Dining Naked and Death's Long Pining for Our Flesh
Serendipity and Surrender
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Naked Dinners and Healthy Children
REFLECTIONS ON LIFE, DEATH, AND ACCEPTANCE
“I’ve never been a controlling JAP bitch until now.” Toth hooked my friend Janice’s eyes and would not relinquish her hold. These two hippy-healer-diva wheelers had so often spoken of the conjunction of fate and fatality that Toth now confronted, the ‘what-if’s’ now coming down to ‘when’ and the “letting go” so easy to imagine in prospect seeming fierce and far too eager in aspect, a drooling maw not just unfriendly but indifferent and unending.
At opposite ends of the Southern Appalachians, these two mistresses of healing -touch and organic wisdom had created remarkably similar lives, albeit Toth had Seth, along with her three children, and until recently Janice had, in addition to her own offspring trio, much more a plethora of beaus, than any special one, whose number has included more than one madman such as the Wild Irishman himself. Sometimes the ripples of relation seem to circumscribe half the family circles of the global village. The diversity of the people in my life is so far beyond amazing that only a matchmaking service for aliens could add additional spice.
I have created a story vector along those lines, in fact, but that is a different yarn altogether---watch for it here or somewhere else unexpected, entitled “PARKING PROBLEMS.” But enough of that for now. Toth’s shining skull showed every vein and pulsing arterial interlude when Janice hurried close enough to hold her.
Toth is much more Jewish than Janice, though their cultural mutuality is as obvious as the cancer that has systematically eaten away and otherwise consumed most of what is perishable, to leave Toth Goodman as helpless as a naked child before the reaper’s calm and patient gaze. Janice Comer and I have been lovers for eight years now---my God, how time flies!---and I have yet to witness her weep under the weight of the caretaker’s mantle that, fairly frequently, she has assumed.
HIV and other terminal ailments touch those to whom she ministers---in all of the practical aspects of her life---and she carefully cultivates intentional living and intentional dying as part of the great cycle of existence, which we resist, not only at our own possibly terminal collective physical peril, but at the ultimate risk of any semblance of the sense of ‘soul’ that has mattered to our forebears from the earliest incarnations of our existence. As “Tough Toth,” a pal since first grade, lost all countenance of control in my dear Ms. Comer’s embrace, however, tears flowed freely down Janice’s cheeks as she considered her friend’s rough and rocky road, that might just as easily be her own path on any given day.
In all of our diversity, we all disembark on this voyage somehow or other; we share this cold kiss more absolutely than anything else we have in common. We eat differently, though we all eat. We shit differently, though we all shit. We breathe, come, and talk differently, in spite of the air we suck hungrily, the orgasmic connection that wires us to our cores, and the communicative caulk that holds all human culture together with simultaneous similarity. But death’s visage visits and elicits a more universally uniform unction than any other homo sapien encounter.
From the vortex of consciousness, which blesses us with every power in our miraculous lives and curses us with the animal panic which inevitably rushes forth at the impending loss of the arterial pulse, emerges every cultural component of human life. This is the crossroads of evolution, much more so than sex or any other biological bounty in our bones.
Cloning, gene-splicing, fucking with any fundamental piece of this cosmic puzzle we have barely begun to unravel and can never hope fully to comprehend, any such critical pathway---that might more effectively neutralize all of life than even the nuclear menace---emerges from our relentless tinkering with the one fate we all share equally. Religion, with promises much less tangible for the most part, also obviously comes from this creative response to the inherent destructive course of all living things. Janice had stepped into her old friend’s life, not as a result of proximity or profession, however, but because the diminutive Ms. Goodman had called: “I need you; I don’t want to go yet; I need you.”
In Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More responds to a nasty bit of cross examination with the classic line, “Death comes to us all, my Lord! Yes, even to Kings it comes,” to which his irritated inquisitor blurts back to him that “the death of KINGS is not in question here.” This brings forth the line we all want to deliver to death with Sir Thomas’s sense of barely suppressed mirth at the headsman’s coming task, “Nor my own, my Lord, I trust, until I’m proven guilty!” Of course, we are all born‘guilty,’ condemned to an unavoidable sentence, the only question the timing of the execution.
“She felt like her body was lost to her will,” Janice conveyed to me, “so she wanted to control everything else that came close enough to touch. It was exactly like she said: she was a big old controlling bitch.” This fascinating and horrifying aspect of existence, that we all await with bated breath, commands such a focused attention that none of us dares remove our minds from the matter, even as, again and again, we avert our eyes from and then recast them, repeatedly, on whatever ghastly scene any particular exit becomes.
This labile and labyrinthine relation between our most vital and most morbid expressions is something that I will examine over and over as time rolls on and I continue to stand in this place of witness and record. But that is not the primary purpose that calls me forth today. Rather, in spite of Toth’s difficult pass, the subject of my communique now is serendipity.
I have sketched out a novel---my favorite project “in development,” as my California cohorts chortle---the central subject matter of which is the biological import of both cataclysm and serendipity. The blind good luck that last week descended on Janice stemmed from her proclivity, when visiting Virginia and staying with the Goodman’s, to soak in their hot tub early in the morning.
She met Seth and Anna and Tomas there on this occcasion---Toth’s betrothed and her two elder offspring, all as naked as their birthday entrance into the earth’s and their mother’s warm arms. “I didn’t even hesitate,” explained Janice. She shed her suit like a molting snake its skin and dipped her furry flesh beneath the frothy bubbles. “We all wept,” she told me last week, misty-eyed again. “But for joy---do you understand? The blessing we were to each other and that Toth was to us?”
I averred that I thought I did, and Janice shared another incredible story of life, and death of a sort, and serendipity too, from so many ages ago that neither Anna nor Tomas had exited the hypothetical realm where the three children of Seth and Toth Goodman, at that historical moment, resided.
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“We had naked dinners at least once a month,” Janice recalled, “the kids, anybody visiting, all of us.” She remembered that Scott, her husband and father of Autumn and Terra, “was always just about to split.” They both had lovers outside of their own relations; that phase of the marriage “was exactly like the terminal phase of a long illness, just sort of hanging on without any real hope of survival.”
Seth and Toth, huge with Anna about to burst forth onto the world’s comedic concourse, had just arrived at the farm near Dallas, Georgia, where Scott lived in the old school bus and Janice and the guests stayed in the massive and ancient converted barn. Returning from what at that juncture was one of their relatively rare trysts, “rocking that school bus like newlyweds,” Scott and Janice came upon a merry meal---greens and soy and everything groovy and garlicky.
“Scott’s main girlfriend had dropped in,” Janice said to me, “and this fellow I sort of liked was there with Seth and Toth,” an auburn-dreadlocked gangly Irishman, “who was a Sufi---I’ve always loved Sufi’s.” Toth REALLY liked him too, and so did Seth. It was an old-fashioned hippy love fest, more or less. Both Seth and Sufi Jafez were taking turns listening to Toth’s pulsating belly when Scott and Janice sauntered in, hand in hand.
The combination of it all was an ineffable invitation apparently, especially Toth’s overripe fruitfulness ready to pour forth the future. “Scott and I squeezed hands and announced, I swear to God, at the same second: ‘OK! everybody! off with your clothes.’” Terra, a firmly plump four year old, always squealed about getting naked, while Autumn tended to climb on his chair or the table and display himself like a Vaudeville impressario. The adults giggled and joked too, and then proceeded to dine while they feasted, without fixation or any notion of naughtiness, on the glories of flesh in every possible state of youthful fullness and rippling rambunctiousness.
They ate and cavorted and teased and dissected every topic of current concern in their lives, from Reagan’s jingoistic mauling of Grenada to the latest theories regarding acupuncture, herbs, education, and more. Deep into the night, they sipped wine, smoked marijuana, let the children bed down on the living room sofa in front of a robust late Spring conflagration in their big wood stove, and contemplated what the meaning is of being human and fallible and mortal and tempted by every nuance of flesh and flirtation.
“Scott was never discrete. He and his girl-friend---she was crazier than she was cute, and she was really cute---wandered off at some point.” Janice belonged to the school of connection which proffered that, so long as everyone displayed his wares honestly, and helped everyone make satisfactory connections for her own gratification, “then more was better.” Scott knew that Janice really liked this Sufi surfer, “and it was obvious he liked me---there was nowhere to hide it, under the circumstances.”
When she was sharing all of this recently, Janice laughed with the combination of mellow and wicked that defines the recollections of women of a certain age. She and Scott had been considering, in the way that couples on the rocks do, another child at this juncture. “That was why we’d fucked like demons before dinner.” Normally, she would have used at least minimal precautions with another man during the fertile crescent that her female wiles always knew more or less precisely.
But Jafez---his Sufi nomenclature---was big and sweet in every possible manly way. And he was quick---to release, recover, and then revivify again the connection of coital bliss. “We were going at it like rabbits for a couple of hours. He had to have come four times anyway.” The fifth time, Janice figured that the jism supply was at a safe level, and like every woman at that moment in her lunar ambit when everything in her cunt cries for a man to stay until she can feel every contraction of coalescing contentment, she told him not to worry, “to come inside.”
Forty weeks later---each of Janice’s three pregnancies was exactly forty weeks, two hundred and eighty days in the oven as if she carried a timer in her womb---Maria exited her mama after three hours of the most glorious labor of life---bloody and hard and full of the most brutal joy of which we are capable. “At first, I was sure she was Scott’s, although when her hair came in”---Irish Sufi ringlets instead of the slick and sleek black locks of Autumn and Terra and Scott---”I wondered.”
Janice and Scott parted ways when Maria was just past a year old, and in any case, Toth took to her so strongly that “at one point, we talked about trading off for a year.” Scott nixed that suggestion, however, whatever his doubts of her paternity, Maria so much his favorite of the three children he claimed as his own, that he wouldn’t think about an extended period apart. What ultimately convinced Janice that Jafez was likely Maria’s father was Toth’s attachment.
“She was way in love with Jafez,” not in any spiritual way, “like I was,” giggled Janice, not really carnally either since they never had any kind of erotic thing happen between them. “There was just this intense chemistry---he died when Maria was only five,” a bad car accident on a Winter iced Smokey Mountain switchback. “Toth took to Maria in the same way she had bonded with Jafez, like they were cosmic kin,” or something similar.
Maria sang at Jafez’s funeral. “Every year after that, for at least three years,” Toth would ship in Janice’s youngest daughter during the Winter, basically in order to listen to the voice that had ushered out this man whose mysterious connection with her was beyond either denial or explanaiton, and to feel the presence of flesh that comforted Toth with a sense of continued presence of the flesh now rotted and gone.
“Life goes on” is trite, and it is also true. “Toth and I will never drift too far, even after she’s gone.” But for many years, after Maria turned nine or so, “we saw less of each other.” Then Toth met her personal angel of death, in the form of a colon cancer the uprooting of which proved impossible. Maria has not yet visited the sickbed of Toth Goodman---first year of college and a hellbent activist attitude keeping her on a different track---the woman for whom a decade before her song was a balm, and her body a bounteous affirmation of that which had fled.
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“We both lost track of that memory,” Janice explained to me. “Until that morning in the hot tub, while Seth and I and Tomas and Anna were weeping with the joy of having all we have, and for having had what we are losing now,” what has to go away and can only stay a brief moment more.
Maria and her Mom left for the Blue Ridge this morning, wending their way to a deathbed where Maria will sing the old songs again, this time with her acoustic guitar and the interpretive wisdom of years. “It’s what she needs, I just know it, to let go,” Janice said to me of Toth. The miracle of surrender---when every program of the sturdy stock who have implanted us in ourselves speaks of struggling, insistent on life until the last---emanates from such unlikely serendipitous sources as percolate when we let ourselves be naked with each other.
I don’t know all the songs that beautiful Maria will intone, but to one of them I have been soulfully attuned since the first time I heard it. Jackson Brown’s “For a Dancer” stretches to succor the sublime in the slough of loss that afflicts the ones left behind by each departing artist among us.
Keep a fire burning in your eye
Pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down
I don't remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must've thought you'd always be around
Always keeping things real by playing the clown
Now you're nowhere to be found
I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song playing right in my ear
That I can't sing
(I can't help listening)
I can't help feeling stupid standing 'round
Crying as they ease you down
Cause I know that you'd rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
(Right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play
(There's nothing you can do about it anyway)
Just do the steps that you've been shown
By everyone you've ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you'll do alone
Keep a fire for the human race
And let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know what will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily, it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed someone else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive but you'll never know
This “never knowing” hurts most when the journey seems so likely long and empty. The best that any one of us can hope for, in the event, is an indefineable sense of humor and grace to gird her courage, and the ability to look upon each day that he has lived as a gushing geyser of God’s gifts that the ‘dancer’ has somehow managed to come close to realizing fully. May Toth know this peace, and may the help in its giving not ache too harshly in the hearts of those who will live on for a time.
As for this Wild Irishman, I will continue to suck hungrily from the nipple of life until mother Earth’s breast for me runs out of milk. Godspeed to Toth; may her soul linger among us for as long as we last. THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!!