Impossible Vacation (16 page)

T
HERE’S AN OLD
Tantric idea that excessive indulgence in sex can take you to the other side and free you of a need for it. I thought I was going to have a chance to test it. I could see opportunity looming on the horizon in India, of all places. Yes, I was off to try to take a vacation in India, the place where Tantric sex began.

Meg had the great idea to import Kashmiri rugs and sell them at one of the New York City flea markets. She had saved some money and borrowed enough money from her father to pay for two round-trip tickets and buy the rugs. I had saved money from unemployment and my furniture-moving job to live there, so we were off.

One minute we were in New York City feeling like it was the center of the world and the next minute we were in Amsterdam, stopping over on the way to India, riding in from the Amsterdam airport, looking out the bus window at people skating on the frozen canals. It was a dark, cold, ancient Brueghel scene: small fires burning on the ice with lean, dark figures skating all around. When I could see it as a picture, I felt safe, but when I saw the people as living, individuated others, I felt undermined and depleted, uncentered and swept away, like that time on the beach with Mom at Jib’s out-of-the-blue homecoming when I first perceived that there was a world elsewhere. Now, riding into Amsterdam with Meg, seeing all those people skating, I had a deeply disturbing thought: Why me here—why can’t I be them out there? It was ludicrous, but at that moment I had the fantasy that there was a choice involved and I could have been some Dutch person skating out there instead of who I was. That feeling
permeated my entire being, stole me away, reduced me to a frozen scarecrow, a heap of overstuffed winter clothing sitting beside Meg.

We got off the bus and looked for a taxi to take us to the home of our friends Hans and Sonia as a cold wind swept down. I could not visualize the place from which that wind blew. In New York I would imagine Chicago and the sweeping plains, or Albany and Montreal; but now I couldn’t tell. I could imagine nothing of the landscape beyond that little patch of street on which we stood, all hunched in the cold. We were in Holland, the tulip capital of the world, and it was cold and gray and there was not a tulip in sight, but it didn’t matter because it was all new and beyond tulips.

Hans and Sonia were a mime team. I had seen them doing a street mime in Washington Square a year before and offered to put them up for a few nights when they needed a place to stay. Meg thought it was real weird of me to drag them back to our apartment, because she knew how much I hated mime. But they weren’t so bad; at least they didn’t work in whiteface, and they seemed to be genuinely in love. They treated each other with mutual respect and concern, holding hands, touching each other in a nice simple way. We planned to spend the night with them and then fly out to Delhi on Air India the next afternoon.

Sonia was pregnant and looked radiant. Hans was his old tall, dour self. We ate thick Dutch homemade pea soup with little hot dogs cut up in it and drank room-temperature beer. Everything tasted good. The feeling in my eyes and mouth was like a child’s. We were four kids all having our own little backyard party. The only reality that dimmed that fantasy was Sonia’s pregnant belly.

Meg and I slept under an old cozy Dutch eiderdown in their attic room. I dropped off to the sound of the north wind blowing like it was coming from the cheeks and lips of a storybook Mr. North Wind cloud. The banging of old rusty iron shutters and the shivering of distant buildings turned my dreams into a great animated cartoon of winter.

I was awake the whole next night straining on Air India to see anything, any glimpse of the wildly imagined landscape below. Meg slept while I pressed my nose to the window and saw a portion of my face, reflected, which I first mistook for Turkey or Saudi Arabia.

Soon it was dawn, but we were too high up and over too many clouds to see anything of the earth below. Meg was still asleep. Almost everyone else was too, so I felt free to explore.

I stretched my legs near the cockpit door, and with that haphazard boldness that often comes from lack of sleep I just reached down and turned the handle, stepping into the cockpit, where there were three Indian men all dressed in pilot uniforms. No one protested or acted surprised, as it all continued like a waking dream. Slowly adjusting to the intricate, innumerable dials and panels, I zeroed in on two of the pilots, who were carefully taping a newspaper comic strip across the front window with two rolls of Scotch tape. I could see nothing but funny papers. “What are you doing?” I cried. Both pilots turned toward me, their heads bobbing like strange dolls. “We are flying directly into the sun now; we are on automatic pilot.” I forced a smile and staggered back to my seat. There it was, spread below my window like an endless hot, colorless mud pie: India. I didn’t want the plane to land. I felt like I’d already seen too much.

I was dazed in the airport. I followed Meg like a somnambulist. She turned and pointed and following her hand I was swept away into some other world. It was a strange family scene she pointed at—not a family waiting for a plane but a family engaged in communal repair work on a brick airport wall. They were mixing mortar in an old wooden trough. A slight man, dressed only in a loincloth, was squatting by the trough, playing with the mortar like a fascinated child. A woman dressed in a beautiful sari stood chipping at the brick with a little trowel. Surrounding them was what I took to be the rest of the family: an older woman in a sari pouring tea and two young girls holding babies in slings. The scene was slow and self-contained, like some strange piece of theater composed to usher travelers into the rhythms of ancient India. We watched and we sighed. We felt something together, like “Here we are at last.”

Like the trip from the airport into Amsterdam, the ride into Delhi was confusing; but there was no time to reflect on it. We both held on for dear life as the cab careened through streets of chaos. I only had time for two thoughts: one, how Gandhi had ever imagined he could bring peace and order into such a place, and two, that I did not want to die here and that was what I felt was about to happen. Precarious,
chaotic, whimsical anarchy is all I saw. Our driver leaned on the horn the whole way, which made a high-pitched, crazy, raspy, tinny sound as he wove from lane to lane, trying to avoid the huge cows that were standing docile in the road like stuffed museum pieces. People in the sweaty hundreds squatted by the edge of the road doing everything Western people usually do in the deepest privacy of their bathrooms. Motorcycles buzzed by with whole families balanced on them, Mom in her sari sitting sidesaddle behind smiling Dad, a baby in her arms, a child behind her, and another one balanced on the gas tank between Dad and the handlebars, and they were all smiling this crazy smile. It would not have surprised me to see one of them doing an Indian classical dance on Dad’s head. Big, steaming colored dump trucks roared by; on one of them we saw a man dressed in shorts riding balanced on the front fender, one hand holding the side of the hood up while his other he adjusted the carburetor, working the throttle while another man steered his truck through flower vendors, crazy people, happy people, dying people. The scent of jasmine, and the smell, the great smell of streets mixed with cheap diesel fumes. This was an overpopulated world, and it immediately brought up those old colonialist attitudes in me: There must be some order imposed here immediately! There are too many people in the world! Humankind is a virus that must be stopped!… I never sensed my father in me more—that constant, almost fascistic craving he had for order and control at all costs.

Exhausted, we reached our little hotel. I just wanted to go upstairs, lock myself in our room, lie on the bed with the overhead fan on, and read about India. I never wanted to see that insane, chaotic vision in person again.

I tried to make plans to avoid the lack of structure that might sweep one or both of us into the country’s irrational, crazy mouth. But I needed some direction; I needed to be in India for a reason. It was clearly no place to take a vacation.

Meg had direction: her rugs. I needed to tap into my own interests. I didn’t want to live through Meg, to be led through the rug markets of India like a helpless child. We both decided that it would be good for our relationship to explore a little independence, to see if we had developed a center that we could come and go from. But
my idea of freedom, although I didn’t voice it, was sexual freedom. I was stuck in some adolescent mode and I could only equate freedom with the ability to get laid anywhere, with anyone I wanted.

I heard there was a new guru in India who dealt exactly with that problem. He had a huge following of Westerners. His name was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and word had it that he advocated you could only get over your need for constant sex and get into greater spiritual realms by having so much sex that you got sick of it. His theory, or at least the way it came down to me, was that because sex had been forbidden by our puritanical parents, we all thought—as I did—that sex was what we wanted more than anything else in the world. Until we got past that, we would never grow up; we would never pass on to larger issues of commitment and meaningful labor. And best of all, what the Bhagwan advocated for getting through these sexual hang-ups was doing it—doing a lot of it. He preached a kind of homeopathic sex cure, fucking your way to the other side. And if there was anything I needed a cure from, it was those compulsive thoughts about sex. All I wanted was to get laid over and over again with a stranger. I had the notion that pure, isolated, uncomplicated, nonintegrated sex could cure me. Sex was best for me with Meg when I could manage to turn her into a stranger through fantasy, and that was getting more and more difficult. So I wanted to keep Meg as a comfortable friend and explore the rivers of anonymous Dionysian sex; that was my idea. I had to go to that island of licentiousness, that bastion of free love located right in the middle of the sexiest-sounding town in India, Poona. I was sure the Bhagwan had a great sense of humor and had decided to locate his free love ashram there just for the turn-on of that name, Poona. Can you imagine pooning in Poona? Just saying it gave me an erection.

Before we explored my sexual healing and her rugs, Meg and I made the mistake of deciding to see one or two of the sights together. It was the end of February and still pleasant, but we were told that within a month’s time it would begin to get too hot to travel and by April it would be unbearable.

Our first side trip was Meg’s idea. She wanted to see the Taj Mahal. I wasn’t real interested; I’d never been keen on grand palaces. But Meg really wanted to see the Taj and I agreed, because after the
Taj I wanted to see Benares and Meg wasn’t real interested in
that
. We made a deal to take turns.

On the train to Agra to see the Taj, Meg ate some scrambled eggs. Two hours later, just as we stepped onto a glorious walkway that led over golf-course-green lawns being cut by giant lawn mowers pulled by white Brahma bulls, Meg collapsed into a moaning heap. She had never been in such pain, she cried. I didn’t know what to do. I was torn. There was one of the wonders of the world, a trumpeting edifice of white marble just crying out to be explored, and here was my girlfriend practically dying at my feet. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did it: I left Meg in a heap and ran to the Taj to take a quick peek. Of course I couldn’t enjoy it. With the thought of Meg lying out there in a sick heap on the lawn I could hardly see it. But I could hear it. It was crowded with Indian tourists all calling out and yelling to hear their echo, although there were Silence signs hanging everywhere.

By the time I got back, Meg had dragged herself into the shade of a flame tree and some sort of Indian holy man was bending over her, trying to force-feed her something. I could see her groaning and turning away from the Indian as he held a dirty glass of some vile liquid to her lips. He said, “Please, I am trying to give the madam some health.” Meg was moaning, “No, no, no, take him away, Brewster. Please take him away.”

By that point I was almost carrying Meg. She was doubled over in pain. I managed to find a bicycle rickshaw, and as we headed for town I screamed at the rickshaw driver, “Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!”

He took us to a small clinic in Agra. There was a long line outside, but when the people saw two Westerners, one of whom was in great pain, they stood aside to let us pass.

As soon as the doctor saw her he wanted to give her a shot. I said, “But do you have throw-away needles?” and he said, “Did you bring your own?”

Whatever was in that shot calmed Meg’s stomach down. We took a room in a small hotel nearby and both of us fell right into a deep sleep.

We awoke very early the next day, and still in half-sleep, without breakfast, we took a rickshaw to the train and that’s when it happened again: we went back in time. It was ancient, ancient, ancient. There
were no sounds of motors, not a car anywhere, only thatched huts and shacks and people coming out of the shacks in multicolored robes only to lift them and squat in a soft morning haze of burning cow dung, amid the moans of cows and the easy, soft pedaling sound of our rickshaw. Both of us sat there silent and suspended in the newness of a place that had not changed its slow habits for two thousand years.

In Benares we decided we would splurge and stay in a Western-style hotel where I could buy Indian beer and we’d have a small swimming pool. We arrived at night, went to sleep early, and got up early. It was still dark when we woke a sleeping rickshaw driver and got him to take us to the ghats on those holy shores of the Ganges.

It was still dark when we arrived. There were very few people around, but there were several boat-tour men; so off we went for a rowboat ride across the black, swirling Ganges. There were no lights and therefore no way to get your bearings. Our boatman rowed in silence. The river rushed and swirled. We sat silent and dazed, waiting for the first light of day to show us the ancient river’s edge.