Good-bye and Amen (13 page)

My world was tiny. It was the size of my head. What
was real was what I personally could see or feel and what I felt was: Alienated. Everywhere. It was excruciating.

 

Benedikte Bastlund
I remember an American Moss boy at the farm one summer. Interesting looking, but sullen, and with no curiosity or languages. He had no idea that his sister Monica was named for a hero of our Resistance. He didn't even know that his aunt had been in a concentration camp during the war. She was a marvelous woman, Nina Moss. But the American nephew, Johnny, was not of interest. I really can't remember much about him except how much he complained about our tobacco. If you don't like it, don't smoke, for heaven's sake.

 

Frannie Ober
Oh well, you know. First love. My parents didn't much want me hanging out with rich summer kids, so that made him very attractive. He was furious at his father and I was furious at my mother, always a bond. I don't know why
I
was furious. I think maybe it was that my mother and I had been too close when I was growing up and I didn't know how to draw away gradually. I was too important to her, you know? For her own reasons, which weren't my reasons. But why was Jimmy so mad at his father? I don't remember. Really, he was mad at everybody. He said he was a cuckoo in the wrong nest.

There was a time when we thought we would run away together and live on Beal Island, and make all our clothes and food ourselves. It was the sixties. We'd have windmills to make electricity. I'd weave cloth and make patchwork quilts. Jimmy was going to fish and farm and we'd raise beautiful barefoot babies, a girl for him and a boy for me,
and we'd never misunderstand them and they'd be perfect humans. Doesn't it sound wonderful?

For one thing, Jimmy was very, very funny, especially when he was drunk or stoned. He was mean, but he was funny. Mean about other people, his parents and sisters, never mean to me that first summer. And of course there was sex, which we personally invented. I'm surprised you didn't know that.

But the second summer, when he came back from Denmark, he was different. He was or I was. He was more angry than funny. Once or twice he turned that on me, and I didn't like it. Plus I was going to college in the fall and looking forward to it. Jimmy wasn't looking forward to anything.

He hitchhiked to visit me in Northampton that winter and brought a couple of tabs of LSD. I don't know where he got it. He was supposed to be finishing high school but it sounded as if all he did was hang around Harvard Square. He got angry that I wouldn't drop acid with him, and I told him I didn't want to see him any more.

 

Jimmy Moss
I was completely lost when Frannie broke up with me. She was my world, she was all I could see. I wanted to kill her. I thought she'd taken my life from me.

I hung around the music scene in Cambridge. You could live for nothing in those days, and I did. We were all going to live together and die together,
mi casa es su casa,
the musicians. The freaks. There was a lot of dope, and we discovered macrobiotics;
that
was going to change the world. We had malnutrition and we weren't very clean, but the highs were something. There was plenty of acid if you knew the
right people. There was a whole apartment down in Kinnaird Street painted black, an acid factory. You could crash there too.

God, it's weird to speak this language again. Another country and another time.

I met a guy who'd spent a summer in Peru and brought back a gourd full of coca powder that he'd learned about from the Quechua people. They were the last of the Incas. Wait, maybe it was coca leaves, and you'd chew them and then activate the drug by dipping a wire into the powder in the gourd and licking it. I forget.

There were magic mushrooms. There were peyote buttons. I'd try anything. And I threw up a lot.

The music scene. The Jug Band—people making music by blowing across the top of a jug? Playing washtub bass? Playing the washboard with thimbles? Bluegrass on fiddles, blues on a twelve-string guitar—it was like LSD, when the rocks and trees start talking to you. Those instruments made out of nothing, that lost music, suddenly pouring out of every open window. For other people, maybe the music was one diversion among others. For me, it was like the music breathed for me.

When I worked, I worked as a roadie. I'd carry those people's amps, I'd drive their third-hand vans, just to be welcome in the dressing rooms. The one thing I wouldn't do was work for a band that used keyboards. That was too dangerous. It would be like being taken up to the top of a steeple and dared to jump off to prove I could fly. Way too dangerous. For who I was then.

On my first LSD trip, I walked around Cambridge Common with some boy who'd taken what, two trips? So he
was my “guide.” On the grass in the sun I saw a little girl in an orange coat and realized she was God. It was all so clear. I wanted Frannie to see God too, with me. I wanted her to be unhooked from all the things that link you to your tribe, all their programming, then we'd be free together.

 

Frannie Ober
I hadn't wanted to break up with Jimmy that weekend. But he got so hurt and angry. He said I didn't understand what I was saying no to. I said I just couldn't give away an entire weekend, I had papers to write. Also, I'd heard from someone that acid could cause chromosome damage that would hurt your babies. That made him madder—that I would give some wild rumor about something that might damage some imaginary baby ten years from now more power than going to find God with him right then. We were on completely different tracks. I told him I loved him and I hoped that he'd come back to me someday, but for right then, I wanted him to go away.

I can't tell you how many times I wanted to call him back to me. But who knew how to reach him? And he was so proud, I knew he'd never call me. It was a miserable winter. Sometimes I'd hear rumors about him. Angry, funny, beautiful, trapped Jimmy. I'm not sure that I don't still miss him. A couple of years later I even tried LSD with some other guy. I saw a lot of colors I'd never seen before, or thought I hadn't. I spent about four hours looking at an artichoke. But I guess to see God, I'd have had to trip with Jimmy. And he was long gone.

 

Jimmy Moss
Once Monica came to Cambridge to find me. She bought me dinner and gave me all her money. I explained
about how I lived, and that I was all right. I told her I'd heard the Carter Family play in the basement of a church right off the Square. Mother Maybelle Carter herself with her autoharp. Monica got it. She told me Mom was wild when I didn't come home for Christmas. I said to tell her Too bad.

 

Monica Faithful
I went to find him because I missed him, but also because I knew Mother had cut off his allowance, thinking that would force him home. I didn't want it to drive him further away, where we
couldn't
find him. He showed me where he was living at the time. I met a couple of his friends. He was very thin and had a scraggy armpit beard, but he seemed sane. He let me buy him a steak, even though he said his girlfriend wouldn't come near him when he ate meat, she said the smell came out on his skin. I asked him to tell me more about her and he said, “Well, she hasn't given me crabs yet.”

 

Jimmy Moss
Nika gave me her number at college and I called her now and then. Just to hear her voice, or sometimes to ask for money, which she always sent if she had it. But I didn't go home for a couple of years, and when I did, it was to ask them to give me my share of what would come to us when they died. Papa understood what I was saying. I wanted them to be dead to me.

I did also want the money. I'd met some people who'd gone in search of living shamans. Some musician friends who mostly did weed were getting paranoid behind it. The acid thing, with no real guides, could be just another light show. Or it could turn dark. I don't mean the famous flashbacks, or the kids who thought they could walk on water
and drowned instead. I mean that if the rocks and trees start talking to you and you don't know which ones to listen to, you can go down a shadow path. I'd seen God once and I wanted more of the real thing. The drugs by themselves weren't showing me anything new.

These days, I see my father every time I look in the mirror. It's a comfort. My hands are his hands. I catch sight of myself in a glass from the corner of my eye, and there he is. It always makes me happy.

But then? I was enraged at him for not protecting me. From being smothered, from being used as a stand-in for some perfect being my mother thought she loved. Not that I understood any of that. I wanted Jimmy Moss to dry up and split open like an old pod and let some new being emerge pink and naked, a child of the universe instead of a particular human family. Every family is a story. Every single one. But I was sick of mine. Or maybe of all of them.

I don't really know where the inheritance went. I wasn't exactly keeping meticulous records. Most of the time I couldn't keep track of my socks. I left Cambridge. And wound up guess where, San Francisco. The freaks there were more serious about their spirit lives, but they also had some meaner dope. Cocaine. Junk. I saw some things that really, really scared me, which wasn't all bad. I heard of some stuff called ibogaine made from bark in Africa, that gives you a different kind of trance, where you see your whole past and understand it. I decided to go there. I wanted to take it with the people who discovered it, in the birthplace of
Homo sapiens
. That required a major amount of dealing with the institutional universe. Money, passports, visas. Airplane tickets. (I took a few people with me.)

A year or two after that, I decided to do ayahuasca, from the Amazon, in the Amazon. I took a few people with me that time too. Two of the women had their moons when we finally got where we were going and weren't allowed to be part of the ceremony. One of the guys just pissed himself and vomited the whole time, which was disappointing for him. I got where I was going, though. That's when I began making my way back.

 

Monica Faithful
I thought it would be easy to share the house. That's really what I thought. It was going to be great for everybody. Dundee was my life on an ideal planet. In Connecticut when I was young, people noticed if my hair was all wrong, and that I had no backhand and didn't care. In the places Norman and I had lived, I was always having to present myself and explain myself, to try to guess what was expected and then live up to it. In Dundee, it was as if I had twenty brothers and sisters who all saw the point of me, and I of them. We'd sailed together, fallen in and out of love when we were teenagers, our parents were friends and our children are friends. My friends there read books and play cellos. Some of them are eighty, some of them are ten. It's the place where I always feel that I belong. Some people never feel that anywhere.

So I had planned to get up to Dundee early and I could have helped get the boat straightened out, but to be frank, things in Sweetwater were feeling very…I don't know, itchy. I was distracted. Norman's new curate was a woman named Lindsay Tautsch. She's one of those square-shaped young women, stolid, like an engineer, and she runs rather cool. At least with me. Also, she'd grown up in the area and
had her own little power base. In early June, she suggested we have lunch together. It wasn't convenient for me, but we had it, and I couldn't figure out why. I kept waiting for her to drop her bomb or ask her question…let me know what the subtext was. She never did. We ate our soup and half a sandwich, and then I ordered coffee and she ordered hot water, and she looked at me kindly, and sighed.

 

Norman Faithful
I came home between counseling appointments to hear what La Tautsch had wanted, and Nicky wasn't there. She was downtown buying more books. This is a sickness. She had about eleven books in a stack by her nest in the den that she hadn't finished or even started, and here were three more, one a great fat book about Vichy France that cost thirty-five dollars! If she lived to be 108 she'd never get to read them all.

 

Monica Faithful
Then one of my favorite people in the parish, old Mr. Sector who'd been an elder for decades, got crosswise with Norman because he kept singing the old tunes to the hymns when Norman had called for the new improved ones. Norman is all about the church keeping up with the times. Change is good. Mr. Sector couldn't carry a tune in a bucket so it didn't make much difference what tune he sang, but as senior warden he leads a lot of people in the community so Norman called him on the carpet about it. Mr. Sector told his wife he'd been called down to the church to be exorcised.

He always wore a cutaway and a top hat on Easter Sunday, Mr. Sector. They're lovely people.

Norman took the job at Good Shepherd in Sweetwater
about a year after the Hawaii business. He needed a fresh start, and he thought the parish might be a better fit for him than New York had been. But things haven't always been smooth sailing for us in Sweetwater either. For starters, on his very first Sunday Norman looked out on the congregation and there in the third row sat the McChesneys, his tormentors from Holy Innocents. They'd driven all the way across the state of Pennsylvania to be there and go to the coffee hour and stir up trouble. Do you believe it?

Norman weathered that, but he did then get out in front of his constituents in a couple of ways. He took a stand in favor of gay marriage that he could have prepared them for better than he did, and he published a pamphlet called
A Priest Asks,
about the spirit world. Why, he asks, if we believe that Jesus' spirit was personally intact after the death of his body, so that he could appear to people and everything, wouldn't we also believe that something similar happens to the rest of us? If Jesus' life is a pattern for us to follow? Of course, some people found it threatening, and some found it plain nuts. Then a couple of years after we got there, Norman went off campaigning to be bishop of New Jersey. It was Hawaii all over again. He made the final cut, he was by far the best preacher, and he had great strengths the diocese needed, but it went to the archdeacon of the diocese. Another inside candidate. Norman took it hard. Really hard. And people in the parish didn't like thinking that Norman saw Good Shepherd as a booby prize. Why should they? They think Sweetwater is paradise.