ever ready to lend a hand,
eccentric in attire but in a pleasing, dashing way, scrupulously conscientious, punctilious as
well as punctual, sentimental but not sloppily so, idealistic, slightly cantankerous, neither
a follower nor a leader, sociable yet chary of ties, and, where the other sex is concerned,
just a trifle difficult to live with. A man, in short, who would lend spice to any community.
A man to rely on, as a worker, as a helper, as a friend, as a neighbor.

This is the lone-American type I admire, the kind I believe in, can get along
with, and whom I vote for even though he’s never nominated for office. The democratic man our
poets sang of but who, alas, is being rapidly exterminated, along with the buffalo,
the moose and the elk, the great bear, the eagle, the condor, the mountain
lion. The sort of American that never starts a war, never raises a feud, never draws the color
line, never tries to lord it over his fellow-man, never yearns for a higher education, never
holds a grudge against his neighbor, never treats an artist shabbily and never turns a beggar
away. Often untutored and unlettered, he sometimes has more of the poet and the musician in
him, philosopher too, than those who are acclaimed as such. His whole way of life is
aesthetic. What marks him as different, sometimes ridiculous, is his sincerity and
originality. That he aspires to be none other than himself, is this not the essence of
wisdom?

Howard is one of those young men I spoke of earlier when gathering the oranges
of the millennium. The type who is content to live
en marge:
the sort who believes in
picking up the bread crumbs. I’ve run across a number of these individuals these last few
years. They may not agree with all I say about them, but to my mind they all have something in
common. They all arrived here by different paths, each with his own purpose, and one as
different from the other as marbles from dice. But all “naturals.” All somewhat “peculiar” in
the eyes of the ordinary run. All of them, to my mind, men of service, men of good will, men
of strong integrity. The ideal material for the making of community. Each and every one of
them fed up with the scheme of things, determined to free themselves of the treadmill, lead
their own lives. And ever willing to give of their best. None of them demanding anything more
fantastic of life than the right to live after his own fashion. None of them adhering to any
party, doctrine, cult or ism, but all imbued with very strong, very definite ideas as to how
life may and can be lived even in these evil times. Never crusading for their ideas, but doing
their utmost to put them into practice. Making compromises now and then, when compelled to,
but always cleaving to the line. Adapting themselves to the ways of their neighbors but not
necessarily to their views. The first to criticize themselves, laugh at themselves, humble
themselves. Putting above everything—human
dignity. Difficult sometimes,
especially where “trifles” are concerned, yet always available in genuine emergencies. Stone
deaf when asked to toe the line.