Please Enjoy Your Happiness (7 page)

Soon death will be my visitor. I wait for the knock on the door, made of cedar from Peru, that guards the entrance to my small paradise. I live day by day, aware through the mixed blessing of the internet that friends and relatives of friends are dying or becoming seriously ill every week. Sometimes I wish there would be a clock I could set for the end of my life. If I set it now and it gave me a reading of 2,124 days, 13 hours, 25 minutes, and 14 seconds to go before the end, I would not procrastinate any more. If I was aware that every
tick tock
of this clock was winding my time down to zero, I might not relish those deep sixty-minute naps I am taking every afternoon, from which I awake completely disoriented. I would be painting my house. Repairing cracked caulk in the bathrooms. Attending social gatherings and musical soirees. I would be driving my Alfa Romeo Spider as fast as I could every day of the week. Would the Yukiko you were in 1959 recognize me now?

To help me recognize that 1959 version of myself, as I write I have assembled a dozen photos of me when we knew each other. They show a slim young man with a piercing look and neatly arranged dark features, who could be Latino, Arab, Roma, Italian, Persian, or maybe a mix of some of those, with a little Japanese thrown in. Well, of course, there is some Japanese in me, put there for all time by Kaji Yukiko. One of
these photos shows me in a white T-shirt and dark blue dungarees, painting a metal ceiling in an office space on the
Shangri-La
, with a shipmate named R. E. ‘Red’ Downs, a genial African-American guy who was from Mississippi. I have a kind of sneer on my face. There is some stubble around my chin and above my mouth. I am standing on a chair, so I look down on the photographer. Do you remember that you told me this was my ‘imperial’ look?

‘You would make a very nice young emperor, Paul,’ you said at the Mozart coffee shop, when I was standing by the table that was your favourite. ‘Such a look you have,’ you said. ‘I did not teach you that. Where did you learn to make a woman feel afraid?’

I did not understand what you were trying to say. I also remember what I said: ‘There is a lot I do not know. I am trying hard to catch up. Maybe I am looking like this at you because I can’t believe . . .’ I did not finish the sentence. I was not yet a man. I was speaking like a child, and you knew it, and you knew if I had completed the sentence I might have said too much and robbed you of the chance to put your own ending there.

Other photos show me with an impish grin, packed with energy and ignorance and insatiable curiosity. They show me standing alone and confused, or maybe even overwhelmed, in front of the Zen temple in Kamakura, with my hands on my hips, not looking at the camera or at you but at something else. I still stand like that, with a slight lean to the left, all six feet of me. Despite age, you might be relieved to know that I have actually not shrunk one bit. Time changes us and then it doesn’t. Isn’t that strange?

The really strange thing is I still do not understand where my
knowledge about the world came from in 1958 and 1959. It did not come from the one year of American schooling I had at Freeport Senior High in Illinois, Home of the Pretzels – what an uninspiring name!

Even stranger is the fact that as I was writing this paragraph I noticed Ben, the mailman, arriving by bicycle at my mailbox, into which he inserted a letter postmarked Freeport, from Herb Jacobs, a fellow graduate of the class of 1958, inviting me to the fifty-fifth class reunion: ‘Informal get-together at Ron Prasse’s Barn on Lily Creek Road’, followed by golf at the Park Hills Golf Club and a social hour and ‘2-Meat Hot Buffet’ at the Freeport Eagle’s Club. I phoned my sister Mary in Ohio. ‘What is an Eagle’s Club?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, laughing. ‘There are a lot of strange things about Freeport. Someone told me it is now run by the Mafia.’

Did I know that in 1958? Certainly not. What I did know about Freeport was that during the year I went to that high school I did the following. It caused an unpleasant buzz. First of all, I accepted an invitation to have coffee with five other students at the home of a quietly intellectual black female classmate who wanted to discuss racial discrimination. I was so incensed by the evidence all around me of racial prejudice that I jumped to my feet and angrily denounced the United States – my adopted country. I was not trying to be a hero. I was upset that the other white kids in the room showed no evidence of outrage and said nothing. Our hostess appeared to be stunned by my outburst. She looked at me oddly as if she thought that explosion of rage was not called for. But I could not help myself.

One evening a couple of weeks later, I was at a soda fountain reading and thoroughly enjoying a forbidden book, Henry
Miller’s
Plexus: The Rosy Crucifixion #2
, published by the Olympia Press, Paris, and sold to me wrapped tightly sealed in brown paper, like a half-kilo brick of heroin, from under the counter at a dismally lit cigar shop. Four non-black classmates with bad-boy greased hair sauntered in, took one look at me, and shouted ‘Nigger lover!’ several times before sitting down and looking proud of themselves. No one in the soda fountain looked astonished or alarmed, except me.

But evidently word had circulated about the English boy who abhorred racial prejudice because the week after that several black male classmates stopped me on Douglas Street and invited me to join a high-speed night run in a souped-up Mercury coupe on State Route 20 to the bigger town of Rockford. At a small club down on the river they introduced me as ‘the English boy, and he’s all right!’ That was some night. I did not know how to drink. I did not know how to dance, or even how to move to music. I didn’t do any sweet-talking. But I did have fun – the first completely uninhibited fun I had had in America. We were all squeezed into an overstuffed red velvet booth shaped like a smile, together with some long-legged girls who asked me – close up – if I knew how to kiss. I remember they were playing ‘Do You Wanna Dance?’ by Bobby Freeman, and ‘Whole Lotta Loving’ by Fats Domino. I was not yet eighteen. I was drinking beer. I felt good.

What were the roots of my hot-blooded response to prejudice? You often asked me about that when you could not understand some of the poems I started typing out, poems that were, in effect, howls of rage about America circa 1959. Something primal was stirring in me. There was also something in the air just then, especially at that point in time when we met. This was the year when Fidel Castro, my big hero then, came down out of the mountains to liberate Havana and force Fulgencio Batista to flee to the United States, which greeted the repulsive dictator with flowers. I have the poems I mailed to you on my desk here. They are heavy with political content.

It was the time of the typewriter, and carbon copies, and the thrill of underlining key passages of verse in red with the flick of a lever if you used a red and black ribbon. Many nights out in the western Pacific I was up late listening to vinyl LPs of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
and Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
. I told you that I pounded on an office typewriter with a soft lead editing pencil clenched in my teeth, writing poetry with a passion so strong I could not sleep later. I mailed all of these poems to you. I wonder if you have them somewhere. It was the end of the decade and its deadhead politics: Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president. There was still the smell of Joe McCarthyism in the air. John F. Kennedy had let it be known he intended to run for president. Segregation had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 1956, but it was an undeniable fact of life, even in smug little Freeport. The struggle over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was going on, with segregationist youth spitting, with no shame, at students who were black. All across the South brave people were struggling to make equality a reality in schools, at
diners, on buses, at the voting booth. ‘I AM A MAN’ some of their protest signs read. Yes, indeed.

I remember our conversations about those topics. You were appalled. The Japanese had treated their Chinese neighbours in Manchuria with similar contempt, you said, sadly. I remember how amused I was when some of my shipmates called me a Communist. They even suggested that Security investigate me for the pro-Castro viewpoint that I never tired of expressing, even at the White Rose when Johnny Cash records were spinning. Do you remember how a drunk Marine with a broken beer bottle, who was looking for a fight with anyone, slashed the palm of my right hand and how I marched out into the street with that hand held high to slow the bleeding? Blood was running down my arm and dripping onto my white uniform. What did you exclaim then, when you were waving that big brown bottle of Kirin beer over your head? Was it this: ‘Don’t touch that nice boy or you will be a dead man’? If so, it is a fond remembrance.

Last night I was reading some of the poetry I wrote aboard ship. I know that you read this too. It was probably an early reaction to the bar scene in Yokosuka, where you worked pouring drinks, slow dancing, and making conversation in baby talk, which was what sailors expected from you. They were not in the White Rose to discuss Dylan Thomas, after all.

Were there roots of my discontent in youthful experiences as a teenager earlier, back in England, where, when I was dragged off my bicycle while pedalling through a quiet residential area by a group of thugs, they yelled ‘Paki’ (Pakistani) and other curses I do not recall? One of them hit me in the jaw with a full-bore thrust of his fist, a punch with such impact that it caused my teeth to dig into my lower lip, cutting it severely. The scar is still visible. This happened when I was sixteen.

Was my discontent connected to the long chats I had with my uncle, John Brinkley, a loyal member of the British
Communist Party, who served with the propaganda division of a British Army unit during World War II and whose book-shelves included a cache of red-bound volumes on Marxist topics? Uncle John, who later taught graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London and who wrote
Design for Print: A Handbook of Design and Reproduction Processes
, was at first refused a visa by the USA to lecture at American colleges because of his Communist affiliations. Later, after some academic protests, he was permitted to lecture at Yale University. He was an extraordinarily good-looking man; dark, lean, like a panther emerging from a jungle of deep shadows.

Was my discontent, and occasional eccentricity, passed down to me from both sides of my family? Did it come partly from my father, Gilbert, who delighted in driving Rolls-Royces loaned to him by car dealers because he was quite convincing in passing himself off as wealthy? Maybe it came from his glee in embarrassing my sisters with rambunctious behaviour in department stores? Did it come also from my mother, Phyllis, whose side of the family had alleged Romany underpinnings and included an aunt, nurse Nancy, who with her friend, the Irish nurse Katy Plante, drove a doughty little Morris Oxford sedan from Paris to Moscow two years after the end of the war to take a look at what all the fuss had been about?

My mother’s eccentricities were connected more to her occasional ‘nervous breakdowns’, which removed her every now and then for weeks from our household. She had a lot to be unhappy about. She wrote unpublished poetry, quarrelled frequently with my engineer father, became involved in psychic matters, and was convinced that I had had a personal visitation from the Virgin Mary in front of our house in Ashford, England, before we emigrated to the United States. She also did not do
much to squelch the rumours that I, her son, might be the illegitimate child of her very real romance with an Indian prince in the mid-1930s, when she was photographed wearing a sari and bearing a Hindu red caste mark – the bindi – on her forehead. The prince was killed as the result of an accident that occurred when he was riding at a polo match, this family yarn went. My father, who hit the glass ceiling as a works manager at a giant electrical engineering firm in England because of his working-class roots, was very much in love, all his adult life, with his wife, whose family had upper-class pretentions in spite of its healthy infusion of Romany blood, which made me, my mother, my uncle John, and my aunt Nancy all look weirdly –
even wildly – Middle Eastern.
²
Who knows where my mother’s affections lay.

We had several lengthy conversations about this, Yukiko. I told you that I did not know much about ‘nervous breakdowns’ at the time. Recently, I unearthed several letters written by me to my mother in those years when she was hospitalized. These letters are written in pencil in a constantly developing and maturing longhand. I am guessing that I wrote them between the ages of seven and twelve. On the back of the letters I always drew a highly detailed map of some remote part of the world: Aden, for example, or Bombay Island or Socotra or the bleak Isle of Rona, north of Scotland, where no human being lived. I remember how surprised you were soon after we met when I
sketched a map of Japan from memory on a bar napkin. ‘I thought only strange Japanese boys did that,’ you said, intrigued. ‘It is very nice to know that there are strange English boys too.’