With every passing year, she came to the Diner less often, but she still came. She sat in the same booth they used to sit in and she ate the way they used to eat. Except now she ate alone, but at the end of each meal, she ordered two bowls of strawberries and milk, one for herself and one for him.
She thought about him often and
the vision of him crossed her mind at least once a day. He was a
soft-spoken man. She remembered that about him the most. How
peaceful and calming his voice was. He was tall with sharp features and a
wonderful mane of silver hair with a spectacular widow’s peak that he wore
combed back away from his handsome, freckled face. He had a magnificent
toothy grin. He was a respected and productive member of the
community. He was a high school English teacher, a reliable man of steady
habits, of good convention and deep spiritual beliefs. He was also, or at
least he had been once, in another version of his life, an American iconoclast.
He was a legend of a generation of poets and artists and writers who had once,
briefly and a long time ago, held sway over a now almost forgotten corner of
the world’s literary realm.
He was all those things and more,
but on the night she first sat with him in the Diner, although she could not
recall how long ago that was, he was an older man who couldn’t decide between
onion soup or New England style clam chowder. The waitress shifted her
weight to her left side and played with the pen, preparing for the older
gentleman to take another several minutes to decide. She looked at the
unchanging clock on the wall and then back to the old man. At the
counter, the busboy was inspecting an A&P’s Ladies Fragrance Perfume in the
fancy glass bottle.
“I’ll take the onion soup,” he
declared but not in any way that would inspire others to order the onion
soup. The young woman wrote “1 onion” on the note pad and silently walked
down the narrow and near empty isle of booths and tables and then disappeared
into the kitchen.
Alone at his table, he shook his
head. From the moment, he read in the New Haven Register, that
Yale was sponsoring an Open University evening class entitled, The Works of
Louis Scott, he knew somehow that everything had changed. It was
taught by a young woman named Epione, Anna Epione.
“Why did I go?” he asked himself
in a whisper. He should have stayed home. And since he did go, the
least he could have done was to sit there and not talk. But that young
women, that instructor had it all wrong. An intelligent young woman to be
sure, impeccable credentials of course, and she knew her facts, dates, her
times, and her places but she didn’t understand what it had all been
about.
“That generation of
writers, the so-called Defeated Ones, embraced spontaneity, and the primitive,
instinct, and energy...”she concluded to the class of about twenty.
“But to what end?” he said
surprising even himself.
She stopped, looked up from
her notes and said, “I don’t follow you.”
There was a long silence.
He was sorry he had said anything at all. He glanced at the door to judge
the time it would take him to escape the room but she caught his eye and gave
him an encouraging smile. She wanted dialogue. He wanted to leave
but he continued reluctantly, his eyes trained on the tip of his shoe as he
spoke.
“They didn’t just embrace
spontaneity and the primitive,” he said. “They worshipped it. Which is
fine, I mean, those are good options to explore but not to take up as a
residence for the mind. Their entire being was based on anti-intellectualism
and an opposition to the mores of society, which made sense because none of
them was very bright, much less intellectual.”
“Is that necessarily bad?” she
asked miscalculating the depth of his feelings on the subject.
“Yes, in fact it is,” he said
looking up for the first time, “but again, not to visit and explore as a
topic. That is one of the functions of an artist, to explore and to
temporarily embrace, but again, not as a permanent view point, because the only
thing that can follow anti-intellectualism and an opposition to the mores of
society is violence.”
“Not necessarily,” she
interrupted. “Society would have...”
“Wait,” he said softly but
firmly and then returned his gaze to the top of his shoe. “Listen to me.
I’m speaking in the specific, not in the general sense. We….they…people
listened to us, people mimicked us, and it would have been fine if we knew our
ass from our elbows but we didn’t. It was all just vanity gone mad.
Society had nothing to do with it. We were not revolting against society,
capitalism, or even common respectability. Ours was a revolt of
standards, which is pretty damn cheeky since we didn’t have any
standards. We, the morally inferior, wanted standards
lowered. We declared a war of words against those who strove to
find a moral balance in their lives; those artists and educators who rose above
the common place and the low brow. We were hateful, angry young men who
resented normal because attempting to be normal, productive human beings is
hard work and requires commitment and we held neither of those
attributes. We resented any attempts to cope with the larger world through
simple intelligence. We resented the coherent because it was beyond our
grasp. We resented commitment on any level, to a woman, a job, a
country. Anything. And why? Because we were morally inferior
and we knew it, and rather than bring ourselves up to the standards of society,
which, if you consider it aren’t all that high in the first place, we tried to
reduce society to our meager spiritual and moral levels. The complete and
total sum of our spiritual and intellectual interests was based on half assed
mystical doctrines, irrationalism, and unusable philosophies. Our crusade
was so stupid that only an idealist could have thought it up. We said we
were jazz enthusiasts because it reflected the primitive vitality and
spontaneity of our writings, but actually it was because we were incapable of
putting together a coherent rational artistic thought. Hipster slang as a
literary form? No, no, my dear young woman. We simply had
self-imposed impoverished vocabularies that made us unable to express anything
in words beyond a handful of worn out adjectives. We decided we were
beaten before the game started. The game was life and the game was
real. We were the fakes, the phonies. We had no form, no restraint,
no complexity and no literary or intellectual responsibility. We were a
bunch of poorly educated turn-your-life-into-literature-Proust
wanna-be’s. Nor did we speak for a generation...ten or twelve people who
have decided that life is too hard to live do not for a generation speak.
We were on a dance macabre.”
When he finished speaking, the
room was filled with a sense of awe that translated into a dreadful silence and
looking around for the first time, he realized that all eyes were on him.
After several seconds had passed, she asked, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m just ...” He searched
for a word and concluded with, “I’m just …I teach English up in Seymour.”
That night, she followed him,
from a distance, and when he pulled into the Valley Diner for a late supper,
she slid into the vinyl seat across from him and said, “I know you.”
He didn’t look at her. He
didn’t speak to her but he had drawn his lips in tightly and his face was flush
red. His jaw was clenched. She was frightened slightly, but still
frightened. The chill was momentarily broken when the waitress arrived
and placed the bowl of onion soup in front of him and then turned and
left. He stirred his soup and after a full two minutes, he said without
looking at her, “You followed me.”
She leaned forward with a smile
and said, “I think that...”
“You have no right!” he shouted
without lifting his head to look at her and then promptly lowered his voice
when he noticed that most of the diners in the restaurant were staring at
him. “You have no right to invade my life.” He looked at her for
the first time and his face was absolutely menacing.
She reached into the well-worn
pages of a copy of Down to the Bone and pulled out a 38-year-old-photo
of him. “You’re him. You’re Lou Scott,” she said with a tone that was
half questioning and half damn sure.
He lifted his eyes from the soup,
stared at the black and white photograph, and saw a troubled young man he left
behind almost a half century before. Still, it was good to see him.
For despite the young man’s faults and foibles, he liked him and a slow warm
smile of nostalgia came across his handsome face. Staring at the younger
man in the picture, he noticed that he was holding a copy of Down to the
Bone. He was sitting at a table in a coffee house in San Francisco with the
legendary poets Phil Wallen and Barry Snyder and other but lesser gods of
ink. He returned to his soup, stirred it with his spoon, and watched her
as she took a pen and paper from her large pocket book and wrote a few words
and then slid the paper over to his side of the table. He read it.
“A dyslexic man walks into a
bra.”
He didn’t want to, but he smiled
anyway.
“I realize,” she said, “that
following you was wrong, and invading your world was wrong. I made a
mistake and I’m sorry.”
Like most people who have led a
life filled with errors and goof ups and miscalculations, he felt for her
immediately.
“It’s all right,” he said.
He put the spoon down and reached for
the photo, looked at it and said tiredly, “Yeah. It’s me. I’m
him.”
He sighed deeply and returned his
gaze to his bowl. “I suppose you’ll be running off to the nearest newspaper or
television station with your little discovery,” he said, the words sounding far
more sarcastic, which was not his intent. Still, the words caused her to
say nothing in her defense.
“I didn’t mean that the way it
sounded,” he said. “Let me say this. I’ve done nothing to harm
you. I’ve done nothing to harm anyone. The fact is, young lady, the
only person I have ever harmed in this life, is myself. I have elected to
live out my life here, in anonymity and in peace and in happiness. It has
taken me four decades to build,” he stopped mid- sentence and edited himself,
“to rebuild my life and if you tell the world about me it will all be over in a
matter of hours. There is nothing I can do to stop you. But
speaking as one rational person to another, it will harm me. I will ask
you not to do it, and again, I say unto you, I have done you no
harm.”
When he finished speaking, he
leaned back and waited uncomfortably for her answer. She really had no
desire to share him, or her discovery with anyone.
“All right,” she declared. “But
it’s going to cost you. I want the Diet Plate.”
“All right,” he smiled. “Fair
enough.”
“And I’m contemplating desert,”
she continued, “just to let you know I can’t be bought off cheaply.”
“Desert it is!” he
said.
“What name do you go by now?” she
asked. “What should I call you?”
“You can call me by my name,
Louis Scott,” he replied with the slightest smile. “I prefer Lou.
I’ve never been called Louis, actually.”
“Well what name have you been
using all these years?” she asked.
He shrugged and pushed out his
lower lip and replied, “Lou Scott.”
“Really?” She asked,
astounded by it. “You didn’t use an alias?”
“No one ever put one and one
together,” he said returning his spoon to his soup.
“Besides, I really didn’t know
how to go about creating a new name. I mean, I have no idea where a
person would get a fake driver’s license and all that.”
He paused and took a sip of the
onion soup. “And despite this rather ridiculous legend that had grown up around
us, this image of us as fearless rebels living outside the law, the facts are,
we were a very law abiding group. Jail costs money and we didn’t have any
money. Not in the early days. So we followed the law.”
He turned the spoon in his hand
as though he were admiring its craftsmanship and said, to the spoon, or at
least in the spoon’s direction, “I’m sorry I shouted.” She looked at the
spoon too and said, “It’s all right. I deserved it. And you’re
right, I invaded your space.”
And so they talked. Over
the many months that passed in the short time they knew each other, he never
invited her to his home, preferring to meet her at the Diner. It was twice a
week at first, and then three times a week, at her request. They met at
the same time and sat at the same table. After several weeks, they
decided to try everything on the menu simply to say that they did it.
They sat, they talked, they ate, and they drank coffee, sometimes for only a
few hours, sometimes deep into the night. They talked about everything,
life, art, literature, her boyfriends, and lack thereof. In turn, he told
her that there had been a marriage once, in what he termed “my new life.”
It was a good marriage, a happy marriage, to another teacher. It
lasted for over three decades. She died four years ago.
“Children?” she asked hopefully.
“No,” he sighed and looked at the
floor for a moment. “We were too old by then. It’s a shame. I think
...you know, once I got my problems cleared up...that I would have been a pretty
good father actually. There was just not enough time.”
He told her everything about
himself. He was born in Phoenix, Arizona, to a wealthy family of noted
local surgeons. His parent’s marriage broke up, and his mother moved him
to California with her. She moved from town to town and his childhood was
rootless, skipping from Santa Monica to Coronado to La Mesa, and El Cajon
and finally to Palo Alto where she allowed him to finish high school.
Following two uneventful years in
the Air Force, he returned to California, and he entered college at Berkley
intent on studying, “Something worth knowing but instead I settled on
philosophy.”
He started writing, having been
inspired by Gertrude Stein's long story Melanctha, which is one of
the three stories, independent of each other, in her book Three Lives,
all of which take place in the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
“I know the work,” she
interrupted him eager to find a common ground with him as much as to impress
him, for he was the kind of man that others felt they had to impress. “One
woman’s bitter experience with love.”
His eyebrows narrowed and he
moved his gaze from her to his coffee cup and said with a hint of mild
disapproval, “It’s more than that. It is the representation of the
internal struggles and emotional battles in finding meaning and acceptance in a
tumultuous world.” He then returned his gaze to her. Chastised, she
nodded in agreement. He continued and said that he started to write
constantly. He wrote fiction mostly but some poetry which he never shared
until he met the soon to be famous Phil Wallen and Barry Snyder, fellow poets
and writers who were his co-editors on the school's literary magazine.
After college, he moved to
Chicago and worked as a copywriter for a large advertising firm. It was
here that his contribution to mass marketing in the latter half of the
Twentieth Century was a slogan that he wrote. “Raid kills bugs dead.” He didn’t
actually think it up, he just wrote it down after a meeting with a Raid
corporate executive who replied to his question, “What does Raid do?” for he
had no idea what Raid was and the executive replied, “Raid kills bugs
dead.” The fact that he had penned that slogan, appeared in almost
everything written about him, but he didn’t mind. In fact he found it
amusing and many decades later he still took a craftsman’s pride at having
penned such a straightforward, understandable and memorable sentence.
He said that it was during this
time in his life that he began to display the troubling emotional problems that
he had hidden so well as a child and a teen. Depressions, dark and
painful, sprung out of nowhere without warning and crippled him.
Sometimes they were so deep they kept him out of work for days, even weeks and
he started to drink and was soon fired from his job and a series of jobs that
followed.
He moved back to San Francisco,
and rejoined his friends Wallen and Synder, who were starting to receive
national attention for their poetry. He decided to devote his life
completely to his writing. He became an integral part of the emerging San
Francisco poetry scene, driving cab at night, and working on a fishing boat in
the summers for pocket money. He also taught a poetry workshop offered
through the extension program of the University of California at Berkeley and
he gave a poetry reading at San Quentin. Phil Wallen made him a character
in his best seller The Long Road as Dave Wait, a wandering poet who was
always ready for a good time. Then Barry Snyder included one of his poems
in The New American Poetry, an important anthology and that same year
his first novel, Down to the Bone was published. More than forty
years later it was still a best seller, a must have classic of every English
major from Bar Harbor to Oakland. During those heady years, he wrote
extensively, but despite his burgeoning success, his demons were never far away
and he drank more than he wrote and his dark depressions over took him more
often than ever before. The more frequently the depressions came, the
more he drank until finally he was either depressed or drunk.
For seven years he was involved
with Maggie Cray, a Polish refugee. He became a better than average
step-father to her son, a bright, happy boy named Randy, who, as an adult went
on become an international singing sensation. If there was one thing that
troubled him the most over the break up, it was losing contact with the
boy. She ended it. She cried when she told him she couldn’t support
his craziness anymore, the pills and the booze and finally the heroin.
She said she couldn’t watch him kill himself, bit by bit, piece by piece.
She left. He didn’t know where. He heard she and the boy had gone
back east, but someone else said they heard she was in Canada.
In those increasingly rare
moments of sanity and sobriety in his life, he knew four things in life as a
certainty. He was burned out. He was an alcoholic. He was
mentally ill. If he didn’t change his life, he would be dead within a
year.
He knew that there are two types
of people on this earth, helpers and those who have decided to become
helpless. He had become one of the helpless. It was a learned trait
that he had brought to an art form in his daily life. All his problems
were someone else’s fault. What he had become appalled him.
He was staying in Barry Snyder’s
cabin in the Sierra foothills, just north of Nevada City, California. He
had considered suicide, real suicide. He even wrote a note.
"I never could make
anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make
anything out of it - never could. I had great visions but never could
bring them together with reality. I used it. I have $2,000 in
Nevada City Bank of America - use it to cover my affairs and debts. I
don't owe Allen Ginsberg anything yet nor my Mother. I went
southwest. Goodbye. Lou. PS. I took your shot gun."
He told her that he read
the note again, with a writer’s eye, slowly and carefully, searching for
redundancy, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. He found it to be a
good suicide note, not a great suicide note, but an adequate suicide note, in
as far as his limited knowledge of suicide notes allowed. He carefully
placed the note at the center of the table and walked away but stopped and returned
to the note and read it again. He didn’t care for the style and felt the
tone might be overly somber. He muttered a curse for not sticking to his
original plan and writing the note a few weeks ago. He put the note back
on the table, and left the cabin, heading north into the forest. An hour
later, he remembered that he had forgotten the shotgun and walked back to the
cabin in the dark to retrieve it. A few miles into the woods, he tossed
the shotgun into a pond.
He didn’t kill himself,
mostly because he just didn’t want to die yet. And he didn’t want to kill
all of himself, he wanted to kill that other part of him, the part of him he
dreaded. So he walked, due east, towards the rising sun. He
hitchhiked when he could until he landed in New Jersey and the Atlantic
sprawled out before him and there was nowhere else east to drive to. He
avoided New York because he didn’t need any more crazy or the temptation of
crazy. He could go south but the notion didn’t appeal to him. He
hitchhiked up Route 6 into Connecticut, and he recalled Gertrude Stein's Melanctha,
and decided to go to Bridgeport. Then it started to rain, a heavy dark
rain that for some reason, it seemed to him, changed everything. The
first car that picked him up drove him to the Valley where he created a sober,
peaceful, and productive life.
He said that he read in the
newspapers that despite an extensive search, his body was never found.
That didn’t surprise him, since it was a part of his soul that he had left
there and not a body and the police were not skilled in the art of soul
searching. He read that there was speculation that he killed himself in
the woods and that a bear or pack of wolves had carried off his body. He
told her that he envisioned himself being dragged back to a cave by a bear and
found the vision humorous but saw no levity in the pack of wolves version
because, “You just really never know what a wolf will do.” He said that
he was struck deeply by the fact that others guessed, correctly, that he simply
decided to vanish.
“Have you ever regretted
it? Disappearing that way?” she asked him.
“At first, yes,” he answered.
“In the beginning of this, this new life, not much changed. The depression and
the drinking and the pills continued that cyclic hell- brief normalcy that was
my life back then. Yes, more than once in that first year, I had
deep misgivings about disappearing in the way that I did. It
seemed...” He searched for the word he wanted and finding it, he said
with a nod, “cowardly.”
He told her how he decided
to no longer live the coward’s life. How he tried, struggled, failed and
tried again, to lead the life of a helpful, productive man. He got
medical help for his depression, stopped smoking cigarettes, and gave up the
dope and the drinking. He told her, with great remorse, that he fell back
to all those vices many times and then he met her, his wife, and he stopped
failing. He simply stopped and he never failed again.
He opened his wallet and showed
her picture.
“She made you happy?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “she did more than
that. She taught me that our happiness depends on ourselves.”
Several years went by and
they never ran out of conversation or notions to discuss. Then one
evening over dinner, he decided the time had come to talk about his
death.
“As you probably know I left a
suicide note once,” he said, “so I won’t leave a written will.”
Moving his gaze from the table to her
he said, “It would be a bit,” he paused in that way he paused and searched for
the correct word, “so....egotistical. No, redundant. Redundant
would be a better word to use here. Anyway, those highwaymen over at Red
Fox Press have been publishing my work for over thirty years now and since no
one ever bothered to have me...the old me...” he corrected himself, “declared
dead by the state, Red Fox Press owes my estate a fortune. They’ll fight
it of course; it’s a lot of money after all, seven million dollars at least.”
He smiled and added, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.”
He reached into his brief case, pulled
out a single envelope, and handed it to her. “Here’s a check for
twenty-five thousand. Use it to hire a good lawyer to fight them
with. Don’t fight till the end. That’s not my wish. Settle
for a third. If they won’t settle, try this.”
He reached into the leather brief case
again and pulled out three thick manuscripts, and dropped them on the table,
which caused the sugar bowl to jump.
“Three new works,” he said. “By me, of
course,” and slid them over to her side of the table. “My autobiography, a
fairly good novel and a collection of passable poetry.”
He paused and said, “I have no
one else. It’s a lot of money.”
She pushed them back wordlessly as if
to accept would be to accept his death. She wasn’t prepared to do
that. He knew, and he understood that. He slid the manuscripts back
across the table to her and said, as gently and kindly as he could, “People
die. Nothing escapes death. No one escapes death. And I am
going to die. And you are going to die. And when your time comes, I
hope you too have someone near you as strong, dear, kind, and competent as I
have in you. I'll carry the memories of our conversations between my
hands as if they were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk.”
They fell into a comfortable silence
that friends do, who understand each other, and after a moment she said, “How
do you want to…” she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to ask. “Do you
want a funeral, you know, a regular funeral?”
He tilted his head to the left and
considered it. “Yeah,” he said happily, “I think that would be..” he looked
around the room for the word, a habit writers tend to perfect, and finding it
near the ice machine he said, “appropriate. I’ve taught about a thousand
kids over all these years, give or take a few hundred. I’m sure one or
two of them would show up.”
“Oh, I’m sure it will be more than
that,” she added and then they fell back into silence before she spoke. “What
religion? I mean, who do you want to conduct the last rites and all
that? A priest? Minister?”
“I was Buddhist once,” he grinned, “a
California-American style Buddhist.”
“I know,” she answered.
“You do?”
“Yes, it’s ....” she paused. “Well
everyone knows that about you.”
“I keep forgetting that the other me is
famous,” he smiled. “We were all something spiritual back then.
Whatever we wanted to be or said we were, that’s what we became. No one
questioned us. Hell, Phil Wallen declared himself a Zen Abbot at one
point, whatever a Zen Abbot is. He said that Padduck Gray-Malkin, aka
Magic Patty, a self- proclaimed witch who flew through the fog and filth air of
his mind back then, had turned him onto Zen. Have you ever heard of
her?”
“Padduck Gray-Malkin?” she
answered. “Of course. We studied her work in grad school.”
“Her work?” he asked incredulously. “I
wouldn’t go so far as to call that pabulum work.”
She shrugged, “She has her
fans…..thousands of them. Did you know her?”
“Oh I knew her alright,” he said
with raised eyebrows.
“A great poet in the Russian
tradition,” she said solemnly.
“That was her persona,” he
said waving off the air of sanctity that had crept into the conversation. “She
was actually from Brooklyn. She was half Mongolian-Russian, half Irish.”
He adjusted himself in his
chair and said, “Let me tell you something about Magic Patty, because it explains
so much. She was little more than a hack with a penchant for crudeness
who passed herself off as an oppressed artist. She was a camp follower, a
talent groupie who attached herself to the naturally gifted and redefined their
works by comparing them to her own and inevitably found them inferior.
She was just another con artist in a generation drenched with con men,
hypocrites, parasites, and lunatics.
“Wow,” she said and opened
her eyes wide. “Were you two…” she knew the word but didn’t want to use
it.
“Involved?” he asked.
“How’s that? Involved?”
“Okay,” she said with a
smile. “Were you two involved?”
“She was ‘involved’ with half the
population of San Francisco, men and women.” He smiled. “She was a
voluptuously plump woman. She could belly dance, you know.”
“I didn’t know that,” she
said.
“Oh yeah,” he continued,
“it was part of her shtick. She was physically commanding and had a
natural ability to mesmerize. She proclaimed herself a poet and had a
brief stint with fame as the author of a short book of poetry, The Book of
Love. It consisted of four poems, one of which was titled, To Fuck
with Love. She called her poetic style, ‘a psychedelicized aesthetics
holy erotica’. The San Francisco newspapers literary critic disagreed and
called it ‘Wholly babbling rubbish between covers’. So anyway, the book,
it was more of a pamphlet really, was seized from bookstores across San
Francisco by the police as hard-core pornography in violation of state
obscenity codes which gained her cause célèbre status in San Francisco for a
few weeks and then was forgotten.”
“I’ve read it,” she said.
“You can still buy copies of it.”
He shook his head in
disbelief.
“One time,” he
continued, she said to me, ‘Lou, when a society is afraid of its poets it is
afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition
of hell.’ Well, at the time, I was doped up and that sort of hogwash,
which is what it is, sounded deep and profane and made enormous sense to
me. I thought she was such an enlightened person, a great being. We
would sit around for hours discussing philosophy and art we didn’t truly understand.
Stuff like Zen and Buddhism, all of it. It was lost on me. All I
ever learned from it, no, all I ever misunderstood about it, was that there is
no god and that the earth is not an intimate mass but was a living, all knowing
soul. There was no heaven or hell. Instead, the universe was people
with a hierarchy of spirits and from those spirits came all the features of
life itself. The cosmos was a thinking organic unity in which every spec
of existences was related to everything else. Colors, letters, and
numbers were all endowed with magical properties. It was in that kind of
a primitive thinking that people like Magic Paddy prospered. I wonder
whatever happened to her.”
“She’s dead,” she
answered. “She died about ten years ago. The newspapers called her
an icon of an age.”
“How did she die?” he asked.
“She married a biker poet.
On their way to their honeymoon at the Big Sur their bike collided with a 16
wheeler, killed them both and immortalized her as the doomed wild child
poet of her generation.”
They fell silent for
several moments. She looked out the window into the darkness and he examined
the empty plate in front of him.
“Will you write about me,”
he asked, “when I’m gone?”
“Would you mind if I
did?” she asked.
“I’ll be dead,
so it’ll be fine with me,” he answered. “But I hope that you write that
my life…my old life, was a futile pursuit, a listless wandering, and a great
deal of talk without meaning. I grinned at the devil, mocked the Lord,
and created a belief system that only I could believe and all others, including
me, found ridiculous. I was meaningless to heaven and hell had no
interest in me. I lived a life of moral silence and spiritual
blindness. I didn’t have the courage to see God so I thought I would ask
the devil about him, or in his place, those lost idiots who unknowingly did the
devil’s work for him. We sought truth but we had no faith because to have
faith, to believe, is to suffer. It is like loving someone in the dark
who never answers. It is true that had I not changed my life when I did
that I would have died a very young man, but cheating death, at least in the
first few years of my new life gave me no consolation or peace. Sometimes
death comes as God’s emissary. About three years ago, I decided to use
the time remaining to me on this earth to complete one significant action.”
“And what was that?” she
asked.
“To find God,” he
answered quickly. “After my wife died, I looked for God. I had
questions but I never found him. I thought it over for a very long time,
about why I could not find God. I realized I wasn’t willing to work for it.
I wanted God to put out his hand, show his face, and speak to me. When he
didn’t I thought, well perhaps there is no one there and if that is the case,
then life is a senseless terror. I was trying to conceive God with my
senses. I wanted knowledge without belief. I was on a quest for God
and a quest for meaning in life. Eventually, I figured out that those two
things are really two sides of the same coin because there is no true meaning
apart from God. From that, I learned that the reason I never found God
was that I was not looking for him out of love. God is love. You
can’t see him or understand him in any other way.”
He paused and added, “Anyway,”
and said nothing else for a moment.
“I did great things in my life,”
he said after a while.
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes you
did. You’ve written wonderful….”
“No, no, no,” he said
cutting her off. “I meant great things. I was there a hundred times when
a student finished Gatsby or found a part of himself in Holden Caulfield.
I took a thousand students across the Alps with Hemmingway. I did great
things in my life.”
They didn’t speak for a
moment, each lost in their own thoughts.
“So, I’m going to die,” he
said. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said
sadly. “Find a new friend to replace you, or go look for Hart Crane
maybe. Gulf of Mexico can’t be that big.”
One evening she arrived at
the Diner, the booth was empty. He was gone. His funeral was a
sellout. Four generations of his students, and hundreds of people whose
lives he had touched with his passion, came to see him off.
So, she came back to the
Diner every once in a while, less now than she did before, always on the same
night and at the same time that they used to meet and talk for hours. She
ordered their strawberries and milk and thought of him.