Begin with a Joke

My friend and mentor, Jon Logan, gave me some wise and generous advice, advice that Issan would have seconded: “Always start with a joke.”

So here goes.

One bright afternoon, Isaan was walking down Hartford St. towards 18th with Steve Allen and Jerry Berg. They were headed to the hamburger place that used to be close to the corner right next to Moby Dick’s. That information might not be important unless you want to know if Issan loved hamburgers—he did—but you have to know that Steve is a Zen priest, one of Issan’s closest friends, his dharma heir, and the first Executive Director of Maitri Home and Hospice. Jerry Berg was a successful lawyer and prominent leader in the gay community, and an early supporter of the hospice.

As they walked, Steve and Jerry were discussing possible legal structures for the hospice, while Issan lagged a few steps behind. He noticed a bottle lying on the sidewalk and bent to pick it up. Yes, any rumors that he was an incarnation of Mr. (or Miss.) Clean is well-founded. But when he noticed that the bottle was rather beautiful and might be worth keeping, he took out the rag that he kept neatly folded in his monk’s handbag, and began to polish it. Suddenly, a Genie appeared! A Buddhist Genie, a Bodhidharma look-a-like, with a shaved head, droopy ears, and a bright robe. The Genie looked at Issan, and Issan looked back, a staring match of wonderment. Steve and Jerry turned around to see what Issan was holding. Issan was holding up, and they stopped dead in their tracks.

The Genie spoke the time-honored script of genies: “Because you have freed me after many lifetimes of being cramped up in that god-damned bottle, you, yeah, I guess all three of you, get one wish. It’s just one, so you’d better make it good.”

Steve didn’t hesitate: he knew his Buddhism and asked to be released from his karma and enter Buddhahood, or nirvana, or the Pure Land, right there and then. Just as he was about to raise his palms in gassho, the traditional gesture of respect—poof, he was gone.

Jerry thought to himself, "That’s powerful magic. I’m going for it. I’m not getting any younger, so how about a great life in a heaven modeled after Palm Springs—but without the humidity—endless pool parties, rafts of handsome men, and an eternal nosh that never made you fat? As he smiled and waved goodbye—poof, he disappeared too.

The Genie turned to Issan, who was left standing alone—it might have been wonderment on his face, maybe just a bit puzzled. The Genie said, "OK, honey, it's your turn. What does your little heart desire?

Issan didn’t hesitate, “Get those two numb-nut girls back here. We have a hospice to run.”

"One day not work, one day not eat," 一日不做一日不食

Originally posted Sunday, December 12, 2021

The renowned revolutionary Chinese Master Baizhang Huaihai (百丈懷海; Hyakujō Ekai) is perhaps best known for introducing manual labor into Zen Monasticism. From his rule book comes the oft-quoted phrase, “One day not work, one day not eat.” Modern Western students can thank him for samu, chopping vegetables, and cleaning toilets during our retreats.

 

Legendary teachers create legends. Some of Suzuki’s students came upon him while he was cleaning the public toilets at Zen Center. Not exactly what they expected. Perhaps their surprise was at least partly due to lingering guilt over leaving a dirty job undone.

 

One asked, “Roshi, what are you doing? Why are you cleaning the toilets?”

 

“Because they needed to be cleaned.” And there was still time before meditation and dinner.

 

It is said that Suzuki gave Issan his name during samu. Someone tells the story of Richard Baker climbing the stairs at the Page Street Center with Suzuki Roshi and coming upon Issan balancing a large industrial floor polisher, keeping it close to the floor to do its work. Machines have a mind of their own. Suzuki Roshi admired his tenacity and said, “Issan, One Mountain,” I think, pointing to some determination to quell the bumpy forces at work in our nature, or that is my story.

 

There are several versions of both these stories floating around to amuse, edify, or even prod us. Zen students love a pious yarn. They circulate like the wind, picking up little particles from each teller, sometimes veering so far from the facts that they become jokes or even lies. That is the nature of stories. I will add a few more.

 

Issan loved to cook and clean. We have to learn to sit zazen correctly, but Issan knew samu in his bones.

 

At Christmas, the first year I lived at Hartford Street, I wandered into the kitchen to find him carefully inserting cloves of garlic into a pork loin. There must have been 50 shiny white slivers obeying Issan’s careful, meticulous thumb. Raw pork, raw garlic—meat was only allowed in the kitchen on special occasions; I thought I caught a fierce look of concentration as if to wrap it more quickly in aluminum foil.

 

“What are you doing?” along with the unasked question, what is it? “Oh,” he said, “I’m trying a roast Cuban pork with mojo sauce for JD (the first resident of the hospice). He told me that he loved it, and it is Christmas.” He could never say no to JD. Many people complained that he was just continuing to spoil a spoiled child. But in my heart, I feel that Issan knew there'd be no miracles in the last few months of the young man's life. It was just cooking a tricky Cuban dish with a lot of garlic. 

 

For most of us in the Castro, “Come out the the closet” meant to be honest about our sexuality, to banish all secrets about being gay. It had connotations of a difficult process for most white middle-class gay men of that era, difficult conversations with backward, prejudiced families, about why we weren’t going to marry. Coming out of the closet opened the possibility of losing not only family but also long-time friends, jobs, and inheritance. I certainly had to deal with all those scenarios. It took years. So when Issan told me that if he was depressed, he cleaned out the closet and almost immediately felt better, my mind immediately latched onto every Gay Liberation catch phrase.

 

At the bottom of the stairs that led up to my attic room, there was a shallow closet with shelves next to the door to Issan’s room. One morning, I came rushing down the stairs, probably late for a meeting. The closet door stood open; Issan stood behind his ironing board, neatly pressing his worn underwear. He smiled and said, “Oh, I feel so much better.” He really meant cleaning out the closet. Just that. No time for my middle-class preoccupations, well, maybe the nanosecond between jokes.

 

Issan often said that Maitri was difficult work, taxing, and demanding. Once, he even compared it to war, telling me that he’s been to war, on a ship during the Korean conflict, and it was not fun. But he also said that what made it bearable was to laugh a little, have some parties, and tell a few jokes between the deadly serious bits. One of the most delightful samu tasks was baking chocolate chip cookies for the parties, wigs and skirts optional.

 

I came into the living room looking for Issan, needing to ask about some mundane detail. I asked Phil where he was.

 

“Probably cleaning the toilet with a toothbrush.” Yes, just cleaning a toilet bowl can be that difficult. I saved the joke for last. And I'm not lying.

Below is Ken MacDonald, Issan's heart student, joking, I hope. But he has an important environmental message which might help inform our samu.

Nearly 40% of the developing world’s population lacks clean drinking water, and about 2 million die each year because of it. By 2025, nearly ⅔ will live in water-stressed countries.

In the developed world, we take our supply for granted, flushing it away mindlessly. But BRITA’s latest ads seem to imply that, since the water we use for all our purposes “comes from the same source,” we are drinking sewer water. Do you think that’s tasteless?

But if you do buy a BRITA filter, don’t expect it to protect you from anything…it doesn’t filter bacteria,