THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS MASAKO

an optimistic fiction

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

THE NAKED HOLY MAN OF UDUPI

In Udupi, Krishna’s city, Randy Mesmer discovered a naked holy man ducking around the Tata buses at the station.

Randy pursued at once, tailed the sky-clad renunciant through the crowd, following his big flat feet, his smooth brown bobbing ass as he strode among the middle-class Indian mamas and their dull polyester-clad mates, all of whom carefully avoided looking at him.

How stunning to be naked out in the world. This must be how it feels, Randy thought, to tell the whole truth for the first time in your life.

Randy followed the naked holy man into the vegetable market, where an old woman offered a fistful of long beans, which the holy man took without saying a word.

The naked holy man walked like he knew where he was going—and with good cause. This was not an ash-smeared old man, nor a fearsome Saivite with bloodshot eyes. The holy man was young, his body lean and supple, and Randy had glimpsed his enormous Cadbury chocolate eyes. Better for him to keep moving: folks were bound to come up with creative uses for doe-eyed buck naked holy man.

Such radiant displays of holiness would elsewhere not be permitted, but this was Udupi, Krishna’s city, where the god at the temple cross-dressed every Friday and required all male devotees to be shirtless in the inner sanctuary. This was a city ruled by a god with a rare sense of delight and appreciation.

Still, what a burden beauty must have been to the holy man, like a chronic backache or an aged mother. Like the Tibetan nuns Randy had seen in the Himalayan foothills, who hurried along with their eyes on the ground. Renouncing all vanity and worldliness, these unlucky women shaved their heads, abandoned paint and ornaments, and wound up drastically more beautiful than they’d been before.

Decay is unstoppable, death too, but blooming also intrudes and insists upon itself.

The holy man turned now to look at his pursuer. Randy in his faded ragged clothes, skinny from six months of dysentery and beans, his face shot through with longing. One of those well-fed foreign children who run away to India to live like beggars and careen about in manic Technicolor delusion, chasing now an elephant, now a swami, now a buck-naked holy boy standing among the marigold garlands and the cabbages.

It is said that a pickpocket in a crowd of saints sees only pockets.

Randy, likewise: here was no pious wizened saint’s prick but a generous fleshy welcoming member of the sort a philandering sensualist might pray to be equipped with.

Desire pinned Randy’s feet to the dusty earth; the holy man turned and fled into the crowd of pilgrims.

NYTimes. "In Myanmar, Fear Is A Constant Companion"

"ALL THAT THE HUMAN HEART WANTS IS ITS CHANCE." -- William James

Why Do You Always Write About Such Embarrassing Things?

Obviously I would rather write about cancer, about nice people having affairs, about the Immigrant Experience, or growing up on a farm. I would prefer, of course, to write about writing professors who sleep with insatiable teaching assistants, about the sordid underbelly of creative writing programs in these United States of America.

Unfortunately these subjects are already taken; the quota is full. Everyone wants to be a writer nowadays!

What’s left is humiliation, shame not feigned or artful but smelly and sulking. Bad sex, waking up with the clap, sitting in the public STD clinic waiting to have my urethra swabbed by a nurse who remembers my name—this space available!

Obviously I would rather write about Nice Homosexuals. But you know how it is—the Nice Homosexuals are all taken. What’s left are a few bitter-faced members of the International Sex Army: men with sour hearts and bad breath. On retrovirals. Drunk.

The men who make mistakes occasionally—they were taken long ago. Ditto the men who often make mistakes. What’s left are a few men with unpleasant personalities and unremarkable genitals who make mistakes more or less constantly.

Obviously I would much rather write about cancer. But I do so want to be a writer—and there are so few spaces left available.

And so I devote myself, my heart and living hours, to smallness, humiliation and degradation, to everyone no one else wanted. (I myself cannot claim to like them.)

Bitter-faced, small-dicked, petty-minded queer army: accept me as your humble representative.

Reality

From center stage, with a blue wig and gold eyes, Le Mado surveys her kingdom and announces, “You can be naked. Of course it is against the law to be naked. And the law is completely ignored. . . Like pot. We smoke wherever we want and nobody gives a shit. So, please: be naked.”

Le Mado on a huge screen hangs above the city. A banner on the horizon: gold blue glittery laughing Le Mado. “Did I just say that?” A playful little gasp. “Did I say that out loud?”

“I am allowed to say anything. Because I am not real. I am a drag queen. After the show I will go back into the valise.”

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Robert D. Richardson, biographer

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
Robert D. Richardson

(also: Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: A Mind on Fire.)

Richardson’s biographies of Thoreau and Emerson are two of the best books I’ve encountered in my life of voracious reading and this is one is just as wondrous. I cannot read any of these books in public, because they all make me want to weep and clutch my chest and shout, "At last! Everything has been revealed!"

I wish I could explain why Richardson’s biographies are different from anyone else’s. It’s not just an artful piling up of delightful and distressing facts. Instead it’s like the doorbell rings and you have a new best friend: William James. There’s something magical and occult about this. It’s not like he went to the research library, it’s like he drew mystic diagrams on the floor.

Richardson writes that one of James’ gifts was “his uncanny ability to pick up redemptive ideas from his reading.” And it is Richardson’s gift too, to fill each page with life-giving ideas. These biographies are as purely inspirational as a strong Lao coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Reading them makes me prone to fits of euphoria.

Richardson points toward the sources of James’ genius— one of the most important of which was James’ own depression and heartbreak. He writes, “James had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight.” How hopeful that is!

Richardson’s compassion for his subject spills out, somehow, to the reader, and makes one feel that one’s own nonsense and bleakness do not render one disqualified for a whole human life. What more can I ask for?

Up front, let us unfashionably admit. . .

Up front, let us unfashionably admit: it’s a scary holy world. Anywhere you put your ear to it, the world goes WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP like some freaky kind of space ship.

And all this fucking is, admittedly, just a way of keeping God at bay.

Because it is a very scary holy world. Like a horror movie when the girl’s alone: all she does is open the refrigerator and scream:

oh holy world!

". . . I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden." -- Montaigne (CW, 72)

Tokyo Garden

A Tokyo garden. No garden at all. Thirty-seven pots. Not to everyone’s taste. Not exactly tasteful. Thirty-seven pots inches from the highway, tripping up passersby. Mixed pots. Sprigs of this growing in that. Succulents in the ivy. Bamboo grass in the tea roses. Impatiens, marigolds, cactuses. A dull jade tree. A prize winning miniature cherry chained to the curb. Hydrangea. Chives. A little, old lady, not sweet and not nice, everyday solemnly trimming and pruning, refusing to toss out what ought to be tossed out.

If it were all terracotta—

But no. Plastic pots, cruddy blue and white, forlorn white hooks. Who in their right mind would harbor a Christmas cactus--eleven months of the year a collapsed gray green. What else? Even as far as a ceramic gnome, maybe, sleeping it off in the dirt.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

PLASTIC AND THE AFTERLIFE

Randy Mesmer died expecting the boy-next-door and the rest of the coveted neighbors. Husband, father, son, big brother. Those sins. Their corresponding punishments. Instead muscled arms and hairy asses just protruded here and there beneath a heap of plastic bottles and coffee cups, beer cans, junk cars, and burger wrappers, in a cloud of monoxide and chlorofluorocarbons.

The angels trailed plastic bags from all night pharmacies. One angel—now grounded due to acid rain-- explained that lust had lost rank in the new list of sins against the body.

“The twenty-first century has transgressions all its own,” explained the angel. ”And they have a helluva lot to do with trash.”

Carnal lust, fearsome as the Bengal tiger, is now likewise direly endangered, and hunts forlorn in scabby patches of jungle. “We can’t get them to mate,” moaned the angel. “It’s something in the water.”

Between heavy metals and depleted uranium casings—nostalgia for adultery now sweeps the heavens. “We don’t worry about wet dreams. We worry about hormone disruptors.”

“Retribution was simple when you just killed a man,” said the angel. “Then maybe his grandchildren killed yours. Now that toxins poison 100 generations down--frankly it’s hard to know what to shoot.”

On the Moment to Moment Instability of Beauty and Ugliness

Someone, I’m sure has written about this. I just haven’t come across it yet. It’s too obvious--and also too unsettling. This scandal: that the beautiful are not beautiful, and the ugly are not ugly, consistently.

That the beautiful are sometimes ugly is a disgrace. That the ugly are, without warning, beautiful is heartening.

Why struggle to befriend the beautiful people? By the time you catch up to them they could very well be hideous.

I am disconcerted. I’d prefer if people just stayed in one camp or another. Beautiful or Ugly. Permanently. The world would be easier to understand then, and easier to prepare for.

Some oscillation, some divergence, can be blamed on late nights, on whether one is beloved or forsaken, on the consumption of salmon, on happiness or unhappiness, and of course on beer—but the greater, more significant change remains a mystery. Does it change with the moon? Is it karmic or atmospheric? Should I not wait so long between haircuts?

Because nowhere is this more disruptive than in oneself. Other people can be forgiven. Here comes the day of the family portrait, it’s date night, and you think, I’m doing okay. Of course, I’m nothing special, but I do make it to the gym now and then. I moisturize.

But you look in the mirror that day and find a haggard aged goblin struggling to contain her eating disorder by means of IV drugs. Aghast at your reflection, you ask: where has this weight come from? Why is my skin this color? Have I managed to die without noticing? Yesterday I somehow imagined I was remotely okay. What happened?

That this happens is well-known. I don’t know why more people haven't written about it.

Conversely, a sudden shift from ugliness to beauty appears to be positive. However this shift is likewise calamitous and generally causes more trouble than sudden ugliness.

Imagine then, this situation. This situation which is very familiar to me. You are not attractive. Your features are unfortunate. Your body sags. Your genitals are unspectacular. You’re getting on in years. And you’ve accepted this.

You say to yourself: now it is time to focus on my spiritual life. Now I will learn to meditate and let go. Now I will study the Collected Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Now I will give back to the community.

Enough, you say. Enough nonsense. Enough vanity.

You no longer seek out mirrors but, then--one can’t really avoid them. You glance and there is a nanosecond of pure astonishment.

Hmmm. I’m not half-bad.

A nanosecond—and then you fall at once to plotting. Because if you look this good, then doubtless there are attractive people somewhere who would not object to sleeping with you. And hadn’t you better give them more opportunities to do so?

There is anxiety in this, heavy-duty anxiety, because you are well-aware that, not only will these good looks be gone in twenty years, they may very well have vamoosed by the next time you look in the mirror.

So you rush back to the mirror. Careful now not to turn on the overhead fluorescent. Still okay. Phew.

And the next moment you’re out in the street, flagging down a taxi on your way to (at best) that overpriced cruisy coffee shop or (more likely) that bar where no one wears anything but boots. Just boots. Nothing else.

Beauty and ugliness alternate back and forth. The Collected Essays of Montaigne remain unread.

The Life and Adventures of Randy Mesmer

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE OF MANNEQUINS

At the age of seven Randy Mesmer became renowned--at least within the family—for groping a mannequin at Filene’s.

Curious Randy clamped his avid hands on the stolid gentleman in turtleneck and corduroys and had to be pulled off by his mother, who shouted when she discovered him in this compromised position and, to tell the truth, never looked at her little boy in quite the same way again.

Thereafter, Randy was designated: the third son, the gimp-legged one. Who gropes mannequins. His family guessed, accurately as it turned out, that little Randy was going to be a world of trouble in this arena.

The cause of this commotion--the mannequin’s nether regions—were lackluster and un-compelling. One side, in fact, was much like the other.

Misinformed thus, Randy managed several respectable years. Until age 13, when he groped his first non-mannequin and discovered a situation more complex and appealing than he’d hitherto supposed.

Of all the excesses that came afterward, his family would only sigh and explain, “What do you expect from a boy who gropes a mannequin at Filene’s?”

Indeed.