January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
This is a formal academic essay on the role of the Black Goddess in the world. It explores what Black Goddesses exist and how people regard them.
The Black Goddess plays an important role in society. We use her as a scapegoat, a demon, a holder of our secrets, a mother and as a balance to all that belongs to the White God.
The essay ultimately shows the importance of finding balance in life. The Black Goddess embodies the importance of wholeness.
The essay is in PDF form below.
black-goddess
Tags: black goddess, growth, kali, religion
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
The Encounter
I had been in Madrid a month and a half and the solitude was getting to me. It was another job photographing the Gypsies, each day roaming the shanty town fields on the outskirts of town, watching the women wash clothes in the winter air, their hands red from scrubbing in freezing water. Some of the unmarried women would flirt with me, and we would both go crazy with the impossibility of it all. As we stood by the water spigots, we all knew we were hoping for something that our different cultures could never reconcile.
Then, after a long day in the shantytown, I would go home, arriving late at night, tired and in no mood to re-enter the noisy streets in search of friendship. Going out would mean speaking to people, standing up in a dark and smoky bar. But I did not want to speak to anybody. My work took everything from me. When I arrived home I was spent. As the days went by, my conversations with the Gypsy women at the water fountains only aggravated my loneliness, causing a pressure inside me that grew and grew.
As it grew, I began to think of my two brothers and father. I was different from them in many ways, but at the core of every difference was the primal fact that they liked whores and I didn’t. For them it was a simple economic exchange where both sides benefited, an exchange they had made countless times across the globe. Nevertheless, for me the act insulted my idea of human decency, and I had always resisted it. Yet, as I sat in my apartment, the noise of the New Year celebration bouncing up from the street, I questioned my convictions. You’re all pent up and miserable, my father and brothers would say in this situation, you need to get laid, but you don’t have the time or energy to find her. So, get a whore.
Too tired to stay up, I went to sleep at twelve thirty on New Year’s Eve. Next Saturday I would do it, I thought. Maybe.
The week dragged by and by the time Saturday came I had decided to put a fixed amount of money in my pocket and go to the street where the women stand. I would walk along it like I was passing through, and if I saw a woman who wasn’t repulsive, I would stop.
I arrived early, people were still having dinner, and the street was empty except for one woman on the far corner. I walked over to her. She stood by a bar door and the bar’s blue neon sign blazed by her ear. She looked up. I was amazed to see that she was pretty and my age. I felt a generational bond with her. She seemed pleased to have a possible client so early in the night and smiled. Her teeth were black and rotted, but unable to back out, I asked her how much. I was nervous and came across bluntly. Two thousand pesetas, she said. She spoke Spanish with an accent, maybe Portuguese. Two thousand! This woman is selling her body to strangers for two thousand pesetas. What a deal.
“Okay,” I said, “so what do we do now? Do you come to my house?” I looked really stupid.
She smiled again, I wish she didn’t, and said, “No, I have a place.”
We walked down the street in silence, then she asked my name in an overly friendly way. Such niceties seemed out of place. I have no manners, I thought. Hearing my name, she asked, “You’re Italian?”
“No, American. What’s your name?”
“Susana.” Something in her tone made me suspect the name was made up. I felt slightly betrayed.
We walked past the movie theatre. Two thousand pesetas would buy us a movie, but not popcorn.
At the corner she turned into a darker street. She walked ahead of me, leading the way, or maybe she was eager to get it done. As she crossed the street she walked through the parked cars and I noticed her gait. She lurched. Only heroin addicts lurched like that, stumbling, fighting with gravity. Shit. I will get myself an AIDS test.
She rang the buzzer on a crumbling wall. The door clicked and we walked up a circular wood staircase with crumbling cement walls to the first floor. A woman waited by the door. Susana went in, they talked, she came out.
“It’s one thousand for the bed.” Susana said.
I hesitated. “Above the two thousand?”
“Yes, for the bed.”
I gave her a thousand. We walked by the fat woman down a narrow hallway with doors on one side. We stopped at one and she opened it.
“And the two thousand for me,” she said.
“Now?” It seemed so businesslike. What did I expect.
I gave her the money and we entered a very small dark room with a red light over the double bed and a sink and bide in one corner. It was very small and the bed took up all the space. Without pausing, she sat on the bed, took off her dress in one swipe, and rolled her stockings down and off one foot, wrapping them around the other.
Why did she wrap her stockings around one foot? So they were easier to put back on? She had no needle marks on her arms; maybe she injected in her foot. But she probably smoked it, like most addicts in Madrid. I knew this; some of the Gypsies I photographed were sellers. She had no bra; her breasts were barely there.
Once I saw her body, I recoiled inside. She was the skinniest person I had ever seen. I was going through with this, though, I told myself. I had to do it for many reasons.
She walked to the bidet, her ass slightly brown and wrinkled, and sat down to wash herself. She looked like an old lady, bent over, her ribs showing, doing something intimate in public, like a homeless woman washing in the park. She washed herself for a long time, as if she couldn’t get clean.
Was she washing herself for me or for herself? She was engrossed in her act and I undressed on my own. Afraid I would not get an erection, I played with myself on the bed. I coaxed myself to some sort of hardness and had plenty of time to put on a condom. I lay of the bed keeping myself hard.
She came over and lay next to me.
“Do you want a blowjob?” She said it in the same friendly way that she had asked my name. Her manners were much better than mine.
But eager to get this over with, I said no. She lay down flat and I got on top of her. Again she kissed my chest like she was being polite, but I came close to her so that she couldn’t. It was too awful for such niceties. I put myself inside her and she was cold, like meat from the fridge. She had washed herself with the cold winter water. Her cold, thin body reminded me of a corpse. Terrified that I would never come, I moved in and out quickly. The friction heated her up.
“Can we do it doggy style,” I asked.
“No, it hurts too much,” she answered, breathing softly. Heroin addicts have aching bodies all the time, or maybe it was the amount of sex she had. Pushing away visions of hairy fat men grunting over her small fleshless frame, I tried as hard as I could to come.
In and out, I finally came.
I groaned and she put her arms around me and waited. I got up, and she went to the bidet again. I wrapped the condom in a tissue and dressed.
“It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad,” she said cheerily and with a hint of gratitude as she unrolled her stockings from her foot and pulled it up her leg. Jesus, I though, that was lousy sex. I imagined some of the pigs she had to deal with and figured I was a relief to her.
“But why do you come to me? A handsome guy like you can just go to a disco and get a girl.”
She spoke of the disco as if it was an innocent world she did not belong in.
“I don’t know,” I said, “too much work, maybe.”
Now that it was over, I relaxed. I wanted to know her. My sense of decency wouldn’t allow me to just leave now. And I did not want to go back to my cold apartment. I sat on the bed instead of rising to the door. She sat next to me, the red light bulb behind her head, and I marveled at the beauty of the image. I wished I had my camera with me.
“Where you from?”
“Portugal.”
“Why did you come here?” I asked.
“I came to find my father, he’s a heroin addict, he smokes.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked, hoping to get an honest answer that would relieve me.
“No,” she said unconvincingly, “I have a two year old son.”
“Where is he now?”
“In my room.” I thought of the boy sitting alone in a room. She asked, “What do you do?”
“I’m a photographer, here to photograph Gypsies.”
“I’m saving to go back to Portugal. I want to work there. Oh I don’t care what. Office work maybe.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other, have a coffee,” I said, feeling warmth for her.
“Yes,” her teeth blacker in the red light. Then I realized I was kidding myself and she knew it. I saw myself sitting with her in the café, a sinking feeling in my gut as her life weighed down on me, pulling me with her. My human decency had no bearing here and her smile mocked my idealism.
She stood up and I followed her down the narrow hallway. She stopped at the entrance and exchanged some words with the fat lady. A suitcase appeared from nowhere and Susana lugged it into the stairway. The landlady closed the door. To my surprise, Susanna made to go up the stairs.
“I have to pay the rent,” she said. My two thousand was paying her day’s rent.
“Well,” I said unsure what to say. “Goodbye.”
“Yes, goodbye,” she smiled lightheartedly, her suitcase pulling on her arm, and walked up the staircase. Before she even turned, I could see that I was out of her mind.
Maybe she was thinking of her son. Her footsteps slowly scraped up the stairs. I stood there, feeling the cold draft. A door opened and slammed shut. I shivered, and then walked down and into the street. I went home to my empty apartment and took a shower.
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
My first encounter with him was at school, back when it was simply called Mary’s school, after the woman who started it. I think I was fifteen. Now they call it Morna Valley School, partly to appear more professional, partly because Mary doesn’t run it anymore. It’s a converted farm house and most of the class rooms are corales, as they say in Spanish, or animal pens.
When I first met Ra, my class room was the sheep shed. The feeding troughs were still in the whitewashed stone walls and the cracks in the corners had old sheep droppings. He made an impression on us because he was such a freak. We were used to freaks, most of our parents were hippies, but Ra wasn’t a hippie. He walked in with a turban on his head and spoke to us in an American accent. His teeth were black and his face moved with quick intelligence that caught our attention.
“He’s an Arab,” my friend whispered to me.
“No he’s not. He’s Canadian. He left his family to come here,” somebody else whispered back.
He said he was teaching us history, but it wasn’t like any history class we knew. He told us not to bother with books, they were mostly wrong or boring, and spent the class telling us about his experience in the Israeli army. We were meant to be doing W.W.II, but he said this was much more interesting. It was. He made us laugh.
“So you know, they put us in this game where we had to get the flag of the other team. We had to find it and it was somewhere on the other side of Israel. No, really this stuff was serious. War games. They don’t screw around with that. You mess up and boom, into the shed, or ten weeks of toilet duty. So you know what we did, me and my friends, one night when we were stoned out of our heads? A helicopter. We stole it! No, really! We did. We stole it right from the base. Never mind nobody had a license to fly it. But we got that flag and that’s what matters. Sure they were angry, but we got the flag, you know. What else did they want from us.”
The next class he told us about W.W.II. Somehow he was involved in the war, despite the fact that he could only have been about three at the time. We didn’t care.
One day I came early to school. I sat in the arched entrance, the part that was the farmer’s house, and watched the steam rise from the sheep in the field in front. I was alone in the morning stillness and I heard his mobilette puttering from far away. I could hear him as he slowed down to maneuver a puddle and then rev the little bike back up to gain speed again. His bike was an old 49cc and it rattled. He drove it up to where I was sitting, adjusted his turban and coughed wretchedly. The air was damp.
“I’ve had this cough two weeks now,” he said. He sat beside me and took out his cigarettes. He took one and broke the tobacco into his palm. With his lighter he heated a chunk of hash and sprinkled generous bits into his hand. He mixed it together and rolled it into a joint.
“Ah, I love the morning. Up on the mountain I watch the sun rise from my tree. Yea, I sleep in a tree. In a school chair. Well you know you can’t beat living in a tree…” he took a drag from the joint and coughed violently, “…it’s tied in so it’s safe. There’s nothing like it.”
He took another drag. There was something about his smoking that I liked. I was used to joints, most grownups I knew smoked them. Most of them even dealt in pot. We sat in the early morning quiet, when things are dreamy and unreal, and he coughed and smoked, like a ritual. His chest sounded deep, a rich gargly sound, almost pleasant in it’s surrealness.
He talked a lot. He talked about his mobilette, about his tree, about the music that came rolling down from the house above him on the hill. He said it was Wagner and belonged to a German called Reinhold, married to an American heiress of the Duke family.
“I like the Wagner. It’s heavy and dramatic, heralding the coming of the sun. Epic. Very dramatic, man. No really. You should come by and visit some time. See for yourself. You can’t beat Wagner in the morning. It’s heavy shit.”
I never got the chance. My mother left the island shortly after and took me with her. She was wanted by Interpol for some small time terrorist stuff she did back in the early 70’s in Berkeley. Anti-Vietnam movement. That was partly why we had gone to the little Mediterranean island in the first place. We went to Amsterdam for a few months until things cooled off, and while I was gone Ra got a bit crazy.
He stopped going to school and spent most of the time on the hill taking drugs. My brother Celli, who was twelve at the time, went up with some friends and took acid with him. They had a great time. Ra sat in his school chair in the tree and sang while Celli and his friends sat around it laughing. But then Ra got even crazier. He started taking this drug called Ketamin, or K, an elephant tranquilizer. They sold it in the local pharmacy for farmers who needed to operate on their livestock.
Celli told me later that it was around this time he became too crazy to deal with. Ra began talking about how Haley’s comet was sending him messages and how the world was going to end. He set a date and told everyone. When the date came nothing happened. The next morning he and his lanky dog came walking down from the hill into the village.
“Sure the world ended. No really, I’m serious. Didn’t you feel it, man. It ended for me. I died. This is not me! I was reborn! Sure I died, man. I was sleeping in the tree up there, last night, and all of a sudden I’m lying face down on the ground and Carlos is licking my face. Smacked right out of the tree by them. Them? I don’t know, whoever kills people. Them. But I was reborn and that’s who I found when I woke up face down. I found a reborn me. Died then reborn! Wild shit. I’m really serious! That comet is really something! Can you hear it? I can hear it even now. Bzzzzzzz in my ear, “ he pointed with a straight finger to his ear, his elbow held high.
He had lost a lot of weight from lack of food and the daily injections of K, but his energy was manic and he moved his arms nervously. People laughed, shaking their heads, and gave him some Pesetas to buy himself and his dog some food.
When I came back from Amsterdam a year later I ran into him at Can Curune, the local café. I was sitting at a table with my stepfather. The café was on the corner of the road, nestled in a little valley of olive trees and small plots of land. He came running up to me, more hyper than ever.
“Hey Gennaro, it’s good to see you. I almost didn’t recognize you, man,” he still wore a turban, although it was much rattier. His cheeks were gaunt. He had a scruffy beard. His clothes were old and looked like hippie hand-me-downs - you can’t get more scruffy than that.
My step father continued reading the Herald Tribune and I felt awkward, but I was still glad to see him.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m writing a book. It’s a new system, man. Really amazing stuff. Things are really taking off. I’m doing great, people are receptive. This system is going to change the world. I should have the book done soon. But hey, I have to go, you know,” he rushed off down the road, hitch-hiking as he walked.
“Oh, man, he has really lost it,” I said.
“Yep,” my step father said from behind his paper.
“People say to me ‘Wow!’ and I look at them and say, ‘I didn’t do anything, man. What did I do? I survived. I didn’t do anything. I’ve been living my life, I have no control over all this. All these silly things I’ve been through, stories I’ve told, all this stuff. What control did I have over any of that? I’m just a human being like every body else caught in a wave, you know. And what I have now is the will of gods, you know, this is what I get. It’s very nice, you know, but I didn’t earn it. I didn’t make up all this stuff, even I’m not smart enough for that, that I know…” Ra trailed off with a smile.
He stood before us in knee high black boots with tucked in black Arabian riding pants and a black shirt. His turban had been replaced by a Turkish round hat, also black. This was five years after I had seen him in Can Curune. We sat on comfortable cushions in a seminar room that a rich German woman on the island rented out. Outside, singing cicadas sunned themselves in almond trees. Except for me, everyone there was paying vast quantities of money to attend his seminar. He had written his book that explained the universe as he saw it.
“So one night I’m walking back from the bar and it’s dark. It’s really dark. It’s new moon and the rain clouds are out. But I’m walking along the camino anyway because I know the road really well. I’m with Carlos, my trusty mutt. And I’m enjoying the evening air, you know, just after rain. Fresh. I get to the ruin I’m living in and Carlos starts growling. Strange. Carlos never growls. He’s a coward. But he’s growling. Yet I don’t hear anything. I tell him to shut up and I walk into the living room of the house, which is now a courtyard since all the walls are down, you know. And I take out the key to my room. A big black cast iron key, heavy, the size of my hand, one of those nice old Ibisenco keys, you know,” he pauses to take a drag from his joint.
“So I approach my door, a dark wooden door, old as the house, and I see a light coming from under it! Strange. I didn’t remember leaving the oil lamp on. But I’ve got the only key to the door, and it’s locked, so nobody could be in there. Carlos had stopped growling and was now shaking. Shivering so hard he could barely stand. And I start shaking too! I’m not usually scared, but I started shaking uncontrollably. It’s not that I’m scared even. It’s something else. I’m just shaking. It put the key in the door and open the door,” he pauses, thinking.
“The door opens and Carlos falls to the ground with a yelp. I piss myself. There’s nothing in the room, but there is! There’s a strange glowing light coming from nowhere! An energy just hits me and I piss all over myself. A few minutes earlier down the road I taken a shit, but if I hadn’t I would have crapped myself too. And then this voice comes, clear, perfectly clear. All the other noise in my head disappears and it’s just this one voice.
‘Time to work,’ it says. Like a command. Like my grandmother or Darth Vader from Star Wars. ‘Time to work.’ I’m standing there in a puddle of piss and sweat. Yea, all of a sudden I’m sweating torrents and torrents. I lost twenty pounds in a few days, and I was already pretty fucking skinny, as you know. That’s how it started. For eight days The Voice spoke to me and it was the most painful experience in my life. It entered my body and realigned my very cells so that I could take in all the information. The Voice told me where we come from and where we are going. And It taught me the Human Design System. For eight days Carlos slept under my bed, not moving. And I stayed in that room without leaving, taking it all in. I had no choice, man. I couldn’t leave! You don’t fuck with the gods, man.”
The people in the conference room listened and took notes.
“Genius to freak, man,” he said to me a little while ago.
We were at his new house, sitting beside the pool. He wore swimming trunks but still had his Turkish had on. “They come from the same place, geniuses and freaks. I’m a freak, but sometime I can trick people and they think I’m a genius. I’m rich now,” he waves his hand around his property, “not only in material gains. You know, you wait long enough and the gods give you your rewards. I went years without sex, without any friends. The only people who I could talk to were the kids, man. The grownups wanted nothing to do with me. Of course I was fucking crazy! But genius to freak. That’s the way it goes,” he laughed.
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
I wrote this story for class and nobody believed it was true. But it is.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
My mother bought me cowboy boots one size too big, allowing space for the money to fit. In each boot she placed a wad of bills, carefully wrapped in brown paper so that it looked like an insole. She helped me put the boots on, and when I said they fit, she rubbed my head and said, “You’re a good son. Only thirteen years old and you’re helping like a man. Your father will be proud.”
My mother and I boarded a plane in Canada, and flew direct to Peru. We drove to the hotel where we recounted the money: Thirty-five thousand dollars, all laid out on the bed in one hundred-dollar bills. She repacked my boots and the next day we went to the prison.
It was in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima and I had heard that the prison was a world of its own, a cowboy town with no rules. Some people had been jailed so long that their records couldn’t be found any more. They had gone crazy a long time ago and nobody remembered what they were in for. We stood outside the main gate with hundreds of other people, mostly women. Some were there to see their male relatives and others were vendors who had come in hopes of selling food. On the way there, I had seen the official lunch rumbling along in barrels on the back of trucks. Some of the containers had no lids, exposing what looked like watery lentil soup to the shantytown air. Inside, nobody ate the prison food if they could afford to buy their own. But I had overheard from my father that the vendors not only sold food; they sold their bodies too. He had said that plenty of womanly men were available inside, and the inmates were allowed dogs, cats and chickens- in my father’s compound one dog had become such a popular sex toy that the owner rented it out. But if they wanted sex with a woman, they had to buy it from the vendors. I looked at the women in the crowd. The ones with modest clothing and somber faces had come to visit relatives, but I suspected those with short, tight dresses and heavy make-up would visit anybody who could pay. I wondered if my father ever slept with them. The way he talked, he probably did.
We entered the prison much faster than the rest of the people because they were Peruvian, and my mother, using the power of our white skin, moved to the front of the crowd and through the gate with ease. We walked past tables and guards who searched the food that the women brought, using bits of wire to rake through cooked rice and soups, checking for concealed weapons or drugs. We passed the chief guard who looked my mother in the eyes but did not say hello. He peered dreamily at me with calm, pale gray eyes. His lips drooped and the corners of his mouth were wet. My mother whispered to me that he was the one who had agreed to get my father out. For ten thousand dollars he was going to dress my father in a guard uniform and walk him out of prison during the midnight shift. The rest of the money was for fake passports, traveling and bribes.
We walked into one of the female body search booths. My mother joked with the woman guard who frisked us. She had no reason to suspect us, being white foreigners. My feet hurt, but I showed no signs of it. I was good at hiding my feelings. Kids at school said I was too serious, and sometimes I burned to tell them that my family dealt drugs and my father was in jail, but I couldn’t trust anybody. The silence hurt me badly.
In the concrete courtyard I met my father. Tall and handsome with a bushy moustache, a suntanned, bare chest and tight jeans. My mother said that he looked healthy and he said it was because of all the time he had to do push-ups and jog around the courtyard. When he said this, I was hardly listening. Something about his mouth gripped my attention. As he opened and closed it, and especially when he smiled, which he did often, he revealed a mouthful of gold. All his teeth were made of gold! Noticing my wonder, he said, “Like my teeth?” He spread his mouth wide to reveal gold as far back as I could see. He explained that he got them after the guards did a cell search. They dragged the men out of bed and lined them up in the courtyard. The authorities were looking for the owner of a knife that had been found in somebody else’s ribs. Since nobody confessed, they made the inmates lie on the concrete face down, naked, and went down the line, kicking people at random. My father was one of those picked. They kicked the back of his head, ramming his down turned face into the concrete. “After it happened the fuckers didn’t give me a dentist for three fucking days, man. Finally I got some money to the right guy, and voila! The Peruvian Special!” He smiled sarcastically.
We sat and talked in the courtyard. I hadn’t seen him for a year and I wanted to cry. I could not speak and felt sick. The hot sun hurt my eyes. The sun, that’s why my eyes watered, I said. He told me about the prison. The foreigners had one section of the prison to themselves, much cleaner than the rest and on the first floor nearest the courtyard. Four-storied buildings surrounded the courtyard on all sides, and on the upper floors, I saw people peering down through iron bars. Contrasted by the bright sun, they were in darkness, muted figures with bright eyes that reflected the outside glare. Seeing me look up, he said, “One of my Peruvian friends lived up there, he escaped last month, killed three guards…yeah, a mean mutherfucker. His name’s Raul, one of the best bank robbers in the country. A mean mutherfucker. Last year, he got a price put on his head because he beat somebody at poker. That night a bribed guard left Raul’s cell door unlocked so that people could get to him. He had his own cell; all the murderers and terrorists are kept alone at night. One by one they came…with knives, shards of glass, sharpened bed legs, pieces of brick.” Again he slowed down, speaking very quietly and close to my face, “But he fought like the devil, and the next morning there were eight dead bodies around the door. After that, nothing happened to him, his reputation scared even the guards, and they’re the meanest fuckers of all. He escaped a while later… Did I kill anybody? No. Once, I caught somebody stealing my dollars, and I beat him so hard that my knuckles bled, but that’s the worst. I’m a fast talker, I use my mouth to get out of trouble.” He smiled at this, his teeth glittering, and added as an afterthought, “Having friends like Raul doesn’t hurt.”
After a while, the sun hurt my head and we went inside to his communal cell. It was a large room, as big as a basketball court that housed about two hundred men in partitioned sections. He shared his cubicle with three men, and they left to give us space. I took off my boots and handed him the money, which he put into his own cowboy boots. I felt proud.
“Yep, here’s my money to freedom, brought to me by my very own son. Soon there’s going to be a very rich guard and a very happy gringo,” he said quietly with narrowed, sparkling eyes.
After that, I left with one of his cellmates so dad could have sex with my mother. They didn’t tell me but I knew. This took up the rest of the visiting time. Before leaving he gave me a tooth bracelet from a recently killed monkey, but I didn’t wear it once I got back to Vancouver. The teeth still had blood in them, and I knew this would gross out the girls at school. I never wore the boots again either. I hid them in the closet with the monkey-tooth bracelet, the bullet, the arrowhead, the tiger tooth and all the other stuff my father had given me. Over the years, my collection grew. The chief guard never kept his promise.
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
My six month trip to india in 1996 changed my life. This story captures some of the experience.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
I don’t suppose you’ve ever found yourself in London with lots of money and nothing to do, a pause in your life with no direction but the thrust of a bulging wallet. Maybe not, but maybe something similar. So when my friend Ben asked me to go to India, knowing I had the freedom to go if I only knew where, I’m sure you’ll understand the feeling of my saying, “What the hell.” I had never thought of going to India but since my life had come to a punctuation mark of some sort, like a comma or momentary full stop, just enough to take a breath but too long to be reassuring, I was glad to get moving again. London had a feeling of uneasy calm that irked me, like the calm before a storm, and I wanted to get out before the storm hit. Ben’s invitation was just my chance, giving me that feeling that maybe I’ll just ride this wave and see where it takes me.
A week later I was following Ben around the beaches of Goa with the same lack of direction as when I was in London, and since Ben wasn’t really the direction type, we fit just fine; two beach bums looking for shells in an off hand way, but no worries if we didn’t find any.
Being British, Ben had been pulled to India by unseen ropes that his grandparents wove from tales about the Raj and British colonialism. They had tied these stories around Ben during his childhood as they sat by the fire in England, weaving them tighter and tighter around Ben’s neck, until he was gasping for this exotic land that was so far away yet so much part of his history.
As for me, I had gone on a whim. So actually I had traveled three thousand miles to do what I was doing in London, vaguely searching and vaguely lost, only now I had more money since the Pound Sterling in India is backed by a long history of colonialism; elephant caravans hunting tigers and Queen Victoria back in England writing to say, “The tea is just fine, boys, send some more.” I’m sure you’ve had that experience of wealth before, like putting unspent money back in your coat pocket and finding the coat already held some bills that you had forgotten about, and suddenly you are richer, yet you were always that rich and just didn’t know it.
But as I sat on the beach, so far from that brooding London storm, I began to get the same uneasy feeling and realized that it does not matter how far you travel, your baggage always catches up to you. Not that Ben minded, his blond hair and beautiful torso adapted well to lunghis wrapped around his waist, and he took a tan better than any ex-pat. The coconuts chopped for us on the spot and quaint Hindi lessons at sunset with the local boys, who’s friendliness was genuine, despite their uncle’s clothing business down the beach, kept him nicely entertained. But I still felt suspended in limbo, my life a bated breath. Just how many coconuts can you eat before you get a call saying your baggage has arrived, so deal with it. In my case, the baggage was a yearning, an inner buzzing that couldn’t be pinned down and wasn’t going away no matter how many coconuts I drank.
Sensing my restlessness, like a sentence wanting to start but held back by a word that refused to come, Ben tossed me a book one day, Travels in India or something. It was a collection of short stories about different people’s travels in the continent I had now decided to call home. One day I had simply told Ben that I had decided to cease being a visitor and was going to call India home, not because it said “home” to me, but because I had nowhere else to go and felt like calling somewhere home. He laughed when I told him and asked if I minded he join me. I moved over, patted my towel and said, “No, not at all, welcome home. Care for a coconut?” He accepted and we moved in together on the Goa beach. It seemed like a good enough place to settle down. But as I said, he sensed my restlessness and as if playing matchmaker between me and destiny, tossed me the book called something like Travels in India.
The first story was about the foothills of an area called Salem, little Swiss-like villages where the rich Indians spend their summers, away from the heat of a dry Southern India. Interesting but nothing to start a sentence with. The second was about Bangalore’s silicon valley, little companies that fix computer glitches while the West is asleep, being a twelve-hour time difference. Cyber world has no borders. Silicon Valley in California and Bangalore have many things in common that you or I wouldn’t even understand. They speak frequently. Yet, I wasn’t pulled in and, while entertained, the full stop that my life had taken still remained.
However, the third story changed all this. Somewhere in a little village south of Pondicherri in the state of Tamil Nadu is your life story, including your last incarnation and your next. Two thousand years ago, a yogi channeled the lives of all the archetypal people in the world; past, present and future. He spent his whole life reciting our destinies to scribes who etched his words into palm leaves. Called Nadi Leaves, they still exist in an unnamed village south of Pondicherri. As I read this, I felt my life creak, the vowels of a word forming, the blurry vision of another sentence starting.
Goa is on the west coast of India, Pondicherri is three thousand miles across the continent on the east coast. I sat on the Goa beach, my home with Ben and a few foraging cows and coconut sellers, the end of the earth as we had found it, and I looked towards Pondicherri, out of sight, hidden behind old trucks, potholes, (hang in there reader, I’m about to describe a quest of epic proportions), twisty jungle roads, monkeys, fruit vendors, concrete floors, sleeping bags head level with cockroaches that had names, and food, oh food that I was told had more in its ingredients than just assorted chili’s but I wasn’t convinced. Not that I could eat that often- where did all this diarrhea come from? -from my flesh, my very bones, until I was skinny and weak like so many others around me, only I was white and rich and they were not. Yet at that point of physical exhaustion money matters much less than God, and they knew God more than I did, maybe by another name, but still they knew God. And despite the religion that surrounded me, my days were spent dealing with money: how much for this or that? Too much. Too little. The guilt, the rage. They cheat me, I rob them. If they only knew the prices in London for a taxi ride. But they do know and are robbing me silly- a day’s wage for them. And it’s still only a subway ticket for me, yet it all matters. And none of it matters- the moment you have a theory that puts it all in perspective, they raise the price on you with a whimpering sneer or give it for free with stoic kindness- wham, your moral reality is shattered again, but who cares since before you know it you’re on your back once more shitting your insides out and nothing matters but God again…
This is what lay between me and those mysterious and distant Nadi Leaves. As I sat on the Goa beach envisioning it, I felt the divine pen being raised and the unfinished sentence in my life’s book began to unravel once more.
I left Ben the symbolic keys to our home: a towel and some suntan lotion, and told him to feed the cows regularly. He was sad to see me go, but I didn’t care. Oh, I forgot! Did I not tell you that I was going crazy?
Yes, I was. I arrived in Goa with warm feelings towards my mother in San Francisco, my friends who had come all the way from Spain to visit me at my new Goa beachfront home. I liked my friends, said nice things in their direction. But then the nagging full stop in my life began to cloud my vision. The break, the new direction that my life was taking, took up all my energy, and after two weeks in Goa I was unable to even hold a conversation. They would say nice things in my direction like I had once done, and I would look behind me, surprised, annoyed, that they should be speaking to me, bother me as I desperately groped for that word that was on the tip of my tongue, which was not directed at them but towards the next sentence in my life. I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience. Perhaps something close? Anyway, I had gone crazy, unable to speak, especially to people who knew I had once spoken, so I left Ben and our towel house on the beach with silent relief. He said he’d tell my friends when they got back from the market and I nodded. He understood. I didn’t want to see him again, nor my friends, nor my mother. What for…
But then I got a pang of remorse for my mother. Maybe I should just leave a note with a hotel number or something so she doesn’t worry. But my friends might want to find me, speak to me, point out that my judgment at this time wasn’t exactly crystal clear. They might try to stop me! Fuck them. Before going, I wrote in the sand, “Gone crazy, back in five minutes.” By the time they realized I wasn’t coming back, I thought with glee, I’d be far too gone to be found. And who cared anyway, the tide was quickly coming in.
That’s what I noticed myself remembering several miles into the wilderness half way into India a month and a half later. But I couldn’t remember if that was me who left Goa or if it was a character from a book. I argued to myself about this but figured it didn’t matter much anyway since either way it seemed to have brought somebody to where I was. I raised my head and peered at myself lying naked on a rock, alone in my craziness, in a landscape full of similar rocks, huge flat boulders the size of houses, tossed onto the earth, or thrust out of the earth by a random giant some time ago. I had been there several days, lying, too weak to even crap, not that I had anything left inside me, too weak to drink from my canister until I looked over and saw there was nothing left to drink in my canister anyway. I had been fitful the whole time, dreamy, almost a pleasant state if it weren’t for the dry heaves. Night had chopped into dawn, dawn into morning, and each time I awoke, the light cut brighter into the opal sky. The sun’s edge scraped across my rock and in a few hours it was full on me. Lying there alone on the slab, I fancied myself a little morsel of food on a frying pan. I chuckled deliriously, and thought, rather calmly, that if I did not get up and walk back to the village, I would die. Life had never been so simple. I pondered this a little while. I had disowned my friends and family long ago, so that was no pull on my life strings. I had no reason to live, but then again, I had no reason to die. Somewhere between Goa and here, the sentence that had revived so grandly had stopped again, and I had again been told to take a deep breath, full of momentous pause, or a comma, or even a full stop, and to just go with the very slow and cloudy flow once more. Here I was again, contemplating my next word, the next syllable that would restart me on my life story (or end it), indifferently looking at my choices: die or not, die or not, die or not. Hmmm… and then, from a distant memory of why I had left Goa in the first place, I remembered the Nadi Leaves.
Somehow this gave me the impetus to get up and drag my frail body across the boulders those few miles to the nearest village, fainting, pulled on by a palm leaf with my life story on it that some yogi held captive in an unknown village somewhere south of Pondicherri in the state of Tamil Nadu. Funny how the world works.
And then I found myself on the Eastern coast of the Indian continent, looking onto the Bay of Bengal, where I picked up this Danish woman my age, twenty-five, in a nice turn of the century hotel that used to be the servants’ quarters for the Raj of Madras. It made me wonder what his house looked like. Her name was Rikke and she was very logical, something she inherited from her ancestors, all of whom were also blond with glasses and khaki shorts, the type who traipse around in the tropics with butterfly nets and Ph. D’s. I never asked why she was there. It had something to do with getting a Ph. D. She had a boyfriend in Denmark who later dumped her, but then she didn’t know this and so she was being faithful, which was fine by me because I was way too crazy and weak to consider sex. We made a good team, my tendency to have misfiring brain cells was something she could understand scientifically, loosening her up, and her logical ancestors gave me something to lean on, keeping me standing. Without each other, we probably wouldn’t have survived. She would have cracked and I would have cracked, but for the exact opposite reasons. We bonded when she took me to her small apartment in Pondicherri and I lay sick on her kitchen floor, head level with some cockroaches whose names I knew at the time but couldn’t remember once the delirium passed. She took care of me for a week, forcing me to take medicine over my cries that only God and the Nadi Leaves could help now. For her it was a religious education, for me I got antibiotics. After that experience, she too wanted to see these Nadi Leaves that kept bringing me back from the dead.
This all happened several months after I had left Goa, I had lost count exactly, and we were now on India’s East coast, bumping in crowded spice and sweat buses down the spring roads south towards an unknown village that fate had heard about, fate being a little old man we ran into on the street, or a name we read in a hotel register, or the similarity of the surrounding hills to the ones I had read about in the book, Travels Through India or something. But I could only remember the book’s story since I had sold it to a Goa book merchant so many months ago. Perhaps it is in the hands of some other person whose life has hit a comma, or maybe even a full stop. What did that person do with the book? Did he follow the second story and go to Bangalore to start a computer company, cyber-talking to Californian geeks in Silicon Valley? Why not?
Rikke and I looked good as a couple. Are we married, people would ask. And I’d reply, No, not exactly but we are to you, since you just want to get her in bed and feel like you’re taking advantage of her. I said this to one Indian guy who was interested in Rikke, or at least in using her body for a few spurtful moments. Why not? His reality of us is now different from our reality of us. I never married her and never will. I’m sure my Nadi Leaf will attest to that. But in his Leaf, he meets two foreigners who are married. Same people, different reality. Why not?
With this attitude we arrived at that unknown village south of Pondicherri in the state of Tamil Nadu, two thousand miles and three months from Goa, five thousand miles from London and its subway, where one token from Bayswater to Paddington, a five minute ride, costs one day’s wages in this village. To those who saw us get off the bus and walk down the street, we were a respectably married European couple arriving late, the blue moon lighting the one street and wrestling with the kerosene lights of the little food stalls, projecting multiple gray shadows on the dirt road like several negatives of life sloppily placed on top of each other in the same place at the same time. The dirt road was spotted black by the tobacco or beetle nut or whatever the locals chewed with hardworking fervor and spit, speckling the land with bloody red dots, now black in the light of the moon, the dirt road a huge canvas of multiple realities painted with people’s own spit and shadows.
But wait! That’s all nice and fucking poetic, but what about the Nadi Leaves? Yea, they were there. The street had maybe five places advertising Nadi Leaves, each one claiming to have copies of the originals, each one willing to show me pictures of Japanese tourists who had come and spent thousands of dollars to have their leaves read, each one willing to do the same for me. Indians were there too, drawn by their superstition and the truth of a palm font with their destiny etched on it, willing to pay a year’s wages to hear it read to them, sitting before the reader with trusting, anxious eyes.
Did I have mine read? Yes. I paid a very large sum. Refused to pay the Japanese tourist rate and settled for what the Indian tourists paid, still a huge sum for all involved. Rikke, a scientist, was more skeptical. I was both religious and crazy, a good alibi when you need to justify spending fortunes to get your destiny from a palm leaf, so for me there was no problem, but she came from a family of scientists, respectable Europeans who believed in the virtues of logic. Palm leaves with your destiny went against what her ancestors had fought and died for. Who exactly did they fight, I asked, but she dismissed me, and I suspected even the Indians’ dark skin would seem illogical to her ancestors. Logic. Being somebody whose life story stopped and started regularly, I couldn’t relate. Logic seemed so shallow in the face of a good life-threatening stomach virus, or a leper, or a heated argument over ten rupees, three meals to my Indian opponent but not enough to buy a pack of gum in London. Yet, I argue over the ten rupees nonetheless, for the absurdity of it, for the logic of it, for the logical absurdity. Stop. I’m making my point too clearly.
So, Rikke compromised and got the abbreviated version of her life for half price. No past or future life, just a short overview of this one.
They located our palm fonts by elimination. Do I have four brothers, they asked. If yes, the leaf could be amongst all the destinies with four brothers over here, if no, all those. Is my father alive, divorced, is my moon in Scorpio, Mercury in Pisces….and so forth. Eventually, they found the leaf with my destiny. I saw it, crisp and dusty, filled with tiny etchings. Come back in two days and they’ll have it copied into a book, they said.
We came back. They told Rikke she came from a family of logical scientists, her current boyfriend would dump her but she’d eventually also marry a scientist and have two children etc. Pretty boring life if you ask me. The half-price destiny. My destiny was much more exciting, but then I paid twice as much for it. I was a temple garden keeper in my last life but in the face of great scandal, I ran away with a girl. This life I’m a photographer to become famous, will marry at such an age, two children…they went through my life year for year…will retire to such ashram and die at such a date as a guru to a small gathering of disciples. Next life I’ll be born into the religious life and become a famous guru. Sounded interesting. They said nothing of me going crazy. Shame, I was so enjoying being crazy. Yet apparently it wasn’t part of the plan, so I stopped. But then, I think I gave them the wrong astrological data. I don’t know if my Mercury is really in Pisces. Maybe it was somebody else’s life. Why not?
Just to be on the safe side I decided to call my mother and tell her I was fine and that the rumors about me going crazy and disappearing into the Indian subcontinent were absolutely fraudulent. In fact I hadn’t disappeared at all. Here, I have a witness, her name’s Rik…No she’s not my girlfriend. No I don’t have sex with her! I’m perfectly happy without one…look, if it makes you feel better, you can pretend we’re married, we pretend all the time. I told Rikke to assure my mother that I still existed and that every one here was actually of the opinion that I had a wonderful future as a photographer and guru, and that craziness was not even on the leaf, as long as, that is, my Mercury is in Pisces. Again, Rikke dismissed me and, drawing upon her ancestors, laid out a perfectly rational argument about something or other. Why not, I thought, she has a right to her destiny too. Besides, my mother bought it. I then tried to call my friends in Goa but I was told they had all trickled back to Europe with death-threatening illnesses. Wimps!
Keeping with the rules of a quest (go into the wilderness, return from the wilderness), I returned to Goa nonetheless, trekking across the continent with death-defying stubbornness, but when I arrived, I found it barren. The monsoon had come and my home on the beach was washed away, a huge mountain of black seaweed in its place. No more coconut vendors even. Hmmm…I noticed my life’s sentence amble to a stop once more and immediately called Ben in London. Life was good, he said, come.
I was on a plane the next day, wondering who was ahead of whom, me or my destiny, the two of us twisting, stuttering, creating each other, and all the while a scribe in an unnamed village south of Pondicherri in the state of Tamil Nadu frantically scribbling it all down on a palm leaf so that in my next life I can come by with my Danish wife (who’s not really my wife) and pay outrageous amounts of money to hear my destiny read back to me, all the while wondering if it’s actually my destiny being read, since I won’t really be sure if my Mercury is really in Pisces.
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
We were always travelling when I was young. This was when we were in France, uh, when I was seven.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
“I can not believe you brought those condoms to school!” my mother said as she drove me home. My two younger brothers sat in the back. “I’m really pissed off at you!” This I had already gathered. Being seven, I thought they were merely balloons. Their oiliness and strange smell had seemed odd but I thought nothing of it. Madame Bouvior had looked at me with a strange smile when I showed them to the rest of the school during recess. The school was small, and we all studied in one room, the twenty desks, holes in them for inkpots, roughly arranged by student age. We had fun with the balloons in the courtyard and Madame said nothing to me. But her smile bothered me. She had smiled once before like that, when telling my mother that perhaps I should have my hair cut and treated for lice. Both times my mother fumed, embarrassed and furious at Madame’s condescension.
“She already thinks I’m a bad parent! Now what does she think? Jesus! Did you not think that maybe condoms were inappropriate?” she said as we wound along the side of a hill on our way home.
After a few tense minutes she added, “You know these people are straight, you know they think we are hippies. Jesus!”
I kept quiet and stared at the side of the road, feeling bad.
We turned a corner and to my astonishment, I saw a little man on the upper side of the road just ahead. I jumped but nobody noticed because my mother had looked back at my two brothers who were arguing. He was not an ordinary man. He stood about a foot and a half tall, not counting the pointed red had he wore. He had pointed red shoes and striped pants with a blues vest. He had been taken by surprise and he jumped too. We made eye contact for a split second. He quickly stepped to run up the hill, but then vanished as if he had become invisible. I watched in amazement, unable to speak.
“You’ve got to become more aware, Gennaro,” my mother was saying. “She is a very straight woman.”
“Did you…” I said, pointing to where the little man had been.
“Are you listening to me?” she screamed. “I wish for once you would stay in this world!”
“Yes, but…” I trailed off. That was the last time I tried mentioning what I had seen. It was too real. If it had been any less real then I would have.
“Okay. Then let’s leave it at that. I bought a turkey. I thought it would be nice to make a big meal. We haven’t had a big meal since dad left. It’s a really big turkey. I got it from the farmer up past Girac. It was the biggest one he had. It’s still alive. I put it in the bathroom.”
Girac had seventy-five inhabitants and except for my mother, my two younger brothers, and me, they were all over the age of fifty. We were also the only ones who hadn’t been born there. The French village had younger people once upon a time, but they all left in search of the industrial revolution, leaving Girac in an aging medieval stupor. The castle on the hill looked down upon the village in crumbling loneliness and the three or four streets were quiet except for an occasional tractor pulling a load of fresh walnuts. We lived across from the walnut factory, run single handedly by the old Monsieur and Madame Rouen. Napoleon had owned our house, or so I thought when my mother said it was built a hundred and fifty years ago in Napoleon style. The house had two sections, the front and the back. We lived in the front part. The back was where the servants had lived, scuttling up and down the back stairs that were now dusty and dark, inhabited only by mice. It was closed off now. We had no servants. My father had run off to Peru and gotten himself arrested for drug smuggling. So, my mother, twenty-seven at the time, kept house as best she could with small savings and help from friends. My dad was gone for years and I slowly replaced him with a fantasy father that looked like my real father but probably had very little in common with him.
As I helped my brother Felix, who was only two years old and still wobbly on his legs, get out of the car I heard my mother scream from inside the house, “Oh! Where’s the turkey! The window! I forgot to lock the window! Quick, the garden!”
We rushed inside and she scooped Felix up with her arms on our way to the garden. It was a large garden. At one end was a six-foot deep water canal that channeled a waist deep stream. Beyond the canal were fields with cows. On the other side of the garden, where the wooded hill began, an eight-foot wall led out from the side of the house and wound around in a wide ark to the stream. The turkey stood looking at us, perched high on the eight-foot wall, his long red chin bouncing from an arched beak and trailing down his rounded chest. Behind him, his large tail spread out in a fan. He clucked once, as if to say goodbye, and disappeared over the wall into the forest up the hill.
“Oh, no,” my mother groaned.
“Quick! I have to catch it,” I said, running back into the house and out the front door. I ran around the house and into the underbrush where the turkey had jumped. I could hear him but could not see him.
“Gennaro, wait for me. I want to come too,” my brother Cisco whined.
“Go away! You’ll scare him,” I whispered. He was only four and pestered me wherever I went.
“But I want to,” he whimpered.
“Go away!”
I lost my brother and pushed deeper up the hill. I could still hear the turkey farther ahead. After half an hour, I came upon it sitting in a tree, but it jumped to the ground again and scuttled off. It was getting dark and the shadows made me uneasy. I was now far enough up to see the crumbled tower of the castle, still lit up by the setting light.
“No luck? Tomorrow I’ll tell Jacque and he’ll shoot it,” mother said when I came home.
“I’m gonna get it tonight, when it’s sleeping,” I said, excited by the new challenge.
I used my cowboy belt to hold the rope and the bottle of water. My pants were tucked into my boots, and I had two flashlights. I left the house at seven thirty, walking around it to where the hill started. At the mouth of the woods I paused, staring into the winter blackness. My ears rang with heightened awareness. I stood there for a long time. Finally, I took two steps into the woods, turned, and ran as fast as I could back into the house. It was seven thirty four.
“Didn’t find it?” my mother asked.
“He’s too quick,” I said.
“Yea, he’s a fast one. Maybe you’ll have better luck in the morning before school. It’s time for bed anyway. Go get in bed and call me when you’re ready.”
“Can you come with me,” I said, “to check that the servants’ door is locked.”
“Of course I can. Look, it’s shut and locked. Nobody can get through here. Now get in bed. There’s Bugs the Bunny waiting for you. Cisco move over for your brother.”
I awoke with my pet rabbit’s whiskers tickling my ear. It was still dawn and from our second story window I could see the steam rising from the fields. My brother was still asleep, his breathing gently ruffling the rabbit’s fur. I quietly dressed and ran out of the house. The woods were bright and fresh. I made good headway, and within ten minutes I reached the crest of the hill, the castle looming above me. I ran to the tower and ascended it, spiraling upwards, my footsteps echoing in the stone cylinder. Towards the top, I slowed down and tiptoed the rest of the way. Black, cigar shaped, droppings littered the stairs and a strong smell hung in the air. I peered around the last turn and saw Merlin, the tower’s falcon. He rested on the ledge of the crumbling staircase, peering intently at something down the hill.
“Hello,” I said.
He turned his head towards me, gave a cry that echoed down the stairs and flew off with two cracks of his wings, gliding out into the valley.
I peered over the hillside like the falcon had just been doing and looked for what he had found so interesting. In a little clearing made by a collapsed shed, I saw the turkey, pecking at the ground with focused effort. Fixing the spot in my mind, I rushed down the tower and made my way through the woods towards him. When I got near the clearing, I lay on my stomach and crawled towards him, hiding behind an old, rotting wall. He had his back to me and continued pecking, seeming to have found a spot rich in food. I crawled almost within reach. Up this close I realized how big he really was. He was almost as big as I was. I counted to three and jumped on him. For a split second I looked right into his face. I saw his eyes, very wide and round, and hesitated. I lost the moment. My hands reached out and flailed over his body. They failed to get a grip and slid over his feathers to his tail. I grabbed on as hard as I could while he dragged me a few feet. Then he was gone.
I was left lying prostrated on the ground with an enormous bouquet of tail feathers. He ran into the forest, his bare red ass disappearing into the foliage.
I looked at the feathers, a trophy, second best to actually catching him. I thought of his eyes and decided to let him go.
“There you are! Hurry, you’re going to be late for school! You can’t be late,” my mother said when I got home. She was dressed in an ankle length dress and cotton shirt. “Oh, feathers! Did you get him?”
“He didn’t want to be caught,” I said.
“Smart of him,” she answered. “Come on, here’s your porridge, you can eat it in the car. Cisco! Felix!”
“Fifi is in the Garden,” Cisco said. He sat under the table playing with the cat.
My mother went to the garden. She checked in the rabbit hatch. There was a knock at the front door. A man with an English beret and riding pants stood in the entranceway, holding Felix upside down by the ankles. They were both dripping wet and Felix was crying.
“Excuse me, madam, but is this your child?” he asked in an English accent. His voice was perfectly calm. “I’m told it is. A local was washing her clothes by the river a few hundred meters that way when this child came floating by. She was much too old to do anything about it, so I volunteered. My wife and I are camping here for the day. Would you like him back? He’s rather heavy.”
My mother gasped.
“I presume he fell in over there?” he nodded to the stream in our back yard. “Do you not look after your children?”
“Yes, oh god, Felix.” she said.
“Oh he’s perfectly fine. In fact, he was not bothered in the least when I fished him out. He was floating on his back as if he did this all the time. Does he?” he asked reproachfully.
“Oh god no,” she said, fussing over Felix.
“Babies take naturally to water, you know,” then he added, looking at me, “And do your children go to school?”
My shirt was stained from being dragged.
“School? Oh god, school. I forgot. He’s late. They’ll just have to miss school today,” she said.
“And not get educated? I think not. Where is this school, I will take him,” he said. My name is Mr. Bidsbey. I am a cat breeder. We, my wife and I, have thirty-five cats in the caravan over there as we speak. But school is calling young man, come along.”
And so I went to school with Mr. Bidsbey, arriving late and incurring a snide smile from Madame. But my day at school passed quickly, the condom escapade forgotten due to a child who accidentally spilt ink all over Madame Bouvoir’s white starched shirt. She cancelled class and let her husband watch over us as she went home to change. We played in the courtyard for the rest of the day.
My mother picked me up from school. On the way home I watched intently for the little man on the side of the road, but I did not see him. I never saw him again.
When we arrived at the house Jacque was waiting in the garden. He was married to my mother’s best friend. He had knee high leather boots and a black bushy moustache. His hands were large farmer’s hands, and they held a big black shotgun. At his feet lay the turkey.
“I found it,” he said, smiling.
I went up to the turkey to look at his eyes but they were no longer there. His head was blown off, leaving a ragged red stump. I left to my room. My mother watched me.
I could hear them talking, then I heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Honey, are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, lying on the bed, stroking my pet rabbit.
“Jacque’s going to take the turkey. I told him he should take it. We can have something else for our big dinner.”
Then she added, “Hey, Mr. Bidsbey said you could come over and see his cats if you want.”
“Really?” I got up.
“Yes, and don’t you worry about that turkey. It was over before he felt a thing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, now go see those cats and when you come back we’ll have ice cream.”
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
I would travel a lot photographing Roma, or Gypsies. This is a true story.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
The main difference between Ireland and England is the choice of beer. The Irish prefer Guinness and for some reason this makes them nicer people. Or so I reasoned as I held on to my bar stool in a smoky Irish pub, full of running children and soft old drunks with black teeth. I was there to photograph Gypsies for a book I was working on, but I was really there to get away from New York, my girlfriend Jennifer, my apartment, and my life. After I left home I had inherited my father’s restlessness, and I was successful on this count, across the ocean, on the move away from anything familiar. But I was not having luck finding Gypsies. The only lead I had was that they lived on the outskirts of town, in fields full of mud and barking dogs, beaten upon by relentless rain. But after several days of trudging I had only come across a small handful of people who might have been traveler types, but were definitely not descendants of the people who had left India ten centuries ago and entered Europe as “Egyptians,” soon to be called Gypsies. To boost morale and numb my already-numb-with-cold body, I began visiting bars, and as time went fruitlessly by, my time in bars increased.
It was on one of these visits that an old man leaned towards me and slurred, “Go to Wales.” he paused to light a cigarette and place it between his teeth, blackened from seventy years of Guinness and tobacco. “Go to Wales, there’s the true Gypsies.”
So, I went to Wales, more to get away from the depression of not finding Gypsies than for any wish to visit Britain. Unlike the Irish, the British seem to have let the wet and drab weather enter their veins, seeping them with humid hospitality and a waterlogged spirit. I took the midnight boat across the channel, rain and wind churning the dark sea, splashing and rolling the boat from all sides, and by the time I arrived in Wales I was sickly tired. It was gray dawn when we disembarked. In the cloudy horizon it was getting light, but I knew the coming day could not shake the grayness, as if the night would not completely let go and the sun had simply quit trying to rise completely.
It was January 7th, Jennifer’s birthday. I didn’t feel like calling her. I was sick of being responsible. I let the great expanse of ocean protect me. I would defy logic and claim there was no phone where I was.
I fell asleep in a cheap bed and breakfast, waking a few hours later to the sickening smell of old frying oil. I dressed and left. On the outskirts of this small fishing town, I found a downtrodden caravan with some chickens and an old lady who did not want to be photographed. She sent me somewhere else where I found more derelict sites with people who were unsure whether they had a gypsy heritage, but were sure that they did not want to be photographed. My morale fading, I thought of ending the trip. This would mean reconnecting with everything I had left, but my feet were cold and I was tired. From the train station, I called Lillian in London. She was a childhood friend.
“Gennaro!” Her voice sounded worried. “Have you spoken to your mother?”
“No, why?” I was apprehensive. My mother would call only if it was an emergency and I did not want to reconnect with my life in such an abrupt way.
“So you don’t know?”
“What?”
She paused, unsure how to speak. “You have to call her…it’s really important.”
“Why?”
“Your dad…he’s …sick.”
I heard the words. My dad is sick. I did not let them in.
The day got heavier, the train station sounds slowing down in the thickening air.
“Listen, I’m close to you, maybe a few hours.”
“Really, are you coming by? Will I see you?”
“I have more work to do, but yes…” Seeing her meant re-attaching my umbilical cord to New York, my family, Jennifer. It also meant respite from the mud and dogs and rain. “Yes, I’d like to come by,” I said.
“This thing with your dad-“
“Drop it.”
The phone began to make clicking sounds. “Listen, I’m gonna be cut off, I’ll call you when I’m coming.”
I took a train to another part of England, where Gypsies were meant to be. I found more fields, hit hard with rain, and some bars with stout beer. I did not see a phone, although I avoided places where they might be. Two days went by and my wet feet, heavy with mud, began heading towards London. I called Lillian at the train station.
“Have you called?” she asked.
“I’ll be in London in two hours. I’m not ready yet.”
She did not answer, and somehow that confirmed what I knew already. This was serious. I would postpone it as long as possible.
Her apartment was painted a muted red and orange, the entrance bordered by bushy plants. Her canvases were piled against one wall. Lillian’s house was like a safe haven, a stopover on my way to or from places. She never really asked me questions I could not answer.
Pushing her straight blond hair behind her ear, she looked at my tired face. “Should I run the bath for you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
As I got into the bath, I saw the phone had been placed in the bathroom. I lay there and stared at it. My father was a wild man. He had spent most of my childhood in prison. But when he wasn’t in jail, between terrorism and drug trafficking, he was rarely home. He became more a myth than a father, a wild cowboy who never came home. I planned to write his biography as an attempt to get to know him and maybe forgive him for not being there but I had always been afraid he’d die before I got the chance; overdosed on drugs, starved on a deserted island, or maybe, simply murdered. My whole life I had been scared he would die. But in a way, he was already dead for me. Jennifer said I was cold. But I had lived in a home without a father and three younger brothers to look after. Being cold had kept me going.
I picked up the phone, and called my mother.
“Where are you?” She asked gently, but I could hear the tension in it.
“At Lillian’s.”
We spoke softly, slowly, like tiptoeing around a sleeping child.
“That’s a nice place to be,” she said.
“I’m taking a bath,” I added.
“We’ve been trying to get you.”
“I’ve been in the back country.”
“It happened seven days ago.” she paused. “He had just left his girlfriend’s in Southern Mexico and was on his way to Alaska for that fishing job. He checked into a hotel room on the Mexican border on Friday. They found him on Monday. He had a severe stroke.”
“Is he dead?”
“No…not really. His heart is the only thing working …I see a touch of poetry there.” Was she being sarcastic? Her relationship with him had been rocky, intense, full of hate and love. They had broken up years ago. The last time she saw him she wouldn’t even let him into her house. I was there. I remember it had given me a physical pain and I couldn’t breathe. No, she wasn’t being sarcastic now. I guessed that she had come to peace with him somehow.
“They rushed him over the border to a Texan hospital. He’s being kept alive by a respirator. Uncle John flew down there when we heard. Your brother is there too, just arrived.”
I stayed quiet for a moment, laying on the rug, staring at the ceiling, then I said, “I’ll call and see.”
“I’ve looked into planes. You can leave tomorrow morning from Heathrow for Texas. Get there in the afternoon.” she continued.
“I’ll call and see,” I repeated.
“I love you.”
I hung up very slowly, but I could not slow down what was happening.
I picked up the receiver and held it in my lap, listening to the faint dial done. I had never really noticed how it wavered in and out. Lillian lay on the couch watching me. I phoned the hospital.
“Could I please speak to Cisco. I’m his older brother. Yes, I’m Don Church’s son.” I said to the nurse. She transferred me to another line. The phone rang twice.
“Hello?” Cisco said.
“It’s me,” I replied. “So?”
His voice was grave and dark. “It’s pretty bad. Dad wouldn’t want it this way. He wouldn’t want to be alive like this.”
“You don’t know what he would want,” I was calm, matter of fact.
“Gennaro, it’s really hard to see him like this. He wouldn’t want this. You haven’t seen him. Uncle John really wants to turn off the respirator. He’s leaving tomorrow and he wants to do it before he goes. Dad really looks bad. I agree with John.”
Things were moving too fast. This little voice on the other end of the line clashed with the soft colors of the apartment.
“Hold on, you don’t know what Don would want,” I insisted.
“He might still survive. They said he might last from a day to seven days without the respirator.”
“Is John there?” I asked. “Can I speak to him?”
“Hello, Gennaro,” John said. I could hear panic and despair in his voice. “This is really terrible, it’s really terrible. We need to let him go.”
“I’m coming, I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon,” I replied. “I’d really rather you waited until I got there, I’d hate it if he died before I saw him.”
“You see, now it’s getting much too complicated. I said this would happen if everyone got involved. I just want to get it over with,” his voice was breaking.
The colors around me became vibrant. I could smell the plants. And I was not sad. I felt calm, almost happy. Why? There was something magical about what was happening. My father was dying. He would only die once, and this was it. Some things happen only once in a lifetime. The sound of the crackling phone line, the smell of tea, my uncle’s wavering voice, the soft rug beneath me, my wet hair; it was all so vivid. Experiencing that fleeting moment became more important than anything else.
My father was dying. It would only happen once.
“John,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I trust you. Do what you have to do. I’ll be here all night.”
He was silent. Then he said, “Thank you.”
We hung up and I looked around me. I had been in Lillian’s apartment many times, and I had also left it for something new many times. It was part of my life, the life that I was always leaving and coming back to. I saw the room I was in now, I truly saw it. It was nothing to run from. It was just a room. I picked up the phone then, and called Jennifer in New York.
“Gennaro! Where have you been? Did you speak to your mother?”
“I know.” I said.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I wanted to call you, but-” I let the tears come.
“I understand.” she said.
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
The air is thick with thoughts, zipping around the neon lights like frenzied insects, most of whom are destined to die with a buzz and crackle when the mind moves on to a new idea. Self-absorbed solitary figures stand around or sit in corners, their bulbous, top-heavy heads balanced on frail, malnourished bodies.
Spindly hands turn yellow parchments, smoke stained fingers with cracked nails try desperately to hold down single sentences on the page, and wet lips silently mumble grand ideas that rarely see the light of day. Like dry grass on cliffs, white wispy hair sprouts from foreheads that stretch and strain to hold up their faces, drooping under the weight of thick glasses.
Despite the dizzying roar of thoughts that pound these cerebral cliffs like deafening surf, there is silence in the somber, book-lined room as these meek and quiet people wrestle great ideas to the ground.
c 2007 Gennaro Brooks-Church
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January 6th, 2008 Gennaro Brooks-Church
He’s a little ruffled on the edges, as if he perceived the world much more intensely than most people but didn’t have the strength to deal. He’d nervously stand behind the enclosed glass office and watch me, fidgeting and clearing his throat. I’d stand on the other side waiting.
Between us are the glass wall and the door into the building. In his little room is a button. That button unlocks the door to the building. He controls the button. His job is simple: look at my ID and press the button. But for him this is an ordeal. For some reason he cannot simply press that button.
Time goes by, him behind the glass wall, staring at me, me in front of the door, waiting with my ID held up. In my mind I send him encouragement, “You can do it, little ruffled man, just press the button so the door unlocks.” Finally, he manages, the door goes click, and I walk through into the building. The little man slumps back down, exhausted and even more ruffled than before.
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