There is Only One Misfortune  

10

 

Then I heard car tires crunch gravel. I didn’t have a phone, so friends had no alternative to dropping by. I tried to identify the timbre of the engine before it switched off. Then I stood up and stretched to see out the kitchen window. Sure enough, my number one suspect was getting out of a jalopy I had given him as a wedding present.

This was the rarest moment of the day so far and there was no telling where Dan and I could have gone if we hadn’t been interrupted instead by the most bizarre confrontation of the day.

I opened the door and saw Bernie approaching warily, studying Dan’s sleek car.

“What’s happening man?” I asked.

“Hi,” he said and smiled but I could see his disappointment.

I knew he had just driven forty five minutes from the City, and while he might come that far just for a visit, usually he arrived with some revelation that he urgently needed to share, unearthed while researching a story for the Berkeley Barb,.

“I’m glad you came,” I lied. “I’ve got a friend here that I want you to meet.” Bernie entered the kitchen door and Dan advanced wearing his salesman’s smile, hand extended. Suddenly I changed my mind. This was going to be fun. I couldn’t imagine two people more antithetical in temperament and worldview, yet both were brilliant, outspoken, and aggressive.

Bernie was a math prodigy who had walked away from prestigious scholarships to become a radical journalist. He had a speech impediment that made his childhood, in a working class Bronx neighborhood, a gauntlet of humiliation. As a result, he couldn’t be intimidated.

As he shook Dan’s hand, Bernie was clearly uncomfortable. He had something he was burning to tell me and would have been thrown off by anybody being there, but a straight?! I introduced Bernie as a journalist. Then I introduced Dan as the author of a book of philosophy. I realized I would have to find common ground.

“What kind of philothophy ( philosophy ) ?” Bernie asked Dan.

“It’s similar to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism,” I said and looked at Dan for confirmation. He just smiled. Whitehead had also been an important mathematician.

“Whitehead, huh?” Bernie said.

Bernie wore his thick reddish-brown hair in a longish Beatle cut and had a handle-bar mustache, and he stood now with his left hand tucked under his right armpit and his right thumb supporting his chin, studying Dan. And under that withering scrutiny, Dan just grinned, stoned on God, relaxed and happy as a baby.

“Bernie, you want some tea?” I asked.

“Yeah, shoo-uh ( sure ) .”

I asked him if he was working on any interesting stories. He relaxed his stance, looked at his enormous feet, abashed, and said no. He wasn’t going to open up in front of a stranger, especially not a straight.

Though Dan wasn’t the least interested in Bernie, he knew he would have to take a turn with him, so he asked Bernie what kind of journalist he was. Predictably, Bernie answered evasively. Then, as I handed Bernie the tea, I saw through his thick glasses and knew what he was thinking: could Dan be a government agent trying to get some information about him, Bernie, by befriending me? I stifled a laugh. In recent months, Bernie had been wrestling his own demons of political paranoia.

Though Bernie gave intellectual recognition to things outside of the political realm, he had no real understanding or interest in them. He couldn’t be brought into what Dan and I were doing. Another time I might have been able to find enough common ground between them to have had an entertaining encounter, but Dan and I were nearly six hours into the day and I just didn’t have the energy. I was too tired to maneuver in a sticky social situation, just as at the end of that day I would be too tired to think up a good question for God.

The awkwardness became like an odor and soon I could see Bernie was searching for an opportunity to exit. And that came in a dramatic culmination to the tension.

As I watched them in conversation, verbally circling each other, tiptoeing between volatile topics, I remembered that, to the degree Dan had a political viewpoint, he was a liberal who had canvassed for Stevenson in the fifties. So I wasn’t afraid of Bernie being set off by a political comment, at least not a serious one. Unfortunately the detonator was an unserious one, in response to a passing comment of mine on nuclear war.

“I’m not afraid of nuclear war,” Dan announced smugly. “In fact, I welcome it. It would give us a chance to start again.”

Bernie stared at Dan as if he had declared himself to be a space alien. He didn’t know, of course, that Dan himself didn’t believe in what he had just said, that it was a form of exhibitionism. Dan sounded to himself like that old crazy lady in the baseball cap ranting on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco . His lack of fear of nuclear war was a frequent boast of his, meant to demonstrate the depth of his commitment to his vision. And though he might have been capable of flippantly sacrificing his own life, I knew all those times he declared his readiness to “Tear it down! Tear it all down!” that he didn’t include his wife and children. Many times I passed up the opportunity to remind him of this.

I had to stifle a laugh again, savoring Bernie’s expression. He was flustered and wondering if this could be a joke, or if not, could the man be mentally unstable, and therefore could he be set off by a wrong comment. But then the full magnitude of the inhumanity of the statement sank in, and Bernie felt it a challenge to his moral integrity to declare himself against it. He said it slowly, almost in a whisper, studying its effect in Dan’s face.

“That ith the motht (…is the most) inhuman thing I’ve evuh hoouhd (...ever heard).” He paused, ready for a reaction. “It ith compweetwee inthane (…is completely insane).” He turned to me. “I have to go. I planned to thtop-by jutht foah (...stop-by just for) a moment anyway.”

This was silly. He didn’t know another soul north of the Golden Gate .

He opened the door and turned around and said to me, “Theuh wath thumthing (There was something) I wanted to talk to you about. When we have moah (more) time.”

He nodded, frowning, at Dan, who replied, grinning, “Bye.”