Impossible Vacation (13 page)

A
FTER MY DISILLUSIONMENT
with art I turned to fantasies of Liberation. The idea now was that I would give up on art and just lead a regular life and become
liberated by learning how to live it in the moment. The word was clearly out that “being here now” was all there was and you better live now or fall prey later to hellish regrets like Mom’s what-ifs. It could drive you mad to wake up to the fact that your whole life has been about chasing some false goal. I wanted to learn how to just be. I wanted now to take a regular job and work toward accomplishing some personal salvation in my life. I wanted to learn how to hang out in the blissful present. After all, if I was eventually going to Bali someday, if I was ever to try to take a perfect vacation, I knew I had to have a life from which to take it. After all, a vacation doesn’t exist without a life that you’re vacationing from. So I had to have a regular job; but also I wanted to let go of my past, and let go of Mom. I thought that the right way to do this was through Zen meditation, a relatively popular but rigorous route to the blissful present.

Ironically my attraction to Zen was historic. I could see how it was mirrored in Mom’s father, my grandfather Benton. He was a man who led a middle-of-the-road life of peaceful New England centeredness. He did nothing in excess. You could almost say he did “nothing in excess” to excess. He was excessively unexcessive. Grampa Benton rarely talked about the past. For that matter, he rarely talked. He was a living example of New England Zen. He was also an example of what we might call the Zen miracle.

The story about the Zen miracle was always one of my favorites. It goes something like this: Some very sensational Hindu miracle worker is having a competitive discussion with a Zen master about various miracles, and the Hindu is discussing how he can fly, walk on the water, and materialize diamonds, rubies, and pearls out of thin air. The Zen master listens quietly, with stern enthusiasm, and then replies, quite simply, “But that’s nothing. Listen to the miracles I can perform. When I’m hungry I eat. When I am tired I lie down and sleep.”

Grampa Benton never got overly excited. Grampa Benton was a sailor, and the whole way he sailed was a reflection of his calm stability; he was always, as they used to say around the Barrington Yacht Club, “steady as she goes.” How he ever fathered such a manic daughter as Mom, I will never know.

To sail with Grampa Benton was to become completely relaxed. Every move he made on that boat was done with New England Zen,
with perfect attention and care. He would row the dinghy out to his sailboat, which was named
The Stout Fellow
. Grampa Benton would row his dinghy out to the side of the sailboat, hold it fast and steady while we all climbed aboard. Then he would slip around to the stern of the boat, tie the dinghy on, and come aboard himself. Once all of us were aboard
The Stout Fellow
he would, with some help from Uncle Jib or Dad, prepare the sails and rigging. At last we would motor out of the harbor, with all of us shouting over the sound of the engine, crying out things like “What a beautiful day!” and “Not a cloud in the sky!” and “Couldn’t be better!” Grampa Benton would hoist the sail and cut the engine and we’d all pass from that noisy mechanical world into the silent world of wind and sail. There was only the sound of wind in the canvas and the halyards whipping against the mast, and the water rippling along the gunwales as Grampa Benton pulled the mainsheet in, bringing the
The Stout Fellow
onto a high heeling tack toward the great clock tower on the distant Warwick shore.

Around lunchtime, Grampa would let me take the tiller. He would choose a landmark like the Warwick clock tower or Popersquash Point off Bristol, and he’d say, “Just hold it there—steady as she goes.” The salt water would spray up in my face and over my bare legs and arms as I sat straining in the shadow of the sail, holding it, steady as she goes.

Then, exactly at noon, as we heard the Warren groaner blasting, Gram Benton would break out lunch. There would be peanut butter and jelly (the grape jelly leaking through the doughy holes in the bread) or egg salad or tuna, all made on Pepperidge Farm bread and wrapped in waxed paper. There would be orange pop and Hires root beer for us kids, and for the adults there would be beautiful frosted cans of Schlitz beer. Gram Benton would pull them out of the cooler, perfect white cans with that strange word “Schlitz” on the brown label. Beads of moisture would drip off the cans as Gram opened them and passed one to Jib and one to Grampa Benton, who would always have only “just one.” I loved to watch Gram open those cans of Schlitz for the men. Gram was a Christian Scientist, so she didn’t drink, but she was great at opening cans of Schlitz. She pressed the metal church key into the top and then there would be a hiss of foam that sounded
just like the name of the beer itself. I always thought the beer had been named after the sound it made while it was being opened.
Snap, hiss, schlitz!
—and up would rise the smell of hops, mixed with the salt smell of bay foam and the spume racing along the gunwales, and for a moment the whole bay was beer. Then Grampa lifted the can to his slightly trembling-in-anticipation lower lip and sipped it down. His giant Adam’s apple pumped in and out, letting the foam flood down into his belly. As he looked up from the can to check his navigating points on the Warwick clock tower his face was blissfully relaxed. When he was thirsty he drank, and when his thirst was quenched he stopped. He never confused his biological thirst with a metaphysical thirst, which could be, as in Mom’s case, a bottomless pit.

Looking back now, I’d have to say Grampa Benton was a remarkable man, remarkable in the simplest and most unexciting ways; a little distant, but still remarkable. He had his own little advertising firm and only took on the most proven and trustworthy accounts, things like Hospital Brand cough drops. Grampa Benton prepared his only son, Jib, to take over the advertising firm so he could retire at fifty-five years old. He wanted to enjoy the money he made and not leave it behind for others. And he’d say that; he’d speak it right out: “I’m spending it all while I’m here.” He also said that if he ever had a stroke and was in any way reduced to a vegetative state, a hammer should be placed by his bed so he could use it before he lost all the strength in his hands. It was a ludicrous scene in my mind, Grampa Benton left alone for a few minutes because Gramma had left him to go get him some cranberry juice or something, and him reaching over, taking that household hammer, and knocking in the side of his own head. What a mess. It didn’t seem in his nature to do that, to leave a bloody mess on the pillow for Gramma Benton to clean up.

He didn’t retire at fifty-five; he retired at fifty-six. He retired to work in his vegetable garden, where he grew tomatoes, and to take trips with the only woman he’d ever loved. He spent his money traveling with her. They took a freighter to Panama. They went to China to see the Wall. They sailed to Bermuda. They sailed, they walked, they rode bikes, they laughed. They spent all their money. Gramma Benton believed in heaven and Grampa believed that this
fantastic accident on Earth was all we had or ever would have. He lived his steady-as-she-goes life with no regrets, and left nothing behind but memories and questions in my mind.

I will never know how manic Mom came out of the union between Gram and Grampa Benton. They were both such steady-as-she-goes types; and Mom, perhaps in reaction, before her dark days, before the sanitarium, was always acting up a storm: tap-dancing in the kitchen, singing, farting, and laughing, always trying to rock the boat.

There is no question but that Mom’s suicide was an incomprehensible horror to Gramma and Grampa Benton. After it happened, Coleman and I had a quiet lunch at their house. Cole was always the more confrontational. He tried to speak of Mom’s death in the middle of our fresh shrimp salad. Grampa Benton stopped him and said, “No more. I don’t want to talk about it. No more.” Gramma Benton quickly followed with, “She’s better off in heaven now. We know that. She’s better off in heaven.” We finished our shrimp salad in silence, and I had this strange feeling that Grampa Benton was the only one who could taste his shrimp that day.

S
O IF THERE WAS
any propensity on my part to take up the path of Zen, it was that steady-as-she-goes quality of Grampa Benton’s—coupled with a very beautiful book that had come to me by chance. The book was called
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
. It was utterly without pretense or style. If it had any style at all it was that of a very insightful ten-year-old talking.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
read the way Grampa Benton sailed
The Stout Fellow
. beautifully, directly, without complication or unnecessary excitement. It cried out to me to let go of all the manufactured drama in my life, all the hype that I felt I had to make in order to feel I was living, really living. I wanted to be done with that once and for all. Zen was about concentrating on everyday routines, becoming calm and ordinary, making everyday life into a state of present enlightenment.

I began to practice meditation at a Zendo on the Upper West Side, just a short walk across Central Park from my apartment. It was a neat little parquet box of a place, relatively quiet and without dust, which is a rare phenomenon in New York City. I’d go over there two or three times a week, sit for an hour and count my breath while I looked at the blank white wall. It was good. There were only two things I didn’t like. One was the smell of incense. It made me sneeze. The other was the fact that you were required to count your breath from one to ten, over and over. When you got to ten you’d go back to one and start again, and this made me feel completely hemmed in by numbers. I could see the number attached to each breath. I could see a 1, then a 2, and so on rise up from my diaphragm and go up and out of my nose. The room filled with numbers, numbers everywhere, hundreds of 1-to-10s. Except for the numbers and the incense, my Zen sittings were all quite relaxing and centering.

On the other hand, my new sort of regular job was not so relaxing and centering, which I guess is often the case. It was not a regular job so much as a full-time part-time job, in the recently finished Gulf & Western Building at Columbus Circle. I was in charge of making sure all the right office furniture was placed in all the right offices. And each day I could see my job heading toward termination, because each day we’d be on a higher floor, working our way to the top.

It was an absurd job, because all the furniture looked exactly the same. The movers, who were very aware of this, kept trying to shove any old generic piece of furniture into any old generic office. My job was to stop them from doing it. My job was to get the properly tagged desk and chair into the properly numbered office. Visually it didn’t matter, so I completely sympathized with the furniture movers, and I’m afraid they knew that. But I could in no way behave as if I did. I had to use all my old acting techniques to pretend that I was very very concerned that all the tags on the furniture matched up with all the office numbers.

It really was a horrid job, but I didn’t have much money—nothing outside of the little modeling I was doing on the side. And the worst of it was that the building was hermetically sealed. None of the windows would open, so we had to breathe that same foul
recycled air all day. I was constantly drowsy. When I couldn’t fight the sleep anymore, I would go up to one of the empty floors of the building, pick one of the empty offices, stretch out on the gray industrial carpeting, and take a quick nap. In most cases such naps would be disastrous, because I’d come back to all the wrong furniture in all the wrong rooms. Then I’d have to act angry and say things like “Okay, you guys, hey, come on, don’t tell me you guys are fucking up again! Can’t I go make a phone call to the boss man without you messing up this goddamned furniture?” They would just laugh and whisper behind my back. They could see right through me, and we all knew it, but I went on with my act anyway, and they grumbled as they proceeded to rearrange the furniture.

As for my nights with Meg, they were strained and strange. When I wasn’t out meditating at the Zendo, I was reading books on Zen. Thinking that it was destroying my meditative consciousness, I cut back on my beer intake, and it was like losing a relationship with my best friend. The evenings with Meg were sober and quiet. I’d also given up telling her stories about my day, because I felt that it was bad to dwell so much on the past. It wasn’t very Zen. Meg missed the stories most of all. She missed them more than I did and tried to convince me that to be able to tell a good story about the immediate past and be very present in the telling of it was to be very present in a very Zen way. “After all,” Meg said, “aren’t there hundreds of little stories about Zen, little Zen anecdotes all over the place? Aren’t the stories told to illustrate the philosophy of Zen?”

“Oh yes, yes,” I agreed. But I was not one who could tell such Zen stories, because I was just a novice and I knew nothing of the subject. I thought I’d better shut up for a while and meditate until I got closer to some insight. So at night I would read
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
and Meg would read
A Brief History of the Oriental Rug
.