Journal of an Insect Living in Excrement - Chapter 2

Monday
5 July 1976
Nijmegen, Holland

In Jurriën’s student room, late, the reality of what I have gotten myself into comes crashing down with the roar of Vesuvius, and me a terrified Pompeian ne’er-do-well about to suck in the poisonous ash of my just desserts.

Worse, although I vowed to put her out of my mind, I feel an unspeakable loneliness for Susie, the nine-year-old daughter I finally met a few months ago. This trip was supposed to begin in March; instead I flew from Vancouver, where I’d been working as a carpenter on the building site of Habitat 1976, the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, to Sacramento to try my hand at fatherhood, to be the dad who had written letters but had never been around. Doomed from the start, I could not fit in to the lifestyle of her mother, the tiny, tender wanton woman I was mad about in the hippie sixties. She wasn’t to blame; she’d done her best to raise Susie with no help at all from me. But we no longer had anything in common. I stayed for nearly three months, choking on the domestic banality of it all.

Susie could not understand why I left. Like all kids confronted with abandonment, she thought it was her fault. I explained endlessly that it wasn’t hers or her mom’s fault; I was a wanderer who always had to keep moving on.

I should have just left before anyone was awake; instead we parted at a dingy café near the house. Her mother knew it was never going to work out, but had begged me to make the effort. Susie was in tears, pleading with me to stay, and then, finally … her last words to me: “You’re a fool!”

I’ve always wondered what my last words will be, the word or phrase that pops out at the moment of death. They’ll probably be hers.

Jurriën is in Radboud Hospital, in the psychiatric ward, where he’s been staying on and off for the past five weeks. He has a girlfriend there, Jeanne. They get leave whenever they want it, and the three of us entrained Saturday to Amsterdam, where we met up with Jan, Jurriën’s travelling partner to India in 1971.

I first met these laconic Dutchmen in 1972, at the Mangal Hotel in Jalalabad, not long after I arrived in Afghanistan. They had been in the East for nearly a year, and their expertise in dealing with the culture and especially how to avoid the incessant bouts of dysentery saved me untold misery. (It took a full six months of living with the religious delirium brought on by constant dysentery before my body finally adjusted.) But that is another story.

The reunion in Amsterdam invoked memories of some of the best times of our lives. We agreed that the Indian subcontinent, where everything that has ever happened happens every day, was the place where we all wanted to die. We drank pils in the pubs and smoked ganja and hashish in the doper cafés, debating long into the night on which hash (or charras, as it was known in the east) was superior: Chitrali from Northern Pakistan, Kashmiri and Manali from northern India, or Kabuli from Afghanistan. How fortunate we were to be in Amsterdam, where at least the Kabuli could be had for a couple of Guilders! Slender spaghetti-shaped strips, dark green on the outside, brilliant green on the inside, that when ground to a fine, dense and oily powder in the palm of the hand and then lit in a chillum mixed with tobacco, or purely, by itself, in a brass Chinese pipe with tiny bowl, produces a sense-distorting bliss of aroma and taste belonging to faraway places and totally unknown to Mom and Pop Shopper of Suburbia.

But now we’re back in Nijmegen, and I’m about to head for La Belle France with considerably less dough than I should have, thanks to the blow-out in A’dam. Someone told me there is a severe draught in the south of France, with glasses of water being sold for 1F.50. Can this be true? No, of course not. The grinning Dutchman in the café, upon hearing my American accent, must have been pulling my leg.

Well, fuck, I’m scared. Another fine mess I’ve gotten myself into. In the right place at the wrong time, breathing out when I should be breathing in. Faithless, Godless, trading in the Sutras for pictures of come-on-lips, hiding away in dark corners jerkin the gherkin like a sex-crazed retard.

6 July

Dubbing a cassette of Ragas for Piano that I brought for Jurriën. Gave away the original HMV India LP years ago and stupidly left the pianist’s name off the label of the tape, so I have no idea who it is, other than that he lived in Calcutta and the photo on liner notes showed a kindly old man. Here he is, still playing the piano as if it were a sitar. The music becomes even more otherworldly this way. But shit, who the hell was this great musician?

Yesterday evening, I joined Jurriën and Jeanne for a few beers at a pub in the Centrum. It seems incredible that they have gone back to that hospital, to separate rooms. But Jurriën is painting and he seems happy. I have yet to learn anything about Jeanne but her name. Anyway, I learned how to order beer. “Ik vill drie pils hebben,” beers for the three of us. The Dutch language is hilarious, with much deep throat rasping and guttural gymnastics with vowels. Jurriën told me that his throat was raw for weeks after returning from India, where he spoke only English and Hindi.

I told them about the American on the train from Luxembourg. The son of a well-known lawyer in Washington D.C., he was on his way to Den Haag to study at the University of Leiden and Harvard Law School. We said little, but when a Dutch girl boarded at Maastricht, this was his opening line to her: “I didn’t know you had trains in Holland. Congratulations.” She and I laughed, of course, but it soon dawned on us that he wasn’t kidding. From there until I left the train at Nijmegen, she baited him mercilessly. He bit on every one of her sinkers with the same painfully honest American naïveté.

Reading a portion of a manuscript Jurriën has written about his travels in India. It’s written in Dutch and English. The part most interesting to me — our trek over the Bashleo Pass from Kulu to Rampur on my 33rd birthday — is in Dutch, damn it.

Earlier today, I dropped some dirty clothes off at Jurriën’s parents place, at his insistence. I was embarrassed as hell to knock on their door, but they were effusive in their welcome. They fed me in the small breakfast nook of their sunny, small but comfortable two-story house. His father, at 62, is remarkably healthy and young looking. His mother is the same, energetic and motherly. Both of them frown on Jurriën returning to India, the source, they say, of all his troubles. Of course they would like to see him make some money and stop being the family black sheep.

Sadness about Susie grips again. Why did I go there! Why didn’t I have the intelligence to know it would be a catastrophe. Now that I’ve left, literally thrown her away, I feel a crushing love for her. What a fool, indeed! I’m noticing every little girl in the street and thinking of her. Maybe I can establish myself somewhere in Europe and send for her. Yeah, that’s it. But, shit, I have such hideous problems to overcome. Never mind the lack of ambition or the unreal relationship I have to the real world. It’s my perverted sexuality that will do me in. What was it Gurdjieff said, “…only a person who is completely normal as regards sex has any chance in the work.” The bastard! Did I have sexual feelings toward Susie? No, I don’t think so. But there was Mary Ann …

One more day in Nijmegen, then off to Dijon and a walking, hitchhiking tour of the Côte d’Or in search of work — in the face of a bad drought! My luggage is strewn about Jurriën’s room, as confused as my mind. If I could just drop the “I” and enjoy the one who is here.

7 July

Some stiff tea accompanied by a couple of Gladstone cigarettes this late morning. Jan called to give me directions to the house of some friends of his in the Pyrenees: Thuir d”evol, near Perpignon. He will be there in early August. Also, I have the address of a house near Foix (not far from Thuir) owned by my old French friends Pierre and Monique, who live in Vancouver. They were gracious enough to let me live rent-free in their house while I worked at Habitat. Pity I blew all the money in Sacramento. Anyway, it’s not just emptiness out there, after all.

I’ve brought three books for this voyage into the heart of me. One is Read, Write, Speak French by Mendor Brunetti. With any luck, it will see me through the hideous task of communicating in the land of impossible vowels.

The second is Frederick Wildman’s A Wine Tour of France. Pierre gave me this book; he said it would be a solid foundation to discovering the great wines of his beloved country. He and Monique had done their best to tutor me, with more than a few bottles of burgundy brought back from their frequent visits.

The third book is Let Go (Lâcher Prise) by Hubert Benoît. Can I let go? It’s not looking good so far. Benoît says that cosmic energy comes directly to our centre (the solar plexus?) but that we routinely deflect it to the peripheral particular, where it is contracted into the tension caused by the particular (wanting something) and wasted. If we relinquish I Want/Don’t Want we allow the centre to be penetrated by cosmic energy. His comment on being affected by the outer not-I: we refuse this affectation because we want to maintain our (illusory) autonomy and thus set up a separate existence. If we allow this affectation, we are paradoxically not being affected. The centre does not want — it receives and generates.

Am I wasting my time here? Not that Benoît is wrong or anything, but didn’t I spend 18 months in Mother India and Nephew Nepal, only to dismount from the steed of earnest beseeching at the moment before the big bang of realisation to run down the mountain on eggbeater legs to the nearest brothel in the lowlands? Who am I fooling?

8 July

Afternoon’s morning chai, still in Jurriën’s room. I was supposed to go at 7:30 this morning. Said goodbye to Jurriën and his parents last night, but at 4:30 a.m. I was still trying to get to sleep. This trip will take twelve hours to Dijon via Paris and the idea of riding exhausted in this continuing heat did not result in my leaping up at the 6 a.m. alarm. So I’ll try again tomorrow.

Jurriën’s parents asked me if I am on holiday. Illumination by fire is more like it. What did I just say? Sounds like the agenda of a hero in the making. Ha-ha, ho-ho… Let me turn from this thought quickly, before the realisation sinks in that I am in reality just a wanker — in every sense of the word — who has chosen a rather more adventurous method of winding up frozen in a ditch than if I had simply remained in some big American city, passed out on a sidewalk with a paper-bagged empty bottle of port by my side.

Not likely I will crack and go to the hospital like Jurriën, though. Madness in any of its forms can never be my saviour.

Chapter 3: A Yank in Dijon-ville