Be Here Now all over again

Here is a story from my first year in India along with a few facts about life in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister and her husband in Shimla. She wanted to visit because it was used as a setting in so many Bollywood movies. Early one morning we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a rinky-dink cab with a madcap driver--even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost seven hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under five. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on Indian roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems miniscule until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The power brokers of the British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. A mile and half above sea level, Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s a more picture perfect hill station than our humble McLeod Ganj. There’s a pedestrian mall that you get up to via a crowded elevator, a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings still in use as offices for the renowned Indian bureaucracy, lots of restaurants and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed British civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been carefully preserved. 

One of the oldest small gauge railroads in India shuttled the overlords, their families and extensive retinue up the steep mountain. Though still connected to the Indian Railway, it’s kept in service as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking about Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the remnants of the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. Though this goes back to ancient times, a very recent addition to the landscape has been a huge statue of the monkey god, 108 feet, higher up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon our little group took the toy train down hill. On the way back up we were told about a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate one of the baba’s was chanting, breaking coconuts and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not brand new; perhaps the new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. The only way I can describe it is “very Indian.” Even though I’d met several Indian teachers in California, including Swami Muktananda who came with all the cultural guru trappings, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It was certainly not something that Father Halloran would be doing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s--breaking coconuts and pouring the milk over the hood of mother's Ford station wagon, but I can hardly get that image out of my head now that it's planted.

We managed to squeeze past this elaborate ritual and came into a large hall where there was some intense chanting, surprisingly so. In most Indian temples people line up, offer a few rupee notes, get a blessing and leave. As a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized, but Saturday outing at a temple, and people were posing for selfies with the monkeys using their smartphones. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but the whole scene still felt very foreign. There was a lot of family talk in Hindi and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off.

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to the level below the main hall where there was another highly decorated temple on a small courtyard. I was the only person there. I wandered in, and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sādhu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! It was not that particular emotional feeling that Indians describe as bhakti. It was more deep recognition; “I know that man.” The lifelike, life sized, very colorful, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen somewhere. I pulled out my phone and within a few minutes had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. Neem Karoli was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering these hills of northern India. His main temple and ashram were further north in Uttarakhand but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his disciples. The deity fit; his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman.

640 × 426

The pieces tumbled together. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote the wildly popular New Age book called “Be Here Now” in the 70’s. It became one of the Bibles of the hippies. I met him on four or five occasions. He was always extremely gracious and lively. Even in a large group, he seemed to be able to focus on you in a way that felt very personal. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died and Steve had resigned because Phil did the introduction. 

Even though the enormous death HIV/AIDS toll had begun to decline by the mid-90’s, there were still thousands of infected men facing an early death. An overflowing crowd sat zazen in our small zendo. Ram Das sat in the teacher’s seat and, as I remember clearly, his head seemed to be on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards, staring straight ahead.

He began his talk with a kind chuckle and said, “I am going to talk about the Self and dying. Oh sorry, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” Then he began to talk about one of his visions after he first returned from India: to create a center for conscious dying. The idea was to establish a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in various conscious exercises, including mediation, during their dying process. He even said that he had a location picked out. Then he said that he, or the group that was working with him abandoned the idea because no one was interested. I wondered why he would throw this out into a group of gay men, the majority of whom were facing death. Was it a kind of challenge? How would they choose to spend their few precious last months, weeks, days?

Then he turned towards me and asked me about the hospice. I said that Issan had been committed to making life as normal as possible for the residents, but we had no requirement that residents had to be particularly conscious, spiritually or otherwise, during their last bit of this-life-alive time; that we were committed to allowing the individual's path to unfold. There were however a few residents who meditated as much as possible. He nodded and smiled. 

We collected a few hundred dollars that evening to help pay the bills, but we received a different kind of gift, not pouring coconut milk over a second hard car, but an invitation to examine what was really important about life, especially when the end is definitely in sight. 

Allen and Phil's last conversation

I can’t say that I had a front row seat, but I got as close as he allowed, even to his friends. I was present at all their meetings when Allen came to Hartford Street during the years that I lived with Phil. Perhaps a few others acted as his amanuensis, but I picked up the task whenever I could, knowing that it was a rare privilege. I answered the door and made the tea. It happened in what were our public room so it was appropriate to be there, but I was polite, kept my mouth shut and listened carefully. 

They were giants and yet in some ways they acted like kids on a sandlot. Of course they were older so the shouting was replaced with lots of pauses, keywords that brought a chuckle, “do you remember…” followed by the briefest notation said more than enough. They were old friends who never had enough time together, old friends at the end of their lives who realized that there was never enough time but what did remain was precious and had to be enough. They always seemed to pick up exactly where they left off. I sat trying to hear where there was perhaps new insight, but their love for one another, the appreciation and respect between them was so thick it didn’t matter.

Their meetings were like clockwork. Phil was always getting ready to go to the zendo as he did twice every day, and that took at least an hour. Allen would arrive at 3:30, 4 at the latest. It never went much past 5:30. Allen would always politely excuse himself saying that other friends were waiting. Allen was a creature of the night, and Phil only operated in daylight where he had a fighting chance of avoiding the sharp edges of furniture and the unexpected drop of steps. Dinner or lunch for some reason were never included. Perhaps it was the noise of a restaurant, or that they wanted to get to the part that mattered, being with one another.

Allen had become what he always wanted, a public figure whose opinion was sought after, a poet whose work was respected, a firebrand who fought for things he really believed in, even if it was Nambla. I cannot say if Phil was happy being a Zen monk with the same certainty. I never got the sense that he had really found a true vocation, but it was a job he relished, and he did it so thoroughly and thoughtfully that he appeared happy though there was always some dogged anger that would appear when you least expected it. There were other rewards for him, like really discovering his true nature which is not an insignificant prize. 

Phil had a small circle of devoted friends, and they were faithful. He was a great raconteur and lively companion. They would come and visit, Lou Hartman, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure,

but I only saw Phil cry twice. By the time that Issan took his last breath, it was the end of such a long difficult process that there were not many tears. Our breathing, all of us had been as hard as his as we sat by his bed. We were too worn out to cry. No tears.

But when Phil  told me the story of the search party for Lew; how Gary had organized a posse looking and hoping that he was not lost, his eyes filled with tears. He loved the guy. 

He loved the way he used words, and they had the same mistress, all words in the English dictionary. Phil is the only man I know who actually read the whole thing, page after page, line after line. 

There was no trace of Lew”s body. Maybe he’d jumped into a hidden car and escaped to Mexico. No, that was just wishful thinking  He had killed himself or fallen into a deep ravine. He and Gary had both known he was depressed. No words could help.

Tears. Just the memory and tears. It was still raw.

I was with Phil when Allen phoned to say that he was going to die. My memory says that we were sitting in the living room at Hartford Street, but I actually think we were in Phil’s small apartment in the basement of the hospice, in the small room that opened onto the garden. That is where Phil’s phone was, and I am certain that Allen used that number. Phil had been expecting a call. Allen was due to visit and Phil would have known the exact dates. Allen would have also known when was the best time to reach Phil whose schedule was almost set in stone. He smiled broadly when he said hello and then fell silent. His face lost all expression.

There were very few words, “”I’m so sorry. Yes I understand that you won’t be able to travel to the West Coast again. Give my love to Gregory. I love you. Good bye.” There are times when even words fail. They were both poets and both Buddhists so they’d pushed words’ limits. 

He put the receiver down and told me that Allen was going to die, that he had cancer and there was no hope. Then he started to cry and asked to be left alone. I knew that there were tears on both ends of the call. I told him that I was available to get anything he needed and shifted into the Maitri’s office which was in the adjacent room. At 5:30 he emerged from his bedroom in his robes and silently began up the stairs towards the zendo. Sitting was at 6.    

Lord Krishna comes to tea

I knew that Allen was in town when there was a knock at the front door at 3:30 exactly. A young man, 21 but not a month more, clean shaven, holding a book, asked, “Is this the Philip Whalen Zendo?” I invited him into the living room where he sat down and quietly continued his reading.  Allen would be at the door shortly; I could hear Phil beginning to make his way up the stairs. He and Allen shared years of friendship. They were punctual. I began to prepare tea.

I loved when Phil’s friends came to visit. Phil was on his best behavior. Not that he was normally badly behaved though in private moments he could be angry, even insulting. Despite being one of the foremost leaders of a movement that questioned the very roots of believing and behaving what my parents taught me, when he was proper, he was extremely proper. But there was another quality to the conversations with his poet friends. Their language was careful and measured. It was literate. I was always looking for any innuendos, and I loved their laughter. It was poking fun without the slightest hint of slighting someone.

Phil of course knew Allen’s long time companion, Peter Orlovsky, and talked openly about Peter’s drug addiction. Phil joked to me about Allen being a follower of “the Cult of Boys,” but this was the first time that Allen had brought a young lover with him. Phil was not very interested in sex himself, reinforced or dictated by his isolated personal habits, but I knew I would be looking for Phil’s reaction. How would he treat a young lover?

The young man and I sat a short distance from Phil and Allen. There were barely pauses in their conversation. It doesn’t matter what it was about. It could have been Buddhism, Trungpa, Diane de Prima or other poets who passed through the Disembodied School at RMDC, or even where to get the best Chinese food in San Francisco. They were friends, and though we weren’t excluded, we were not included. What was clear is that his young companion admired Allen. He hung on every word, carefully listening to each line, laughing when it was appropriate. Allen for his part was attentive to the young man. Not condescending or at all lecherous, he was careful that his friend was treated like an invited guest

Yes I admit that I entertained the possibility that there was some kind of coercion behind the young man’s presence. The age gap was enormous, and there have always been rumors about Allen’s sexual exploits. I also had a distasteful experience of being manipulated by an older man. But at least that afternoon, I was not sitting with a boy-toy but a bright young man who genuinely liked older men.

I’d been reading Christopher Isherwood’s tribute to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple. Isherwood asked the Swami a hesitant question about a new relationship with a young man. Isherwood confessed that, given his experience in the stiff Victorian world of English Catholicism, he was expecting a censorious pronouncement. Instead Prabhavananda told him to treat his lover like Lord Krishna.

Then it hit me. I’d been to tea with Lord Krishna.

A year later I was sitting with Phil when Allen called to tell him that he was dying. Phil cried. 

The Clang Birds

I was once the model for a rather unsympathetic character in a satirical novel. Most of the details have faded into distant memories before the Summer of Love, before Stonewall, and they will for the most part lie untrampled in the graveyard of failed friendships. However there are a few details that come to haunt me from time to time when I am feeling vulnerable or when I want to examine the way gay people were treated in religious life before Vatican 2, before the sexual revolution..

The novel was by John L’Heureux. I went looking for the opening passage. Here is the description of a Clang Bird. 

"The Clang Bird is a rare creature that flies in ever decreasing circles at ever increasing speeds until with a terrible clang it disappears up its own ass. It is only because of the will of God that the Clang Bird is not yet extinct.

— St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder,

Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717”

This was John L’Heureux’s world. The absurd image of a bird flying up its own ass as recorded in the “newest words” of a totally fake 18th century Saint in a fictional religious order named after the disciple of Jesus who had some serious doubts. It was very clever, or pretended to be, toying with the imponderables of extinction and the will of the Force That Cannot Be Named. If it were clever enough to get a laugh, that somehow justified any cruelty. 

It was published in 1972, the year that John left the Jesuits. He’d left the Ph.D. program at Harvard and was working as an editor at the Atlantic. He had to have been writing “The Clang Birds” when we were both in graduate school at Harvard, he at John LaFarge House close to The Yard while I was living with six other Jesuits in a small house near Inman Square. Our address was 57 Oak Street. His fictional collection of “over-educated priest candidates” lived at 75 Oak Lane. 

This much was not made up. We were all to some degree involved in the Catholic resistance to the War in Vietnam as were his fictional seminarians. The most senior member of the collective was a young priest, John Galvani, who had been part of the recently closed Jesuit mission in Baghdad. He was involved in planning an anti-war action in Boston following the model of Philip and Dan Berrigan’s action in Catonsville. When the solemnly dressed men from the FBI really did knock on our door, I answered, and had been prepped what to say--nothing.  

Another scholastic, perhaps the one who’d already been selected for advancement in the Jesuit hierarchy, a bright handsome Irish kid from Queens was in the Harvard Med School. He had fallen in love with a very attractive African American nurse. There were endless conversations between his family, his New York superiors and our small living room which made for lots of real life drama. 

Another member of the group was a man from Maryland who was at the Divinity School and sang in the choir at Saint Paul’s. For some reason that was never made clear, his ordination had been postponed. Although I saw nothing overtly sexual at the time, he had a fascination about some of the adolescent boys in the choir school, and I am quite sure that his name later appeared on the list of Jesuits who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. 

A wonderful, first generation Hungarian whose family had fled Budapest in the Uprising of 1956 was the author of the “As Per Duck Cookbook.” When he told his dad that he was going to be cooking for several other Jesuits, the dad dictated some Hungarian homemade recipes, “The first thing you do is chop some onions, garlic, celery, carrot and gently saute them, then you brown the duck skin all over. For the goulash, you start the same way as you did for the duck. For meatballs, you begin the same way as you did for the duck.” And in the young academic Jesuit’s notebook at the top of each recipe read “As per duck.”

I forget my character’s name--he didn’t play an important role in L’Heureux’s plot, but people who read it recognized me. I didn’t have to be told, though I did have to be reminded it was satire. It was published by Macmillan, at that point still a publishing powerhouse, so it was not a fly-by-night hit job. Purporting to be about some of the most controversial aspects of the post Vatican 2 religious renewal, it was also in my view so unflattering I was happy when it was widely panned. Few people got the joke, and, given the situation, I certainly thought it unfair. I found nothing to like in the way I was portrayed so needless to say, I thought it was also cruel. Needless to say, I also got on a high horse silently telling L’Heureux in the comfy Jesuit residence on Sumner Street to go fuck himself. He found it so easy to create satire using Jesuits who were actually putting themselves in danger of following Dan Berrigan to jail while he wrote his three-page daily quota. It was abusive.

The young religious me was a rather inept caricature of a homosexual who was trying to live a celibate life. L’Heureux’s disdain for the man was palpable. Up until “The Clang Birds” I had considered myself his friend, not very close, but certainly a man whom I respected and admired and as Jesuits, assumed that we shared some common goals. 

In my Junior year at Fairfield Prep, L’Heureux had been my Latin, English, French and Religion teacher. I loved studying and working with him and, for the most part, excelled. He was creative and seemed very open-minded. He was certainly brilliant. I was star struck, even falling in love in the strained way that adolescent gays do as they discover and explore their attraction to men, but it was never returned. Thank god for that, but it was a factor in my deciding to become a Jesuit.

He attracted a following. He even gave a name to the clique, the BYP, the Bright Young People which was an actual group of blue blooded high flying hipsters who emerged in London’s Mayfair after the First War. Evelyn Waugh, one of John’s literary inspirations, wrote about them in Vile Bodies, which of course was assigned reading. 

There were some perks to identifying with the BYP and supporting them in the election for our class officers. L’Heureux organized Saturday excursions to New York City. I remember Tom Baker, Jan Wojcik and perhaps Jeff Connell were part of the group. And I was included until I wasn’t. I remember how much I loved those Saturdays. I grabbed the train in Bridgeport which was further east on the New York, New Haven and Hartford than the rest of the group joined. I remember seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin the Sun, Camelot and Bye Bye Birdie as well as the beefcake magazines in Times Square. 

Now the painful memory. I am standing alone in the entrance to McAuliffe Hall on North Benson Road waiting for my mother to pick me up. My mind is a blur and I can barely keep from crying. I have just seen L’Heureux in his room. He told me that I would no longer be invited to join the New York group. Perhaps there was some attempt at using the occasion for helping me “grow” in some way, but if there were, it didn’t ease the pain. I could not understand why I had been singled out. Looking back it might have been that I was just too gay, but that is hard to pinpoint amid the raging hormones of puberty and being rejected by my first crush. He probably just said that I just didn’t fit in with the group. Of course what he would not admit is that he, L’Heureux, was a conflicted bisexual. 

I had three meetings with John after The Clang Birds. I remember two extremely well or at least certain parts of our conversation, or my version of it, has stuck in my mind. Once Tom B and I visited him in his apartment in Boston’s Back Bay when he was working as an editor at the Atlantic. It was on one the blocks closest to the Boston Commons on either Marlboro or Newberry Streets. It was also the cruising block of a growing gay neighborhood. A stream of cars would slowly circle the block pretending to be searching out a parking space while lots of sexily dressed young men would be walking their dogs or just hanging out by fire hydrants or inspecting the parking meters. Eventually a driver and street walker got lucky, and an empty parking spot opened up for a connection. When John looked out the window and saw right below a connection happening, he kind of chanted, “dance away you little queer, somebody’s going to love you.” I may not have the words exactly, but I know that I have caught their exact feeling and can still feel the chill.

Much later, probably in the late 1980’s, when I had a business making custom furniture, we got a contract to supply some furniture for a new Alumni Relations building on the Stanford campus. During the installation I called L’Heureux to see if he had time to meet. He held the prestigious position as director of the Stegner Creative Writing program. He was very cordial, even friendly. He showed me a spacious office in a very beautiful Stanford building. We talked a bit about the AIDS epidemic and he admitted to a friendship with a person with AIDS. Obliquely, he was also admitting to having sex with men. I say oblique because although there was never an outright admission, his words and gestures pointed to the pain of losing a lover, and for a brief second we entered the level field of being completely honest.

As I followed his work throughout his long and productive career, I began to suspect that it was his own bi-sexuality, or totally closeted gayness that short circuited all our attempts at friendship. Of course when he was a Jesuit, all discussion of sexuality was out of bounds, and I just might not have been his type. I do know that he had sex with one man who happened to be my friend.

“The glorious thing about literature,” L’Heureux told The Stanford Daily, “is that it allows you, as a reader, to experience vicariously what you never fortunately have to undergo in real life. The same is true with a writer. It allows you to purge yourself of all the worst kind of bedeviling thoughts or ideas or even temptations without ever having to go through with them.” John, darling, this is at least to some degree wishful thinking. I know that you wrote about a man arrested for sex abuse in front of his class, but I never read the book. One of your last stories in the New Yorker, “The Long Black Line,” was about a Jesuit novice who left Shadowbrook under a cloud and committed suicide shortly after. You were there in the novitiate in 1954 and you died in 2019. That is perhaps 65 years of experiencing vicariously. It was only 63 years ago that you excluded me from a nice group of creative young men and it still stings. Perhaps I am just not as good a writer as you were. I pray that you did find some relief from living a lie. If it helps at all, I forgive you and I pledge that I will never allow my sexuality to block another person’s creativity or happiness.