Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Twelve

NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...

How’s this: I believe in the Superman Theory. Not Nietzsche. Forget him for a moment. I mean the other Superman. For me, it’s Truth, Justice and… You know, all the time, no matter what, no matter who. I have to be that way and, well, I’ll be telling you why. Ah, I’m spilling the beans now. I gave up lying and now I cannot stop being honest. Gets me in trouble all the time. Probably more trouble than the lying. Maybe not long term but who can tell.
And I like to dance, born to dance, because I was born next to my cousin Jean, the dancer. I like all sorts of music, show tunes, doo-wop, R&B… Big Funkadelic fan, as long as you can forget all the bad shit George Clinton did. How about “This Land Is Made for You and Me”?
How about this: There may or may not have been a place called San Francisco. And the Bay Area. Let’s be generous, for we had Berkeley those many years. That has solid mystery vibes. I may or may not have lived and worked there. And one day there may or may not have been a knock on my office door. I like that. I prefer the traditional Arabic “maybe, maybe not” instead of “once upon a time” here, even though this may have a fairy-tale feel.
Too minimalist? Too Hollywood? I get it. You see, I’ve been trying to push a sensation across. Set a tone, a mood. I’m not trying to be clever. I am good at that, though. Being clever and charming has brought me this far, after all, someone who should have been dead before puberty. I can do better, but, for a long time it wasn’t worth the effort. These days, I am trying. Again. But, of course, remember, this isn’t fiction. I’m trying to do a Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson kind of thing, you know?
“You’re really going to keep going in circles like this?”
“Please, Mel. Will you go away now and let me work?”
“Is that what this is, Herr Doktor Detective? Is this your work, now? Writing your memoirs? What a laugh. We’ll have to start calling you Watson. Oh, Watson!”
“Don’t yell in my ear… Go away, or you won’t get any dinner.”
“I’ll be back. To help.”
“Yeah, you and your Irish mother.”
“Don’t say another fucking word about my mother… You Mick on a stick… Jew in a stew…”
“What a fucking mouth on you!” Finally walking away. “Hey! Wait a second! Yeah. These are my memoirs, Miss Brilliance. You never bothered telling anyone the details, you know! The whole story...”
“Well, Mister Mouth, you never told me!!!” And she threw a pillow at my head.
“What’s wrong with memoirs, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to do that after the kind of thing that happened to me? All that television exposure?”
You know, one of these days, I’m going to have to tell the world about her.
“Once upon a time.” In one weird sense, properly speaking, that’s exactly the kind of story this is, now, even if I try to put an Arabic spin on it. Certainly, looking at it from one perspective, the perspective certain parties would like you to have, now that she’s out of the room, it has the elements of a fairy tale, the type that should end with the princess walking off with the prince. Plus, people who speak English used to expect their stories to begin that way. No one has dependable expectations anymore. You want a surprise? Arab Spring? Brexit? Trump? Weinstein? North Korean lube? And I do speak English, having taught it long ago. Once upon a time. Among other things. Not always a detective, not always chasing dogs and cats. Humanities, that’s what they call it. That’s me. Human. But I choose to start with the more obtuse “maybe and maybe not.” Maybe I’m a jerk. Maybe not. Considering. Depending upon who you ask.
They pulled on my memory as I held up to the third degree from those seventeen government intelligence agencies. Seventeen or fourteen? You see how it gets. Then again being ramrodded through four Congressional investigations. I stared back. Some of my bravest moments, if I do say. Just like Mel wrote it up. Robin would have been proud. Punch in the arm, laughing all the way down the hall proud. Doing all that to someone my age. They don’t care. Politicians. Bureaucrats. Who cares what they think I may have done? I like to think I’m still young enough to hold up to it. Pfft. I am! Take ‘em all on, one by one!
Think back to what happened to your memories when the Weinstein affair blew up, trying to recover what you had done or what had happened to you, or what you had seen in the past and never spoken up about. Who, me? For example, I mean. See what it does to you? What is normal? What needs to be rethought, relearned or undone? What needs to be compromised? Too old? Was I still too young?
Lawyers. My ass. When Mac saw those FBI agents coming, he said, “You’re gonna need a good lawyer.” I gave him Chandler’s line: “If he was good, he wouldn’t be a lawyer.” They wanted “the whole story.” Not then. I was ready, which means I wasn’t ready.
Mel didn’t have the whole story either because I didn’t give it to her. She also didn’t want to write the love story. Too girlie for her. Well, now I’m ready, really ready. And I’m a girlie kind of guy, I guess. Mel wrote that piece for The Atlantic. Applause, applause. I suppose you’ve all read it. Or you’ve heard about it. You know what happened, obviously, even if you don’t know these other details, whatever version you’ve been fed. But, this? Too girlie for her.
When I became a vegetarian in my forties, I began by eating Middle Eastern food. It’s because I met this wonderful Baha’i fellow at a Giants game. He explained it all to me. No more hot dogs after that. No, that didn’t make me an Arabist and does not influence the way I tell stories. I hope people reading this are smarter than that. But brother, is my stomach better. In this instance, the variable Arabic beginning makes more sense than the more definitive, traditional Western “once upon a time.” I may be a jerk. Or worse. I know. It seems like I’m drifting. Listen, by the time we get to the end, I promise, this will all make some kind of sense. I think. Just hang on a second more. They tell me you’re probably already getting bored. Something is going to happen in a minute. Trust me.
What’s the best way to tell a story? It depends. What story do you want to tell, and to what end? James Agee used to write about the strange, pure, magical tone that certain movies had for people, especially children, that would reverberate inside when you saw them, or stories that, when you read them, or heard them told stayed with you, became a part of who you were, your nature. A really good story should create what the French describe as frisson, that mystical remembrance. A sensation that creeps up your neck as it draws to a conclusion, a kind of identification with the essence of something that is yet isn’t present, a sort of emotional déjà vu. This is a natural response to something that you know but cannot speak. You could expect it at any moment. There and not there. A ghost but without having to believe in ghosts.
This is important. Some parents twist you with stories, they tell you things you shouldn’t know, shouldn’t think, and these have to be undone. They are undone by stories from others, told and retold. How they are retold, by teachers, by movies, literature, music, current events, love walking into your life, bombs thrown into crowds in front of you, are all different forms of life-changing events. Story-changing events. All capable of the undoing. And death.
When I tell this story over and over to myself, it’s like that. But, so far, I don’t know why. Should I? I mean, I lived it. Well, you don’t know the story, yet, do you? Not the real story.
Anyway. My Baha’i pal told me these stories about why people suffered from all sorts of illness, they explained why I was having these stomach aches, and suddenly I became a vegetarian. And cured. What’s that word the French use? But all we do is pass along each other’s stories. In the end, there aren’t that many. Something like twenty-seven or eight, they told me in grad school. Were the stories true? Who cares? You like meat? Good for you. Current events? Affaires d’l’amour? In those realms are there more than those twenty-seven different stories?
It isn’t lying, necessarily, when you tell a story differently. It’s storytelling. According to T.S. Eliot either stealing or borrowing depending upon your position. If I were Eliot, I don’t know what position I’d be in. Otherwise, you’d be mimeographing the same twenty-seven stories over and over. Mimeographing. That’s what you used to do before Google. You read Anne Sexton, a poem like “Cinderella,” and you know what I’m talking about. Either we retell stories merrily or in a more gruesome fashion, as fairy tales or nightmares.
Am I dropping names? Yes, for reference. For stability. For markers. I am also the conscientious academic when needs be. Or I lie a lot. In an academic way. Same thing.
Here, in this story, something happens, then that, and so on. But the elements of this story shoot out like the spokes of a wheel from a hub, everything runs back and forth, and in the end, maybe it never happened at all? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on trust. You see? So, I need references for stability. Because it depends, I suppose, on what, or who, you want to believe. Other people are telling different stories, aren’t they? They always will and always have. Certain interests will keep what they want known and secret as much as they can. And they will say whatever they want about other people’s stories. They’ll probably have a lot to say about mine. And me. And then, you know, the internet? Jesus. Bots, now, they have bots.
Usually, besides having a pleasant time, the whole point of telling a story really is winning. But what? In the end, what?
If you want to re-right yourself and resolve the problems you have with your memory you have no choice but to go back and reconstruct. Take your time. Be scrupulous. Give the subject the effort it deserves. Also, take a break now and again. This is a matter of rectitude, of the utmost trustworthiness. Especially if you have doubts from the start. Doubts about what you remember. Doubts about what you know. Doubts about yourself. Especially if it appears that others have doubts about you. Self-confidence is a great thing. The Dalai Lama teaches this. It is probably his primary lesson after love. That’s the way I hear him. He also tells us Nirvana is a great thing. I agree with him on that, too. That Nirvana is a great thing, not that it’s real. We need great ideals in our lives, but Nirvana isn’t real. The Dalai Lama believes Nirvana is real. I don’t know the man. Even if I did, would he tell me? I know…
To an extent, everybody has this problem about self-doubt, and always has had because everybody always has their own story, stories being what they are. Whatever they are. Formally, of course, we have the story as it exists and the story as it is told, which one can screw around with as one pleases. As I have done. You are very welcome. Some people detest this. You have been warned. And don’t say I didn’t tell you so. I happen to be a nice person in that regard no matter what others might say. And you know who.
But always one has to rely also on their own story from others. I’ve always had others in my life. Oh, brother, have I. And some stories have always been mysteries and not always for fun. You know, like Sherlock Holmes. This isn’t Sherlock Holmes. Forget what Mel said. Things are just more complicated today and not always for fun. And not always by accident. There are no coincidences, by the way. Maybe.
Say you’re driving down the street and suddenly a cat runs across the road. You swerve out of the way and your car hits a tree. Bummer. Your friend consoles you, tells you you did the right thing, saving the cat, sacrificing the car. You are a hero. Now, change the scenario. Same road, same cat, same tree. Same friend. However, you’re driving the friend’s car instead. This time your friend doesn’t take to the idea of hitting the tree instead of the cat.
Choices like hitting a tree instead of a cat might sound mundane. “Hey, your friend’s an asshole!” Yeah. But say that friend was a woman and I’d had too much to drink and punched her in a Las Vegas elevator. You might take issue with that. So might she. And, no, never happened, thank you. But some fine lines in life consist of happenstance, or the choices you make that end up pissing people off and turning them from friends into enemies for life. Or something in between. To paraphrase Casey Stengel, the secret to life is to keep the people who hate you separated from those who are undecided. You can extrapolate a great deal from that. Stengel was a genius.
Other choices are more or less pretty. I made some poor choices early in life. Did and said some stupid things. I thought they made me questionable because I thought people knew and cared about those choices, naïve enough to believe they spent a lot of time focused on me and the choices I made. I matured, those poor choices hurt others less and, after finally settling down with Robin, I even eased off beating myself up over them. But the memories didn’t stop, they intensified. Once the broom-sweeping started again, the daily memory dump became something of a Zen exercise. Perhaps more of a detention-camp punishment walk. If there is a difference.