There is Only One Misfortune  

3

 

We were connoisseurs of crazies because of a shared personal experience: we had both been patients in a mental hospital. We felt an instant bond because of that initiation. To Dan though, being in a mental hospital was an embarrassment with no meaning other than as the aftermath of encountering God. While to me, the mental hospital was the most extreme reach of hip, a certification of profundity, though I was driven there by the paranoid hell of a methedrine overdose.

When we met, I had recently dropped out of San Francisco State a few credits short of a degree in philosophy, in the course of which I had read most of the scant literature available on mysticism. Living around San Francisco in those years, I frequently met people who had had incomprehensible, sometimes disabling, mystical experiences (with drugs playing no part at all). But I had never met anyone who had that experience and also had Dan’s intellectual gifts.

Part of the charm and authenticity of his philosophy was its homemade quality. This came out in a mispronunciation of terms and names that academic training in philosophy would have corrected. Also, he was completely oblivious to the fads on campus. While reading them to his children, he discovered that fairy tales were a metaphorical code, unaware that the same discovery had arrived in lit departments decades before.

His conversation was peppered with allusions to the Giant, the Witch’s Brew, the Magic Sword, and the Rose, among others. None of these were ever explained and I knew exactly what he meant.

“There is this world community, people chosen to protect the Rose,” he said. By now he was pacing the kitchen like a cage. “They can be on any level of society, have any occupation. Like that old man.” He gestured toward the ocean. “They have a natural aversion to the Giant and they don’t necessarily know each other. They may not even know they’ve been chosen. They just hang loose, committed to noncommitment, awkward, a little off balance, not quite with it. At all costs though, they stay open. They’re like the first apes to walk on the ground.”

Now he became an ape looking down from a tree limb, one arm dangling below his knees, the other attached to an overhead limb.

“Hey, ya jerk,” he said, addressing an ape on the ground, “Whaddaya doin’ down there? Yer supposed to be in the trees. Whaddaya think yer doin’ anyway?”

Then he became the ape on the ground. Assuming a slouch and a dopey expression, he looked up into the tree and replied: “Huh? Uh . . . I dunno.” He looked around on the ground, as if for an explanation, scratching the top of his head like Stan Laurel. “It just . . . seemed . . . like the thing to do . . .”

He became Dan again and returned to pacing while he explained: “In evolution, those are the freaks who initiate the new. They’re mouthpieces of the Spirit.”

He wasn’t referring to hippies. He knew nothing about the counterculture nor was the least interested in it. Though we lived in the same town, indeed were natives of the same state, we lived in different worlds: he was straight and I was hip. Though this was never an obstacle, it was always present, from the day we first met.