Rafiq's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"

The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

This excerpt describes a moment in the tenth chapter, at the middle of the book, when a spiritual quest begun years earlier comes to a beautiful turning point through a chance meeting with a man straight out of a Taoist tale. If I hadn’t gone with the flow, I might have missed what this flawed wayfarer was going to reveal to me about myself.

Part of my spiritual quest included exploring mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. In the tenth chapter, I find my way back to the teachings and practices of the Sufis when a young woman on the Baja Peninsula gives me a book of poetry by the Sufi master Hafiz.

Here, toward the chapter’s end, I am living in a camperized 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon – the “whale” of the book’s title – when those teachings find their sudden expression in me. And I am both surprised and humbled.

Excerpt

By New Year’s Eve everyone in our group had moved on. Some north, most south. I had editing work to finish so I stayed. When the propane tank for my fridge and stove ran dry, I used bags of ice to cool my food and a Coleman burner to cook it. The nearest filling station was a hundred kilometres away.

Then one day a Mexican family came to the beach in a beat-up Volkswagen bus. Its windshield was cracked all the way across, it had no hubcaps or taillight covers, the sun visors were gone, and its signal lights didn’t work. But it ran fine. The father said that they were headed north to Guerrero Negro, but first he had to stop at a junk lot off the highway. I’d driven past it. A graveyard of Volkswagens, boats, and motorbikes.

I went along. I wanted to see if I could add a valve to my propane line so that I could bypass the tank in the van and use a portable one. Something that I could fill in town. We pulled into the yard and were met by a squat, tattooed, mean-looking German. The father asked about the parts he needed. He wanted them cheap. “I’m no American,” he said. “Look at me. Look at my kids.” His three shirtless boys were watching us through the side window of the bus.

The German held one eye open with his grease-blackened fingers. “Do you see anyone in here who cares?” he shouted. Then he went around the yard and gathered up all the stuff. He even took a windshield out of a gutted blue and white bus. And he let the whole lot go for five hundred pesos. Less than fifty bucks. The guy had a heart after all. He said that he would help me with the propane valve, change my oil, and rotate my tires. I just had to come back next week.

When I saw the German again, he came with me to Mulegé to get an oil filter and the parts for the propane refit. I needed him to speak Spanish at the hardware store. As payment for installing the valve, he asked me to buy him dinner. He was starving. As he devoured his southern-fried steak with mashed potatoes in a pool of gravy, he told me his story.

He was an ex-con doing time on the Baja to avoid a life sentence back home. He didn’t say for what, only that he’d had his first run-in with the law when he was sixteen and working as a doorman at a brothel in Hamburg. One night at closing time a man who didn’t want to leave threw him against a wall. The German lunged at the towering brute and clamped onto the guy’s crotch with his teeth until blood was running down his face. When the guy buckled in two he clobbered him in the head without having to reach up.

That was the day he learned how to fight the big ones. The first thing he did whenever he got put in the joint was take on the biggest guy he saw. He would hammer him in the balls, wait for him to come down, and then beat him with the frightened fury of a small man. He said that people always left him alone after that. I wondered what I was doing with this guy.

We went back to the junk lot and he worked on the propane line until after sundown. He was bruised up because his chopper had fallen over on him without anyone around to lift it off. He was lying on his back in the gravel grunting in pain. He had to work by flashlight but he got the bypass line put in. I had propane again.

I came back a few days later so that he could rotate the tires. He was cranking off the lug nuts on one of the wheels when I saw that his arm was scarred. The tattoos were melted together. “What happened there?” I asked.

“Barbecued,” he said. A drunk in a pick-up truck had pulled into the road and cut him off while he was on his chopper. He was left knocked out in the ditch with his arm under the hot exhaust pipe while the drunk sped off to find “witnesses” that he could pay to lie for him. A nurse at the hospital said that she could see the driver was liquored up but the German told her to forget it. He saved the drunk from jail so that the guy could pay for the damages to the bike.

But the German needed parts. So he asked his friends in California to deliver some stolen goods to the drunk at his house back in the United States. All the guy needed to do was mail them south. But he never did.

“Now the motherfucker’s dead,” the German said. His eyes grew wide. “It’s not for nothing I’m an ex-biker. I phoned up there and told them to kill the son of a bitch.” He rolled over in the dirt to adjust the jack. “Was it the right thing?” he asked. “I think yes.”

I was talking to a murderer. He was confessing to me. Asking for absolution. “You should’ve let him live,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“So he could’ve seen what a prick he was,” I said.

“If he didn’t know it already, he was never going to,” he said.

I watched the German sweating there on his back in the gravel and ground-up seashells of what was once an ocean floor. Like he was lying at the bottom of the world. And all I felt was forgiveness. Love.

I recalled what an American man had said to me in Nizamuddin. How the important thing was to choose one path and follow it to the end. At the time, I’d scoffed. That would be like reading only one philosopher. I’d forgotten what the Hindu thinker had said about all religions being a finger pointing at the same thing. The unifying, indwelling quality of God. I felt like I’d followed the path of Sufism to its end. Love for all in All. And I’d found my heart again.