Impossible Vacation (38 page)

I pulled off my red shorts and slipped into the stream. Its shocking coldness made all parts of me come together and immediately be there. Then some part of me surprised another part by yelling out, “Oh, my good Christ! Oh, shit! Oh, God! Oh, fuck, it’s cold!” It came out in a he-man bellow that surprised and shook the fearful child within, that
old child that lay deep in my bowels like an overgrown fetus, a sticky-shit, thumb-sucking fetus with cobwebs over its eyes. Too old to be innocent, too stubborn to be born.

Then some other part of me, a part that could clearly see how the man and the child were united in that complex of flesh, felt reconciliation. The feeling lasted only for a moment. It felt like that bright, sad, hopeful feeling, that comes when the sun suddenly bursts from behind a great dark cloud causing a momentary illumination and unification of a landscape of opposites.

As that reconciliation passed I became all body wrapped in a transparent cocoon of rushing water, lightly suspended, barely touching the fine moss on that bed of stone beneath. The stream was just deep enough to cover my body and leave my face out of the water. Then, relaxing and lowering my jaw, I began to let the water flow over my face and into my mouth, and taking small gulps, I could feel its cool transparency fill up my emptiness and quench me deep.

Then the stream turned into a fluid memory of all those other waters in my life that had in their way carried me to the place I was in now. And I felt them all, the crashing blue Atlantic, the vast Pacific, the ever-changing waters of Narragansett Bay, the LSD-blue waters flowing around me while I stood on those rocks in the heart of the Shawangunk Mountains, the dark brown Ganges crawling through India like a liquid beast, and last of all the snow waters of Ladakh flowing down from the top of the world.

I lay there looking up at the massive rock walls, the innumerable layers of eroded time that led to the canyon’s rim. I knew my fall was completed. I was at the end of that long, crazy fit of perpetual motion. I had fallen from the top of the world to the bottom, from the Himalayan breast of the Mother to the deep, deep place of her canyon.

And here I could lay to rest a part of me, let my raging past soar up and out of me. A complex of emotions and personalities lifted and peeled off of me and like so many multicolored ghosts flew up and out of that grand Grand Canyon. And above me I saw all those ghosts dancing in a wild and crazy Matisse-like chain dance. They had grown out of those letters I had written in jail and now they were departing. I saw Mom in her sundress and saddle shoes, stomping. I saw Dad
scattering her ashes over the bay. I saw Sherry barking in her Lassie mask and Meg flying among them all on a Kashmiri rug. I saw Bernie the porn king in his reflecting sunglasses holding hands with Rajneesh. I saw a bunch of Ladakhans crying
“Julay! Julay!”
as they pranced and danced with their black robes swinging. I saw Norman O. Brown; and Vinnie and Frank, the two toast-cooking jailbirds, come out together from under my bunk bed, squinting and smiling in the sun. I saw Uncle Jib sailing in the penguin’s bathtub. And at last I saw Mustang and peachy, naked Shanti, joining hands with all the others and dancing a great boogie-woogie chain dance to heaven. And then they were gone like evaporating smoke in the wind, leaving me empty and free again.

Exhausted from the hike and washed clean by the stream, I was emptied of past and future, and everything came together in the present. For the first time in my life, I realized something did matter, something mattered to me. It was the sharing of this story, the story of all this, the true story of some of the things that happened to me while living on this earth. I wanted to go back to New York City and at last take the money Mom had left me to live on while I wrote it all down.

I was up and out of that Grand Canyon and on my way. And all the way across America I chanted “Right! I will write! Right! Right! I will write! I will write!” I would dare to remember my ghosts. Then maybe, after I captured them, I could take that vacation to Bali. I would have at last done some real work to take a vacation from.

At last I felt like I was driving home. I was driving straight for the Atlantic Ocean and I half dreamed and half remembered Mom’s never-ending passion for the sea. We were all on our way to Gram’s summer house in Sakonnet, Rhode Island, in our wooden-slatted ’38 Ford beach wagon. What a car!