The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

BOY.


When Randy Mesmer was a sweet and innocent little boy, what he wanted more than anything was to get into the cage at the zoo with the bears.

Napping on the sofa in the afternoon sun, little Randy Mesmer daydreamed that those towering shaggy bears clutched him in their irresistible limbs, pressed him into their fur, and touched him with their heavy thudding paws.

Little Randy Mesmer incited no suspicion. “He does just love his teddy bear!” his mother said and bought him a grizzly just his size, with which he spent several years intertwined. He loved his teddy bear and his Frosted Flakes, which will make a boy swell at once into a mighty tiger upholstered with muscle and a huge set of gleaming jaws, as seen on TV.

Popeye was in the mix somewhere, as well as the Incredible Hulk, who swelled up so big his clothes tore apart.

His number one daydream, however, was of a solitary travler in the desert, scrawny and wretched, who comes across a gypsy witch who sees potential in him and gives him a vial of potion. The potion makes him bigger and stronger, bigger and bigger. Lying in the afternoon sun when he was supposed to be sleeping little Randy Mesmer imagined being big.

Does growth happen on its own? He wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Clutched his big stuffed bear, Randy Mesmer imagined every inch.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

RANDY MESMER.


Randy Mesmer thought for a long time about the world.

Finally he decided. He was in favor of it.

Thelonius Monk
(illustration by the beloved Akemi Shinohara)
see post: Listening to Monk, Thelonius Himself

Listening to Monk, Thelonius Himself

I started listening to jazz and now I can't stop.

I never wanted to be one of those people, one those dull snobs who announced, "This poem was composed while listening to jazz."

Yeah, like, here's my poem. I wrote it listening to The Village People.

But now I listen to jazz and going without Thelonius Monk seems a monk-like penance, the kind of unfruitful austerity the Buddha would warn against.

Jazz is an essential nutrient, like B12 or Italo Calvino.

Ladies and gentlemen, ask yourself, am I getting enough Thelonius Monk?

Forthcoming in December:
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF RANDY MESMER
A new picaresque about an average man with a little bad luck and a lot of zipper trouble.

Gentle Reader,

God help us, we are inspiring to literature. To news that stays news. Therefore, though we fail 99.9% of the time, each day provides a chance.

The reader is humbly beseeched to poke around a bit. The archives are full.

Please visit the SERIES -- the links appear on the right side of this page.

THE DEVIL, DEARLY LOVED, RENOUNCES EVIL -- about lust and desire.
NAGUSAMI -- an ongoing meditation on all the meanings of the word.
FAMILY TRAVEL -- about family, tragedy and hilarity.
SHORT WALKS IN SUMATRA -- about a lucky week spent in Sumatra.

Thank you for visiting.

Yours,

G.S. Das

Insurgencies

At 7:30 am there were already rebellions to report. The vestal virgins at jazz coffee passed me my order before I asked for it. From those starched whites not a word, a little grin, ham cheese toast and a pot of coffee.

How can I explain what this means? Ordinarily the same speech must be given, even if the customer appears at the same time every day and orders the exact same meal. But we broke the rule of anonymity. We admitted we were there, standing across the counter from each other, as we have been every Wednesday morning at 7:25 for months now.

(You must not forget the Law of Tokyo, the Law from which the life of Tokyo inevitably extends—Law #1: Let’s Pretend None of this is Going On!)

The second revolt took place in Iidabashi station, not far from the B3 exit. An old man had set up his easel and was engrossed in the task of painting, in water colors, with a pinpoint brush, the portrait of a vending machine.

How meticulously, how lovingly, he detailed every snack!

I would have embraced him, but the affectionate caresses of a strange foreigner would have no doubt caused his wa to capsize.

Ordinarily the painters are all in a gaggle around some vicious bit of cuteness. For example, that sickening little bridge in Shinjuku Park. No one looks at what is here.
(Please refer again to Law #1)

Sure-fire plans.

There’s the boy to whom coffee gives visions. First hour he hears angels. Makes sure-fire plans for great art. After that he wants to fuck anything that moves. Addiction is no laughing matter. Not in this day and age. He’s often terribly humiliated when he finally comes round. He has to be watched very carefully, that boy. Boy will do anything for a good strong cup of coffee.

Volunteer Opportunity: Paramystics Needed

Carol Lee Flinders, in her book Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics*, playfully refers to Margery Kempe as a "paramystic". "Not fully qualified perhaps but, like a paramedic,better in a pinch than no mystic at all."

Paramystic! How's that for a job title! As the world saturates with catastrophe half-baked cock-eyed mystics sprout up everywhere.

Hopefully, Jesus will be along shortly, along with Maitreya and the next incarnation of Vishnu. The Messiah is, by all accounts, overdue.

In the meantime the paramystics scamper about as best we can, holding hands and emptying bedpans.

(* If you're looking for a friendly engaging introduction to great Christian mystics like Theresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich, this is your book. In any case, you shouldn't dilly-dally too long before reading The Life of Saint Theresa by Herself, because nothing compares to her account of how unspeakably EMBARRASSING it is to start levitating during choir practice.)

Ham Egg Pie

In Tokyo I have heroes to whom I can say hardly a word. First among these is the Bad Girl of Mister Donut in Senzoku who at fifty is thin as a reed and wears sleeveless camouflage half-shirts which showcase her navel. She is a very important role model for me. Whenever we meet at Mister Donut we grin and wave to each other like cellmates in the same exuberant asylum.

Today the illustrious Bad Girl bought me a ham egg pie, which she slid onto the table as she stopped by to pick up my point cards. I always save them for her and she exchanges them at the register for free promotional gifts, for plastic lunchboxes, day planners and rice bowls.

This exchange of pie and point cards was great fun, of course, because the people all around us looked shocked and appalled. I live for these moments of cultural levitation, when things that could never ever happen in Tokyoland go ahead and happen anyhow.

The Bad Girl strutted off and I was left with a ham egg pie.

Now, as an eater, I’m as finicky as a half-starved Labrador Retriever. Put it in front of me and I’ll woof it down.

But I loathe ham egg pie. The egg is soft-boiled, see, so that the yolk bubbles out as you chew. And it’s cold.

So I’ve got this ham egg pie in front of me. The gods are laughing so hard even a mystic trained at a weekend workshop could hear them.

Mother of the Universe, bless me to love those near to me as much as I love certain adored strangers. Because I would sooner die than hurt the feelings of the divine Bad Girl of Mister Donut in Senzoku.

I ate the hideous ham egg pie: the cold egg dribbled into my beard. I laughed and wrote notes and found that, after a long time away, life at last had returned to me.

(a version of this appears online at HITOTOKI. please visit!)

Devils.

Today on the train I watched two well-to-do Tokyo ladies choose seats. There were two empty seats beside me, a foreigner, and two empty seats across the way beside a purple-faced man who was talking aloud and was clearly either drunk or mad. Stumped, they stood in the middle of the train and then, just to be safe, they sat next to him.

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Gary Young

Gary Young, No Other Life, Creative Arts Book Company, 2002

I read all the prose poems I can find in anthologies and magazines. Of all the people writing prose poems now, Gary Young is the most unassuming and the best. Our American Basho, operating with zero fanfare.

The poems are always short and untitled and deceptively easy to read. I've never found so much emotion in so little space. Before I know it, I'm sent reeling.

This book actually contains three of Gary Young's previously published books: Days, Braver Deeds, and If He Had. In the poems included here, especially Braver Deeds, there is a tremendous loss of life. Parents, children and beloveds die. Imagine reading the headlines from Iraq, but without being able to close your heart.

His new poems, being published now in magazines like Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, are gentler, more celebratory. The celebration is made real by its grounding in the knowledge of loss. Hopefully these new poems will soon be included in a book.

All hail Gary Young! We buy him a sushi dinner for sure, if he ever showed up in Tokyoland.

I won't quote my favorite Gary Young poems, it's better to just come across them and let them catch you unguarded. Here's one picked at random.

(from page 80)

My son is learning about death, about the possibilities. His cat was killed. Then Mark died, then Ernesto. He watched the news, and saw soldiers bulldozed into the earth after battle. Down the road, a boy his age was found floating in a pond. My son says, we're careful about water, and splashes in his own warm bath. We don't want to die, he says, we want to live forever. We only just die later, he says, and nods his head. Death is comprehensible; what comes later is a week away, or two, and never arrives.

On my side of town they're removing the sky ---

On my side of town they’re removing the sky, one train station at a time. The train that until today arrived among the tin roofs and vegetable market of Nishi-koyama now pulls into an immaculate tiled basin underground. A station identical to all the others except for the accent color, in this case salmon. Progress in Tokyoland. Soon I’ll be shielded from creation all together. When Fudomae drops beneath the earth I’ll lose the Meguro River lined with cherry trees, the awnings of the ramen shops, the Big Boy Barbershop. I’ll continue unimpeded in the dark. For now I keep my face pressed to the glass: I’m going to miss the world.

Dream: Sheep of Predictability

Last night I dreamt a sheep was standing in the kitchen. As soon as I walked into the room the sheep spoke to me. The sheep's voice was quiet and dry--secretarial.

"The quota of surprises for this year has been exceeded," the sheep said. "Therefore, for the remainder of this year nothing unexpected will occur."

My first feeling was relief. But then I asked myself: can I really trust this sheep?

Nagusami / 40

One thing I appreciate about Tokyo is that there are no extra friends. Every acquaintance is important. I can't afford neglect.

In California one might say: “Oh, we can’t really be friends—I’m vegan, she’s ovo-lacto.” Or: “My Buddhism is Zen, he’s Kagyu Kadampa.”

Whereas in Tokyo there’s only the delighted shock of recognition: “You drink beer! Ohmigod! I drink beer!”

Vegetarians are driven to befriend carnivores, even though it means they must subsist some evenings on nothing but green soybeans. Swedes and Texans swap accents. Driven to new heights of recklessness, Americans start learning languages.

Irritating people—such as myself—are nonetheless retained as friends. Quirks and compulsions pose no bar. There’s time to chat with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to flirt with the Mormons. Some people even strike it up with Republicans.

Gratitude expands to fill the space dug out by loneliness; we learn to practice conservation of the human.

Friendship fed by shared relief. Here at last: a face that doesn’t slam shut at the sight of me.

Nagusami / 39

Some nights my friends are barely visible within their oily clouds of pain, that sickly iridescence littered with bad men, with what was said, and the last seven drinks.

Enter tonight’s jilted lover. We buy him beer and rub his back and step away to piously assure each other that, really, it was his own fault.

“I knew all along it wasn’t real.”

“I didn’t believe it for a second.”

This is how the world works. None of it's real and it all hurts.

I wouldn’t put up with it--except soon it will be my turn to be the heartsick fool--my toy lying broken on a street corner in Shinjuku.

It is impossible to say to whom the pain belongs. Grief scampers from table to table. We all take turns sitting up with it and we feed it from the tiny bottle, many, many times an hour.

Nagusami / 38

Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost. Paul Bowles

Comfort is an exemplary verb. Everyone has a high opinion of it. We’d like to ship it round the world and if we could we’d soak the earth in it.

The noun, comfort, is not entirely reprehensible, though already there’s a whiff of the lifestyle magazine, of homes in gated communities. There’s a wall certainly, and also a door that locks. You’d like to have it for your children. You hope it extends into old age.

(Is it possible to think of comfort, really, without also feeling afraid?)

The adjective, comfortable, is entirely dubious, though my husband doesn’t think so. What’s wrong with being comfortable? he asks. We’re doing well as anyone, rock-a-bye, treetop.

Comfortable, it seems to me, is the fine print on a sleeping pill. There’s an ominous warmth. The dog circles three times and lies down for a nap.

The Reverend Hartman, at home in Winesburg, wonders if the flame of the spirit really burns in him, decides, “Oh well, I suppose I’m doing well enough.”

Is that smell smoke? Do these windows open?

I remember the day I read, in a poem by Luis Cernuda, Comfort is corrosive. I felt relieved, as when the doctor admits, “This is going to hurt.”

Nagusami / 37

A note from Yuuichiro, that gentleman most dapper, most immaculate, teaches me: In verb form, the word ‘nagusameru’ means ‘to comfort’, as in providing psychological relief when someone is under stress.

Comfort. The word appears to me in flames.

In this city we come to know intimately the pleasures and dangers of comfort. Comfort. The pillow, the nurse, the smothering.

Guttersnipe Das in the Tokyo Advocate

Please check out the new Guttersnipe Das monthly column in the Tokyo Advocate.

In humble veneration of the newspaper meanderings of Clarice Lispector and Robert Walser, we are determined to discover how odd we can get away with being in print.

Guttersnipe Das: Home Tonight (November 2006)

(The column appears on page 22. Thank you.)

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Luis Cernuda

Luis Cernuda, Written on Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda, translated by Stephen Kessler, City Lights Books, 2004

This book is on my short list of books that deserve to be famous. It will never be famous. I will go on trumpeting it anyway.

This book combines both of Cernuda's books of prose poems. Like a drinking buddy, at first it seemed a little cranky and maudlin, but it has turned out to be inexhaustible. Somehow Cernuda knows exactly how emotion feels in the body, how grief sinks and sensuality caresses. It is a very humble and generous book--as if he has saved all that was good and vibrant in his life and now he's giving it all away. When life in Tokyo feels like bitter exile, this is the book to which I turn for company.

The warm and nimble translation is by Stephen Kessler, who certainly deserves a kiss from everyone.

from Wasting Time:

"The breeze of the tropical night rests on your skin, refreshing it. You feel yourself floating, light, insubstantial. Your senses alone are alert, and with them your body; but it's a relaxed alertness, without the usual intrusions desiring and demanding. And while you, who've known that body forever, may be a bit suspicious of its calm, it claims that one kiss tonight would be enough to make it happy."

Optimism

My new lover bought himself an enormous potted plant. A spiky purple prehistoric thing with flowers that don’t bloom often. Very expensive. I never buy plants like that, even when I can afford them, because I’m sure I’ll kill the thing and feel terrible for killing it, not just because it was expensive but because it was so beautiful.

My new lover was not afraid. He was willing to spend the money and willing to take care. A good sign, I thought.

He put it just outside his door, where it sat exotic, and resplendent. Certainly a lot more impressive the neighbors’ plants. The cheap impatiens or conformist geraniums. The unkillable mint.

The next week when I came back the flowers had faded. Which was, of course, to be expected. But also the very tips of the leaves were brown, as if barbed. Not so serious but still those brown tips are there forever, the badge of the slightly depressed houseplant.

Pretty good, thanks, says the houseplant. Getting by. Could be worse. How happy can a houseplant expect to be? Even if the door opens occasionally and someone waters it-- it goes on sitting all day long in this city where the houses crowd together like tombstones.

A houseplant can’t throw a tantrum, can’t shout to be heard over the TV, “My ancestors bloomed in the Amazon!”

Sure enough, in another week that plant was dead.

I’m sure I would have killed that gorgeous expensive prehistoric plant. I just don’t think I’d have killed it so fast.

When I offered my lover sympathy, he looked surprised. “Is it so bad?” he said. He looked down at it. “It’s just a little peaked.”

That plant was stone dead. No easy thing to say to a fairly new lover. A little purple remained around the stems, like an old dried flower.

Was it possible he hadn’t watered it at all?

Standing beside his dead exotica, he looked sorry, but in another second his face cheered up. “It’ll come back!” he said.

This bordered on theology, I thought, and it wasn’t my place to correct him. Anyway, my lover was an optimist and wasn’t that a good thing? A positive thinker. It’s a good sign.

For months that plant sat just outside the door and I hurried past it on the weekends.

My lover caught me looking at it, one brilliant Sunday morning as the sun flooded its disintegrating black stems.

“This is just its dormant period,” my lover said. He sounded a little defensive. “Looks good for awhile, then not so good, and then it just comes roaring back. You know, like pansies.”

What could I say? The blight of love begins with tentative suggestions. Not so serious but there’s no getting rid of them. Those little barbs, always on the tip of your tongue.

Meanwhile the plant went on being dead.
As for our romance, well, it was pretty good. We were very, very lucky. In a city like this one? I can’t complain.

Sometimes when I closed my eyes I saw the gleaming green backwaters down near the southern tip of India. The flooded jungle. But everyone must see such things sometimes.

The next time I went to see my lover the plant was gone. I stared at the dusty space where it had been.

“I got tired of waiting,” he said. And then he smiled and took my hand again and said, “It’s for the best.”

Family Travel: end note

Gentle reader: Admittedly, a blog is not the best format for this material. For any chance at enjoyment, I strongly suggest beginning at Family Travel / 1 and moving forward, rather than reading backwards.

The preceding post (29) was the last of the Family Travel series. I'll likely return to it later. As it stands now, there are many alleys and dead end streets.

As I wrote in the disclaimer, this is only my version of events. No family history can be fairly told from the vantage point of one person.

Happy All Saints Day.

Family Travel / 29 -- Conclusion

“Everyone dies sometime,” And then the nurse asked, “Are you afraid?”

“If she’d asked me,” Aunt Gale said, “I would have said, ‘Of course not, honey. You’re going to be fine.’ I would have lied. But she asked the nurse and the nurse was so honest and your mother was calm so I asked her too, ‘Sandy, are you afraid?’”

My mother said, “I’m not afraid.”

My mother said, “I’m not afraid. But I’ll miss Jonathan.”

My aunt said she’d be sure to tell me that.

My mother said, “Please promise me.”

And my aunt promised.

Then the nurse wheeled my mother to the operating room.

Family Travel / 28

“Am I going to die?” my mother asked.

“Everyone dies sometime,” the nurse said.

Family Travel / 27

On the last day of her life, before she was taken away to the operating room, my mother talked with my aunt.

I never knew that.

“I was with her while the nurse prepared her for surgery,” Aunt Gale explained.

At one point, my aunt tells me, my mother turned to the nurse and asked her point-blank, “Am I going to die?”