Abio 18 - Two Stories for the Price of One - April 14 2024 Benicia Herald

Sunday, April 14, 2024 1,284 words

Abio 18 - Two stories for the price of one

Dorm adjustment. Year three, University Park, student dorms, me trying to adjust, my roommate is studying for the ministry. Always noise in the halls. Water fights. Three large connecting buildings that house over a thousand students, most of them three years younger than me. Three cafeteria meals a day. No Gino cooking.

Slowly, I got used to the kookiness and busy pace. I was resigning myself for the mere year. Made a few friends.

Then the unspeakable happened. Please don’t be too angry with me, but I got a call from Suzie Sunshine, the California artist I met in Ridgway over the summer. We’d hooked up briefly. I’d shown her my log cabin.

She was calling me from her home in Rancho Palas Verdes, Southern California. Daddy was a navy admiral. “I’m pregnant,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do.”

I couldn’t handle another abortion. I said, “Drive back to State College and we will share an apartment and plan what to do.”

I told housing I was getting married and they cut my lease. I rented a two-bedroom apartment, thinking roommate. Also, Suzi needed money for the journey. She owned an old yellow VW station wagon. I had only my one-time annual loan money of $1,500.

Her traveling expenses cost me $300, and then her car overheated climbing the Rockies in Colorado and tow and mechanic cost me another $200.”

When she arrived, I helped carry in all her books on transcendental meditation. She was reading Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, and aspired to meditate until all vibration in her body ceased and she achieved weightlessness. I wanted to be open-minded with her; she was so naturally sincere, bizarre, and beautiful. She handed me a copy and I read it and liked it, but I didn’t achieve liftoff. She set herself in the corner of the bedroom amid tapestries, candles, and incense.

I’d come home from school. “Honey, I’m home.”

“Sssshhh. I’m meditating.” I’d give her five minutes.

“Any luck on the job search, Suz? You’re not showing.”

“About that,” said Miss Sunshine. “It turns out I’m not pregnant, after all. I was just late. My period came when I was in the Rockies, so I was hurrying to the next town, and overheated. I didn’t know how to tell you. I’ll pay you back somehow.”

A few days later she informed me with a note that she had already moved out. A guy at her meditation group offered to let Suzi Sunshine, natural blonde California artist, share half his bunk. What a big-hearted hero. They disappeared. Bye.

I moved out immediately and bunked with three friends in a one-bedroom apartment for $84.

Fall semester, I took a course in comparative literature, Hawthorne and Melville, taught by Professor Balaban. Little did I know it would change my life forever.

Balaban started slow, short stories by each author, critique and compare. “The Minister’s Black Veil” “Bartleby.” I felt challenged by the complexity of Hawthorne’s many themes and the simplicity of Melville’s few themes.

I recall the day Balaban passed out our Moby Dicks. “We shall read this entire book beginning today and continue to the due date. Let us begin.”

Students leafed to Chapter 1. “Stop!” he commanded. “What did I say? We shall read this entire book. Let’s begin again.” Students backed up to the Introduction and began reading. He stopped us again. “No!

“Allow me to demonstrate. Put your books on your desks. Examine the cover art. It’s only one side of a whale. Read the title. What does Moby Dick mean? Is it just his name? Read the binding. Flip to the back. Read every word.

“Now you may open your books and begin reading from there, publication dates, publishers, forwards, dedications, every single review written, introduction, glossary, every word of the book. That is your assignment.”

A week before Christmas vacation the book ended, and Professor Balaban posted the two-part final exam question, due before we left campus.

Part 1: Pick any combined pair of opposites in the book – Queequeg the cannibal as Ishmael’s best friend; his tomahawk as a peace pipe, and explain their meaning.

Part 2. How does that comparison apply to the rest of the story?

Sneaky devil. HMr. Balaban made the first half look easy. People who didn’t read the book could find two opposites, but they couldn’t tie it into the story if they didn’t read it. Well done, Professor B.

I suffered over that essay for a solid week. Then a thought hit me. I never heard of a moby.

I grabbed my Webster’s Dictionary and looked up “moby.” What I found was mobile home. Recent edition. So I looked up “dick” and found dichotomy. A bell in my head rang. It’s like the whale’s dichotomous eyes, looking in both directions at once.

I pulled on my heavy, hooded coat and walked in snow to the Pattee Library to find a copy of a dictionary Melville would have used. Under “moby” was “mobility, freedom of movement.” That rang another bell. The whale tales told of seeing Moby Dick in opposing oceans on the same days. He had infinite mobility and could see in all directions. He was Moby Dick.

I wrote my paper on that and hopped in Gino’s 1957 Buick. Off we drove to Philadelphia. We were talking up a storm about what-ifs and imaginary scenarios. I was telling him about Moby Dick and how I wrote my paper.

Then it happened. It was late at night. We were not high. I asked Gino, “What if every life form on Earth died? Would it come back?” Gino didn’t know. I recall silently wondering, why do we study all these ideas and theories and wild guesses? Why do we study? Just then, while lost in thought, there was a loud metallic pop in the glove compartment, indented metal straightening out. When it popped, I went blind. I saw only oncoming white lights like stars, racing by. As I entered one, it would open to be a million more. This went on for a while, then I blinked it away.

“Gino. Holy crap.”

“What?”

“Something just happened to me, something big. It felt like every neuron in my brain fired at once.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just now. The glove compartment popped, I shot through space, sparkling lights everywhere and then it was over and now everything makes sense.”

“What do you mean everything make sense?”

“I can’t explain it. Everything just makes sense.” I was elated, but inarticulate.

Gino dropped me off at Judy’s house, a girl I had met the last time I visited. We had a dinner date and then she would drive me to Gino’s house. Judy and I were driving around Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I tried to explain this miraculous life-altering experience that had just struck me unexpectedly, out of the blue. She didn’t get it. I tried another example. She didn’t get that one either. I could tell I was starting to piss her off. Finally, she said, “If I say one more word about it, I am going to throw me out of my car.”

I only lasted a minute. “Take that old lady, for instance,” I pointed.

“That’s it. Get out. I mean it.”

She never came back for years. I found a train to Gino’s house.

Back in school, I noticed differences right away. My classes were easier. Books made better sense. My writing was more fluent. I felt in tune. An oriental philosophy course on the writings of D.T. Suzuki helped explain a lot. He wrote about the experience of satori, when we see all in each.

Descartes was fascinated by dreams. He kept notes. He writes about one dream in particular that he had in the military while sleeping in an oven for warmth. He was drifting off when he heard “A piercing noise, like a thunderclap, [or a glove compartment popping in a 1957 Buick?] and it frightens him back to the waking state, and on opening his eyes he sees about him large numbers of fiery sparks. – Cambridge.