Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (35 page)

I would need, Old Ray said, to learn how to meditate. “Go to the experts,” he suggested. I visited the San Francisco Zen Center, where shaven-headed men and women in black robes sat in a plain
wooden room called a
zendo
, on round black
zafu
cushions, facing beige screens. They sat perfectly still for thirty minutes at a time. I could sit for five, at which point I resembled Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
, head twisting 360 degrees, moving, twitching, scratching, sneezing, laughing, crying, and suppressing an urge to projectile-vomit supernatural green bile into their Buddhist faces.

My knees hurt as I sat and my brain flew away on interplanetary missions to the darkest recesses of the alcoholic universe, but I attained a sense of calm repose, a tone of well-being. The whole world became a meditation through which I moved with a mystical sense of union. This I realized must be the Fourth Dimension I'd heard about in meetings, where one did not believe in God as some idea but rather experienced Him directly as action in the living world.

 

One day, from Munich, Germany, a letter came with an invitation to perform my poetry at an international writers' conference. I was to call Mona Winters collect, discuss details.

I called. Charges were accepted. A good sign. A German-accented woman answering to the name of Mona said that the prominent Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein had referred my name to the prestigious Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, which in turn had requested her to extend an official invitation to come read my work in an upcoming festival of international writers in Munich. I could also bring along any other American poet of my choice—but one who belonged to my “Spoken Word movement.”

“That's very nice,” I said. “So who pays for this?”

“The festival.”

“I mean, how do I get to Munich?”

“We'll fly you and the other poet round-trip on Lufthansa or any airline that you prefer.”

“Yeah? And where do I stay in Munich?”

“At a first-class hotel, paid by us.”

“Food, too?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Okay. And when I get to Munich, how do I get from the airport to the hotel?”

“We will send a limo to pick you up. Of course!”

“I got one more question.”

“Yes?”

“How do I get from my house to the airport?”

After a pause, she said: “You are so poor?”

“Lady. I'm picking my wardrobe out of the sidewalk garbage collection.”

“I do not know what that means,” she said. “But I assure you that you will not just be reimbursed for your fare to the airport but every stage of your trip will be paid in full. There will also be out-of-pocket expenses. And, of course, you'll be compensated for your reading.”

“How much?”

“A thousand US dollars. Cash.”

After a pause of slow-blinking disbelief, I said: “Same goes for the poet I invite?”

“He gets less but almost as good.”

I called Bob Holman of the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York, who said: “I'm there.”

Then I called Old Ray and said: “A miracle has just occurred.”

GOD DID NOT GET YOU SOBER JUST TO FUCK YOU over. But did God want the son of a Holocaust survivor to fly to Germany to read his poems? This thought plunged me into doubt and then despair. How could I go? Accept anything from a nation that gassed and murdered my people, hunted my own mother? A country whose nightmarish shadow had loomed over the entirety of my life?

A few days later met with Old Ray in our usual coffee shop, a nondescript place whose anonymity was comforting.

Old Ray searched my eyes. “Congratulations,” he said.

“I'm not going,” I said, and could tell that somehow he already knew that.

“I see,” he said. “Why are you not going?”

I told him. He considered. “Okay,” he said. “Well, let me ask you this. Would you say that it's God's will for you not to go, or Alan's will?”

“God's.”

“I see. But if you don't go that would be in accordance with how you have been thinking about such things your whole life, wouldn't it?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“In other words, old thinking. Your usual take.”

“I don't see where you're going with this.”

“Well, isn't it your old way of looking at life that got you drunk in the first place? So, by not going, you're just reinforcing what you've always felt and thought and admitting no other possibility, no other view. Just more of the same. Going would be different though, wouldn't it? That would mean a journey to the heart of your nightmare to see firsthand what has always been for you secondhand history. If you went, you can make your own history; see up close the concentration camps, the destroyed synagogues, the desecrated cemeteries, and so forth. Make a pilgrimage. You could also go to twelve-step meetings in Germany and stay sober in the middle of what you have most feared. This would all be the unknown for you. That is where we want to go, not into the known—which got us drunk to begin with—but into the great unknown, to experience new life firsthand, fresh adventures, your own new experiences witnessed by your own clear clean-and-sober eyes. You must go, it seems to me. God has chosen you to bring back news. What's happening there in Germany? What about the Jews there now? Isn't neo-Nazism on the rise? There's no better candidate to go than you. God wants you to be His hands and feet. So go do God's will, as it is revealed to you along each step of the way. And at the end of it, see what it all adds up to, what it means. That's my suggestion.”

 

At Munich airport a black sedan met me, whisked me off to the center of town, where a black-tie reception was in full swing at the
city hall. Dressed in a frayed weather-beaten San Francisco Giants cap that a Haight Street bum had given me, a striped boho shirt, cutoff denim jacket, raggedy jeans, and a pair of brown work boots with steel-reinforced toes that I'd fished out of Tuesday's trash, I sauntered in. Reporters and photographers circled me as though Madonna had just entered the hall. The Burgermeister of Munich came forward, hand extended. “You are the hottest new poet of San Francisco. We have heard all about you!”

Cameras rolled, shutters clicked.

“Well…” I smiled. “I don't know about the hottest…”

But no one wanted self-effacement. The moment I hit Germany, I was the “hottest” and that was that. As far as they were concerned, they had scored a big coup. I stopped trying to dissuade them of my importance and settled into the strange new feeling of being, just for now, a literary star.

In the lobby of my first-class hotel Mona Winters handed me an envelope containing a thick wad of deutschmarks “for incidentals.” From my room I called Old Ray. He had suggested I do so when I got there.

“Ray,” I said.

“You're in Munich, I presume?”

I told him about my reception.

“Yes, well. It's not your job to decide whether people should think you're important or not, hey? Huh? What others think of us is none of our business. Maybe you're more important than you give yourself credit for. This could be God's way of showing you something you should know but don't.”

“Yeah, but Ray, that's part of what I'm worried about. I know that there's God in San Francisco. But is there God in Germany? My God?”

“Well, let's see.”

“How?”

“Go to a meeting.”

“How do I do that?”

“You've got that contact number you said someone gave you for twelve-step meetings in Munich?”

“Yeah.”

“Call it.”

One hour later, as I waited in front of the hotel, a Brit named Dick pulled up in a Saab, rolled down the window: “Are you Alan, then?”

“That's me!”

“Well, get in. We'll just make it to the meeting.” And as the sun set Dick drove off, asking a million questions about recovery in San Francisco, on a drive that seemed to take hours. Then we were in a forest, the darkest and most ominous I'd ever seen.

I said, apprehensively: “What's this place called?”

“Black Forest,” he said.

Didn't like the sound of that. Few cars, bigger trees, dense woods, expected wild wolves and big razor-tusked boars and immense dagger-clawed black bears bounding from the brush across our path—but in deeper Dick went, and then deeper still, turned off onto a side road and I thought: Well, here we go. I'm now officially fucked. We'll be met by machine gun-toting Sieg Heilers, and that will be that.

Ahead loomed a military base. I prepared for the worst. The sentries, though, were American. “Here for the meeting,” Dick told the sentries, who waved him through to a Quonset hut. Inside, circled chairs filled with an assortment of civilians and military personnel. Dick announced: “Everyone! This is Alan from San Francisco. Shall we ask him to be our guest speaker?”

“I should say so!” exclaimed another Brit, a woman with bright
red hair and intense blue eyes. “It'll be a nice change from listening to your boring stories every week.” Everyone laughed and Dick nodded in appreciation.

And so I sat at the head of the group and told the story of how, just a year and a half earlier, I had lain on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, dying, and now here I was, an invited poet at an international literary festival, on an all-expenses-paid professional junket, telling my story to a group of clean-and-sober alcoholics. When I finished, met with a round of warm and appreciative applause, there was no doubt in my mind that my Higher Power had traveled with me from San Francisco to Germany.

 

Mona Winters informed me that news of my coming had spread throughout the network of German and Austrian literary institutes known as
Literaturhäuser
and I had received an additional four invitations to perform in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Salzburg, and Berlin. Holman could join me for three of those, she said, but in Berlin only I had been requested. In return for this, my ticket would be extended at their expense, I would stay in hotels and private apartments as a guest, and would receive travel expenses to each city, out-of-pocket expenses, and fees ranging from $500 to $1,000 per reading. Would this be, she wanted to know, all right?

Certainly.

Holman arrived the next day. That evening we performed for the festival. My reading was telecast live nationwide to 60 million viewers on Germany's equivalent of
Sixty Minutes
. As I read “Last Emphysema Gasp of the Marlboro Man,” I glanced down at one point to the foot of the stage, where a mob of camera lenses was aimed at me. A month before, I had performed the same poem to an audience of ten, most of them half asleep, at a Sunday afternoon reading in San Francisco.

I had another pact to keep, one I'd made with Old Ray, to visit sites of the Holocaust wherever I went. In Munich took a suburban commuter train to Dachau, where I found drunken German soldiers clutching beer bottles as they weaved arm in arm, singing, through the concentration camp, a tourist site replete with gift shop and a soccer field right behind the gas chamber complex, where a soccer match was in progress, fanatical fans cheering good plays near the crematoria. I had brought a prayer book and yarmulke and stood over a mass grave, said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

The next day visited a Munich synagogue walled in by security barriers and barbed wire. An Israeli sentry in a small watchtower with bulletproof windows kept vigilant watch. He asked questions and checked my papers before allowing me into a modest-sized synagogue with a tiny congregation of bent old men and one or two youngsters with sallow, inbred-looking faces such as I had seen in photos from the Warsaw ghetto. They were a man short for a minyan, the quorum of ten required to hold a proper prayer service, and so greeted my arrival with considerable fanfare.

I was called up to the Torah to read—an honor. After, they crowded around me. They were, compared to me, so small, tiny even, many with numbers on their arms. They insisted that I remain for lunch, which I couldn't refuse. We sat to a long table in the synagogue attic, their wives and daughters bearing trays of kosher food. More prayers were said, and then my plate piled with one delicacy after another, all homemade, and no sooner had I eaten than more was heaped on. They all watched happily as I ate, seemed to enjoy my pleasure in the food even more than eating it themselves, and asked me numerous questions.

Then the head rabbi, a large, bearish man with a gentle bearded face, broke his silence to ask: “So what brings you all the way from San Francisco to our little synagogue?”

They all waited for my answer.