Hopelessly Devoted to You

My essay, "Metta Meditation for Hot Male Action: how to practice love in sleazy bars", originally published in RFD, is now available here, on the blog of Don Shewey, writer and critic. I thought people who enjoyed that essay might also enjoying this one, about returning to Dharamsala after many years away. (And, yes, it is best if you read it while listening to Olivia Newton John.)

Hopelessly Devoted to You

for JYC

(Dharamsala, August 2009)

I used to be a spiritual person, but I’m not anymore. Years ago I joined all the religions, lived in India, bowed to everything. I suspect it was a kind of hysteria, frankly. Madness runs in my family – or, rather, it gallops, and it doesn’t miss anybody.

I used to be religious and India was all that mattered to me, especially Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives. All I ever talked about was freakin’ Dharamsala. I would have driven you out of your mind, I swear.

But I got over that. I don’t believe in any of it anymore. It just melted away. I live in Tokyo. I study ecology and literature. I’m as spiritual as an old carpet in an adult movie theater. And that suits me fine. I’m not the sort of person you’d want your son around, if he was cute and impressionable and below the age of 70.

Yes, I’ve come back to India a few times, but I don’t join cults and I don’t go to Dharamsala. In fourteen years, I’ve never once been back, not until the day before yesterday.

Now that I am here, I understand why I avoided it for so long. Trying to maintain one’s atheism here is like trying to stay sober in a shot bar.

It’s beautiful, this spiritual stuff, especially the Tibetan variety. It’s a valuable cultural artifact and we ought to help them maintain it. It’s lovely, but it’s not true. I don’t just want consolations, you understand, I want something that’s factual and proven, like penicillin, or global warming.

For a really spectacular and lively take on Indian spirituality, you must read Wendy Doniger’s new book The Hindus: An Alternative History. She shows, for example, how the idea of karma arose parallel to the idea of money. Doesn’t that make sense? There are clear societal and practical reasons behind various religious beliefs – and they’re often about keeping folks in line. It’s not magic in other words. It didn’t just bloom in mid-air when Guru Rinpoche snapped his fingers.

I have explained this to myself, repeatedly, but in Dharamsala that has absolutely no effect. I am suffering profound lapses in non-belief. It appears that I am wired for bowing down. I am obviously severely devotion-prone.

Of course I assure myself I don’t believe any of this stuff. I’m just circumambulating for my health. Prostrating for upper body strength. Nonetheless, I fear my atheism could not be detected by even the most sensitive instruments. Last night, in an unguarded moment, I nearly bought offering bowls.

The fact is, despite considering myself fully cured, I am obviously suffering from an outbreak of Buddhism. All over my body, even inside my mouth. And don’t reassure yourself that it will stop there. Because in 48 hours I could be in Vrindaban chanting Hare Krishna. It has happened before. Far gone on a bhakti bender. Basically, if devotion were herpes, I would be in the hospital now.

What can I do? Would it help to visualize Christopher Hitchens (author, God Is Not Great) or pray five times a day in the direction of Richard Dawkins (author, The God Delusion)?

It’s not that I’ve suddenly become fond of theology, or find the idea of rebirth any more convincing. It’s just that – how can I say it? – the sacredness of the world becomes forcibly apparent and I want some way to participate in that, to respond to that. Just walking around with my ordinary mind I can see that the trees, the mountains and the faces around me are (oh damn) holy. It’s obvious, I mean, this sacredness. It’s downright pushy. Things glow.

Yes. You are right. I did stop taking my medication. But my drugs are all for anxiety and I haven’t felt afraid since I left Tokyo.

This morning I was sitting in the main temple in front of the image of Tara. I wasn’t praying. I was just tired after all the circumambulating and prostrating and needed to sit down. I may have been accidentally reciting the Tara mantra. I was given this mantra long ago when I was just eighteen. It’s not my fault if I still recite it sometimes, in spite of myself. Think of how hard it is to stop smoking. Modern medicine has not yet developed a patch for the goddess Tara.

When I was a religious person, I was smitten or, rather, afflicted, with both Buddhism and Hinduism. Tara is a goddess in both faiths. I visited her fierce Hindu aspect in West Bengal once, in Tarapith. A poor and ragged place. And nonetheless radiant. (This is precisely the kind of fuzzy thinking I abhor.)

I'm a Tara devotee. I mean, I was. But I wasn't a devotee in the sensible Western Buddhist way, wherein they remind themselves every minute that she's just a symbol of their own inner wisdom. No, I was a swooning, bhakti-ridden "Oh Mother of the Universe" type. It smacked of Hinduism. I got in trouble with the Buddhists for my Hindu sympathies. The Hindus didn't care. I mean, I was white and gay. I was already literally beyond the pale.

Anyway, a group of Indian tourists traipsed into the temple where I was sitting. Dharamsala is unmistakably on the middle-class Indian tourist circuit now. They all troop in chatting, stare at the monks, take pictures with their cell phones, their kids run all over the place, and then they troop out again. Buddhism, remember, is not an Indian thing anymore, it was wiped out here around the 12th century. I guess a lot of the Dalits became Buddhists in the Fifties but I’ve never actually seen Indian Buddhists myself.

Well, this group comes in -- the women are in gorgeous saris, really high class. They sashay past Shakyamuni Buddha and the wrathful deities, walk up to Tara and suddenly their hands are over their heads, the little boy too, and they’re hitting the floor, prostrating over and over. An old Tibetan woman is standing there too, beaming, saying “Tara Devi! Tara Devi!”

I’m sitting there in back and in my mind the words appear: this is how the Buddha returns to India. And I bawl. Dumb screwed-up foreigner in his torn gay bar camo pants and Moosehill Reunion t-shirt, tears rolling down his face.

It’s a shame I don’t cry fresh water. They could send me to Yemen to solve the problems caused by global warming. Lately I cry so much, I’d reverse desertification. Those Yemenites could all have green lawns. Big leafy trees with ferns growing on them.

If worse comes to worse, I’ll start hanging out with devotees. Western Buddhists. Have you met these people? Watch out for them. Yipes. I was one for years. I went to America’s only Buddhist college, Naropa, where I was permanently cured of usefulness. Of course, I’m sure some Western Buddhists are fine people. I’ve heard those Insight Vipassana people are actually quite sane, but in my experience, most of the time, you could hardly meet a nuttier, more uptight, disapproving crew. Dick Cheney does not take himself more seriously than the Western Buddhists I knew.

In the early nineties I lived above McLeod Ganj at Tushita Meditation Center. The Era of Angry Nuns, I call it. Anytime I saw a foreign nun, I took off in the other direction. Because those nuns were always in a rage and you did not want to get in their way.

As for the rest of us, we boasted about how early we got up and how many prostrations we did. There were people in long-term silent retreat whose entire spiritual practice consisted of stomping around and scowling at people.

People had umpteen high higher highest beyond high tantric initiations. And everyone appeared to be obsessed with some kind of special cheese that could only be bought in Delhi. Or a very special rice paper lampshade that was just perfect for their meditation hut.

In those days, all I talked about was wanting to become a monk. You see, I wanted more than anything to be one of them. I wanted to be good.

I see now how brave they were, those Western Buddhist monks and nuns. They didn’t have much in the way of role models or support. The minute anyone donned robes, the rest of us basically expected them to levitate and never fart.

We all tried so hard. And it didn’t seem we wound up any more loving or enlightened, just uptight. I remember how we disapproved of those who’d given up their vows, stopped being monks. “He DISROBED!” people would say in a voice hushed and aghast, as if the guy had been waggling his private parts in a schoolyard.

And I remember how those ‘fallen’ monks and nuns seemed to have a special grace about them, when they came around in regular clothes with their new boyfriend or girlfriend. It seemed they’d learned something very special – to pursue truth as themselves, and not as holy people.

Anyway, I’m ashamed to admit that, whenever I was pissed off while living in a religious community, I used to take a very quiet passive-aggressive form of revenge. You see, I got angry and self-important, when I saw the very most pucker-faced, disapproving devotees -- the ones who never ever spoke except to tell me what I was doing wrong – those same prickly devotees often turned into warm gushing piles of goo whenever a rinpoche was around.

When this happened I’d go off by myself and, in a low and evil voice, I’d sing Olivia Newton-John, “Hopelessly Devoted To You”. Remember that syrupy insipid song? I adore it.

But, now, there's nowhere to hide,
Since you pushed my love aside. . .
I'm not in my head,
Hopelessly devoted to you

I used to sing that song and take quiet revenge. And it serves me right now, if people sing it about me. Because me atheism has been severely compromised. Actually, I guess it was basically found Dead-On-Arrival in Dharamsala. It’s possible it was never particularly hardy.

I chant, I circumambulate, I bow down. I write. (Writing is the worst of all.) Because there is this radiance, this very pushy sacredness, and I want to participate in it. I want to respond to it.

I opened my door at the Green Hotel this morning and thought, “I get to be here all day.” (Presuming that I continue to successfully dodge the homicidal Maruti tourist vans.)

How wildly grateful I am to return to Dharamsala, to see it again with my own eyes while I am still alive.

What a pity I can’t cry fresh water.

My head is saying "Fool, forget him",
My heart is saying "Don't let go"
Hold on to the end, that's what I intend to do
I'm hopelessly devoted to yoo-oo-oo-ooo
Hopelessly devoted to you.

What I Found When I Was Lost

ACHING, RAVING, RAVISHING, BURNING DESIRE

“Candor ends paranoia.” – Allen Ginsberg

Easy.

I am an extraordinarily difficult person to flirt with. I tend to agree to any inappropriate suggestion immediately. Sometimes this catches people off guard.

As I unlock my door at the Malaysia Hotel, a drunk unshaven Filipino lug peers out next door. Leans against the doorframe and leers cheerfully. “Well, well, well! I had no idea I had such a cute neighbor! I ought to come visit you.”

“That’s a good idea. Give me five minutes, okay?”

Five minutes later there’s a knock at the door. But it’s not the drunk Filipino. It’s an impish young Thai.

“I’m his roommate,” he says. “He too tired.”

And this is also perfectly okay.

This happened years ago. But I still return to the Malaysia Hotel. I take time to struggle with my door. (What I do is I lock and unlock it several times.) So far, no more friendly neighbors.

I am like a dog who saw a squirrel in a tree once and now stops to sniff that same tree each day.

Soliloquy from Dick’s Café, Soi Twilight

“Who am I in Denmark? A retired fire fighter and it is good to be a firefighter but now that is finished and so I am finished in Denmark. When I divorced my wife I thought my life was finished. Who am I in Denmark? I am old and fat and ugly. Oh I can still be charming when I want to be but still the fact remains!

“I can be silent and alone in Denmark and I suppose that is commendable, that is what I am supposed to do. . . and for that what do I earn? Forever silence and forever loneliness! Who am I to anyone? No one! And it will never ever ever be any different. What happens in Denmark? Every few years the bus driver smiles to me. That is all.

“Here I am an ATM – but even that is not nothing. I am also a part of things here. I have my role to play. Six years here I know very many people and everywhere I go people know my name. I have Thai friends who have never once asked me for money. And yes, I suppose I am a kind of insurance. If something goes wrong, if someone is in hospital, then, they will call me. But I do not mind to be their insurance. I want them to be okay. I was a firefighter in Denmark but now that is finished.

“I know they do not always mean what they say, I know this very well. Spend enough time in Copenhagen and you will be grateful to be smiled at for any reason! I believe some of them really are happy to see me. Am I a fool? Are they not human too? I know their names. I tip well but not outrageously. I am a kind person. How do you say in America? I give a damn.

“I know this is very questionable. It is problematic. But I am a part of things. Do you understand? That is all I ever wanted to be – a part of things. . .”

Voyeurism.

In the window directly above and facing the pool at the Malaysia Hotel, there is a head. A white old round head with even whiter hair. Behind glasses with thick black frames eyes stare unblinking at any young man swimming or sunning himself. That head is always in the window, as if it has been mounted there, on a post. It is there in the morning and there in the afternoon. I was here years ago; the head was there then. And it is always staring. If you stare back long enough, the head will finally turn, and a hand will appear and toy nervously with an ear.

Imagine retiring to perv permanently at the Malaysia Hotel! I can easily imagine. That puffy haired white head was once a teenage boy, sneaking looks at shirtless workmen. Desire goes on and on.

∞

How is it possible to ever do anything useful or true with a mind designed for deception? A mind that continually tells small but crucial lies and seeks out poisonous consolations. A human mind.

Obituaries.

Imagine if newspapers told the truth and you opened the obituary page to the words

Addict, 72 Addict, 46 Addict, 19 Addict, 84

Wouldn’t that be excellent? We would be warned and we would not feel so all alone. Also we would have more respect for this Mrs. Joan Tatro, 68, formerly of Columbus, Ohio, who actually succeeded in becoming a secretary. An actual secretary! When everyone else who died on that day died addicted – to heroin or cigarettes or the neighbors’ high opinion, to sex or yoga, to public office or television. .

Herbert Huncke’s obituary carried the headline charismatic street hustler. Remember him? He was basically the Beats’ tour guide for the underworld. Most of the time he wasn’t charismatic at all. Just a junkie. He’s the reason Ginsberg got busted and wound up in a mental hospital, where he met Carl Solomon. Seeds of the poem HOWL. (One of the things that interests me most about human life is that it’s entirely impossible to tell good news from bad.)

It’s extremely unlikely anyone will be able convince the obituary page to boldface the word cocksucker. Maybe I could learn to be a secretary?

∞

The frog in a pot on the stove is slowly, slowly, slowly coming to a boil. Everyone around is smoking, or admiring themselves for not smoking. Even the frog is full of resolutions.

Survey.

I used to wonder if other people felt as lonely as I did. Or as frightened. Or as depressed. And the answer turned out to be Yes. I am still trying to figure out, however, if other people are actually this horny. Please -- take a moment to respond below.

Aunt Lucy.

My schizophrenic Aunt Lucy, lifetime resident of the state hospital in Laconia, has a diagnosis which includes the word hypersexuality. Yessir, there’s a word for it! Like halitosis! Like asthma!

So maybe I have a condition and other people are actually reasonable. Not the people I’m meeting of course, but other people.

God speaks to Aunt Lucy. God speaks to me, too. Not often. Perhaps semi-annually. I am also sometimes afflicted with the sense that everything is meaningful and people are basically good. Pathology!

Then there’s the tendency to endlessly compose long story/poem/essays consisting almost wholly of inappropriate information. (There’s a word for this too: hypergraphia.)

Isn’t this writing, which adheres to no genre and contains no structure, akin to the mythological kingdoms unemployed plumbers build secretly for 38 years in their garages using only aluminum foil, bottle caps and chewing gum?

Creativity is for other people. What I do is probably a symptom of something.

Bodhicitta.

When I sit down to meditate, I set my motivation. And at the end I dedicate the merit. I aspire to wake up and to be of benefit to every living thing. I know, it seems ridiculous for someone who can’t pay his student loans or keep his zipper zipped to pray in such a way but, nonetheless, I aspire.

And each time I make a small addendum that, if possible, I would like to be of benefit to the most miserable and sleazy of the addicts, those who have failed again and again and again. To the very most despised, the real lowlifes, the deadbeat dads and vicious mothers, to those who’ve burned up all of their chances and gutted everyone’s patience, to the losers, to the assholes, to the pedophiles.

The innocent

can

get

donations.

Or

fend

for

themselves.

I don’t want them.

Holy Mother, bless me one day to be the Deep Shit Bodhisattva.

Bulge.

Night after night, a man calls me at 3am. I do not think he is not a moneyboy outright. He does not work for a bar or stand on a street corner. Not anymore. I’m guessing that he now occupies the vast gray area between love and whoring, where many very respectable people live. He has foreign friends who take him on vacations. They sometimes give him something for his mother.

He is not young; he has spent far too much time in the sun. His body is still sleek however and, most importantly, the bulge in his turquoise-striped Speedo is impressive. I’ve noted this, repeatedly, and double-checked to make absolutely sure. He caught me at it, got my room number from the pool sign-in sheet, and now calls drunk at 3am, when his glowering German companion has presumably passed out. “I want kiss you!” “I want kiss you!” he says. It must be the German will soon be leaving town.

Cold Shower

What I have in mind is a portable shower, ice cold and dousing. The kind they use in science labs for emergencies, with a broad steel sunflower head and a chain to pull.

This is what I need above my head at all times. (Perhaps they could somehow attach it to my spine?) When overcome with flaming lust I could just pull the chain and at once douse myself. The water would have to be very, very cold.

Also it would be convenient for other people. Sturdy tourists commando in flimsy shorts with thick tanned calves adorned with golden hairs -- and sick to death of me staring -- they could just pull the chain! The whole world could help me to be virtuous, instead of aiding and abetting my unending perversities.

When I am supposed to be concerned with Real Adult Things – the future of the farm, the bills, elections, schedules – and I instead I am lost in a masturbatory haze because some cocky Israeli buck has sauntered past brandishing his delectable armpits – pull the chain! pull the chain! Instantly I am soaked, shivering, and able to return my attention to the details of the lease agreement.

I’d need to wear some light fabric which would quickly dry (and nothing see thru, Porno Boy!) since I would presumably be dousing myself, or being doused, 18 to 36 times a day.

Or course it would hideously embarrassing, to walk around all day beneath a broad metal shower head. Constantly wetting myself! I’d be shivering, cold and wet. I might catch pneumonia. Yes -- but I would be good.

If this is for any reason impracticable, my next idea is a special ice pack I could wear in my shorts. Very very cold. But I fear this would not be sufficient. I think some small electric shock is also very much in order.

(This is the twelth and final essay in the series "What I Found When I Was Lost".)

What I Found When I Was Lost

Rivalry

They arrived on Soi 4 grinning, dressed as twins in white dress shirts with sleeves rolled and ties knotted halfway down their chests. (“Like Japanese schoolgirls!” they said.) They looked very much alike, except that one was gorgeous and the other just good enough, as if they were two versions of a single person -- one perfect and one botched.

I grinned back, and when the table beside mine was free, they came and talked to me. “It is our first time to Asia! We are having the most wonderful time! We are busy from 6am until midnight every day. We go sightseeing and shopping and then always to have a massage! We cannot believe how fast the time is going – in only two days we must return to Berlin!”

They approved heartily of everything in Bangkok – the food, the shopping, the massage – they liked everything but Chinatown. “It is very dirty! There are garbages in the street. Men spit! Men piss! We decided we never go to China.”

“Please feel my leg,” said the plain-looking man. He was not really so plain. He was actually quite good-looking. He looked plain because he was beside the gorgeous man -- who now invited me to feel his arm.

I approved heartily of both and believed that my night was, at last, headed in the right direction.

“So smooth!” said the plain-looking man. “Today we had tried the body polish. They polish you all over! Then they use powder. It smells so nice! Afterwards you feel so smooth. You do not sweat.” Then he teased the gorgeous one. “He often uses powder. And he is shaved everywhere. I mean, everywhere you can think of! He also wears a little makeup. And never once in his life is there a hair between his eyebrows. It is not allowed. Even in Asia he travels with mascara!”

This is the trouble I always have with threesomes. It’s hard to keep both guys happy – somebody always gets jealous. “Both of you are excellent,” I said. “How long have you been together?”

They laughed and waved their hands, as if to scatter my words in the air.

“No! No!” said the plain one. “We’ve always been together. We’re brothers.”

“I’m straight,” said the gorgeous brother. I checked to see if he was serious. His big brown eyes certainly looked earnest. But maybe it was just the mascara.

“He is so girly,” said the plain brother.

“I am a personal trainer in Berlin,” said the gorgeous brother. “My body is my asset.”

“He is the ultimate number one metrosexual. He is so girly!”

Over the next dozen or so beers they continued in much the same fashion. The gorgeous one gave me workout tips. (Three times a week is perfect. Twenty minutes cardio, then weights, then twenty minutes cardio again. And drink enough water!)

”He is so girly. So totally girly! I do not understand why he does not just give up and be gay already. His girlfriend is sometimes so bitchy. Sometimes no sex for one month. Always he must talk sweetly to her and give her massage any time she asks for it. I told him, you go gay, you can have sex every night!”

I ran my eyes over the beautiful brother. “You could have sex every hour. That’s the good part of being a gay guy. Also the bad part.”

“I love her,” said the gorgeous brother. “We have been together five years now.”

“So girly!” protested the plain brother, who had just broken up with his lover after seventeen years. They’d met when he was twenty. “All that time I could have had anyone I wanted! Now I am free and nobody wants me. Nobody! Everybody, all the time, they only want him.”

There was a short pause then, as sometimes happens when one has arrived at the heart of the matter.

I laughed and rubbed his back a little. “On this subject, sir, I am an authority.” I explained that my unfortunate parents had suffered diminishing returns when having children. Each son was two inches shorter, and less handsome, and duller than the one before. I was the youngest and had inherited nothing but the runt’s sharp-toothed determination. Every beautiful person in the world paraded right up to me to beg. “Please. Introduce me to your brother.”

It bothered me for a long time. Then it didn’t bother me anymore. I have an awkward stumbling soul – this Quasimodo shape of mine is its natural physical extension.

All right. Maybe it still bothers me a little.

“You’re fine,” I said. “You’re cute. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.” The gorgeous brother enthusiastically agreed. We were both insulting him. We knew it and couldn’t help ourselves. The plain brother sat there, drinking his beer, getting smaller and more homely by the minute.

The gorgeous brother continued to counsel me. He reminded me that there was no point to using supplements, except perhaps Creatine and salmon oil, but it was very important to always remain balanced. The plain brother had his hands all over me now, which the gorgeous brother politely ignored. He assured me there was nothing at all wrong with beer, except that it dehydrates one. Dehydrate was a very serious word in his vocabulary. For each pint of beer I must drink half a pint of water. Then I’d be all right.

The plain brother interrupted. “How much for you?”

“What?”

At last the gorgeous brother winced. “Stefan!”

“Come on. We are in Bangkok. Everything has its price.”

I smiled and pretended I’d understood nothing. Anyway it was absurd. The plain-looking brother was still better-looking than me. Nothing was wrong with him at all, in fact, except for the baby shit stink of self-loathing and need that rose off of him. How well I knew that smell, which became stronger the more one tried to eradicate it. It had never occurred to me to try to cover it with powder.

The gorgeous brother announced it was time for them to return to their hotel. The lights of the bar had already turned off. It was almost 2am and he still had to do his evening routine: remove his makeup, rinse off the powder, moisturize, care for his feet, calculate the number of beers he’d drunk and drink a half a pint of water for each. Maybe he’d do some stretches too, or even a few sit-ups. Alcohol is only empty calories.

It had never occurred to me before that it must be tiresome, too, to be the beautiful brother. To keep to routines and maintain your advantage. To be trailed always by a hungry brother who praised you and blamed you. Who begged you. Who loved you and desired you. Who hated you.

(Bangkok, 09.15.09)

What I Found When I Was Lost

Two Hustlers

I only ever saw him on the edge of places. I met him on the way to Dharamkot; I saw him on the far side of Bhagsu. I’d seen him at least twice before on the path around the temple. Each time he asked me to ‘help him out’ and when I refused – he was young and strong – he walked off muttering Jesus Christ. A young Indian guy, though his accent sounded like Newark. Yesterday I saw him at the monastery guesthouse where I’m staying – he was asleep behind the shower block, just barely out of the rain.

Today he was sitting on a bench beside the temple path. I sat down beside him. “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Listen to me, okay? Are you going to listen to me, man? Maybe you will not believe me, but I’m going to tell you anyway. My father’s name was Patrick Kevin O’Brien. Do you know him? He was a great man. I lost my parents very young; he took me in. He paid for me to go to a school. Very expensive school, man. The best. He was like a father to me.

“We came to this place for a holiday. I did not think I would stay here forever. One night he fell. He was a heavy drinker, see. Nobody would help me. I paid two coolies a thousand rupees to take him to the hospital. I went to the Embassy. Nobody would help him and he died. I went to my school to get my certificate but they wouldn’t give it. He didn’t pay the last six months you see. Give us fifteen thousand rupees, they said. But where could I get that kind of money? Are you listening to me man? Are you believing me?”

I was listening. Even if I didn’t want to, I listened. I made a promise years ago. I guess it is a kind of vow. I must listen, and buy him lunch, and never lay a finger on him. I could shake his hand, if he offered it. That’s all. I couldn’t ruffle his hair or touch his shoulder. I made a vow. Because I have been this kind of boy.

He was still good-looking in a sly, rakish way. He had early lines from his face from cheap cigarettes and whiskey. Looked at everything out the corners of his eyes.. He said he was 19. He was lying. I reckon he was 26 and figured 19 was the maximum age he could be and still win sympathy. I could imagine how beautiful he must have been a dozen years before, when he’d attracted the attention of globe-trotting do-gooder pedophiles. Men who paid for everything during the day, and thought highly of themselves -- and at night drank, and figured then that they were within their rights.

I am certain this was the case, though I can show no proof, except to say that I have been this kind of boy.

If you really want to fuck someone over, if you want to pulverize their integrity and reduce their dignity to a fine powder, if is enough to give them money unpredictably. You can destroy a person very efficiently this way. And you can assure yourself that all you ever did was help them.

“Another guy came. He was a German. He sent money for awhile and then I never heard from him anymore. One French man came. He got me a job with a non-profit. I had a staff of six people working under me. But he stopped sending money too and then they said I had to leave. Bad luck, man! Just bad luck!

“I started to work a job then. Because I speak English well. I worked in Bhagsu at a very fine hotel. I worked at the Himalayan Queen. And at the Simla Plaza Hotel. Finally I had to work at the Green Hotel. I did a good job, a very fine job, man, but every place let me go. Because they said I was a thief. I am not a thief. But everyone they say I am a thief. They are fucking liars, man. Do you believe me?”

Obviously, this guy was seriously twisted up. His morality was shot. Boundaries and integrity gone. How could he ever be good for anything now?

Of course, as the son of privilege, I can never truly understand this young man’s situation. After all, my rich father paid for college. Or said he would. Sometimes he did. Other times he changed his mind. If he felt I didn’t respect him enough. Mostly he forgot I existed. He was a very important man, see, and I was not among his priorities.

I was not a poor boy, but I reckon I understand something about benefactors. My father was a benefactor in the grand old style. He liked to be thanked -- he could not be thanked enough, and he enjoyed it very much – but most of all he liked to be begged. Of course we’d agreed to everything in advance, but he never once remembered that. Nothing ever came until I called, never less than three times, often six or eight, each time more desperate, until I’d say “this is the last day I’ll be eating” and then he’d send a check. I’d hurry to pay my bills. And then the check would bounce.

“Everybody knows me, man. And I know everybody. I saw you yesterday, man. You’re staying up at the monastery. I said hello to you, man. You didn’t hear me. You were sleeping in the room with the broken window.”

I reminded myself that I must always keep my valuables out of sight.

“Did I tell you, man? I’m a Christian. I had a dream last night. I dreamt of Jesus. I dreamed of Jesus and he told me I had to get out of here. If I could get to Bombay, I could just start over. All I need is a bus ticket, man. Can you help me out? Nobody helps me, man.”

“I totally agree with Jesus,” I said. “But all you’re getting from me is lunch.”

I gave him thirty rupees. He beamed, took off to buy a bottle of the vicious local liquor. I didn’t blame him. I’d want the same thing in his situation. I did want the same thing. Each day I practiced not drinking it.

Prayer beads in hand, I resumed my pious circumambulation of the temple. I reminded myself that I must warn the guest house. There is a thief in the area.

What I Found When I Was Lost

Chants (and Rants) from Zilnon Kagyeling

I wake to the sound of cymbals crashing in the gompa upstairs, a man chants softly in the room next to mine, and my eyes open on the walls of Room #5 here at Zilnon Kagyeling Monastery. Sky blue walls are spotted with mildew, one window is busted, the window above the door must be propped open with a bottle. The fog has slipped under the door and into bed with me. It feels like happiness – and it smells damp.

Wonderful, I think. Lucky. Why can’t I make good choices more often?

Years and years ago, I often stayed at Zilnon Kagyeling. The first time it was very basic: two buildings, a small gompa, a few guest rooms. At Losar (New Year) they invited us into the gompa for a ceremony and afterwards fed us beautifully. There was an African-American nun staying here then, in three year retreat. She glowered at us and said we should all go away. She knew the value of what we were being given. She didn’t reckon we deserved it.

When I returned a few years later, Zilnon Kagyeling seemed like just a big guesthouse, with a few monks attached. White walls, hot showers, and rules. A dozen years later, the place is in disrepair, and most of the tourists have left. Now it seems like a boarding house for wayward monks. I feel very much at home.

I should not say wayward; I should say independent. Most of the monks I’ve known have been Gelugpa – and those Gelugpa always seem to be on a schedule.

Strange things used to happen at Zilnon Kagyeling. There’d be shouting and windows broken, and the next day someone would be walking around muttering about black magic. These are Nyingmapa monks, remember -- you don’t want to mess with them. They understand the nature of reality and they know how to manipulate it. They have a reputation for being magicians. This monastery is said to use tantric rituals to influence the weather, to make seasons turn, to prevent hail storms, et cetera.

All I can say is -- if these monks are doing rituals to make the rain come -- they are succeeding big time. If I were a little more brave, I might go upstairs and see if I could talk them into fifteen minutes of sunshine. My laundry is about to dissolve.

I sit in my little room and recite the mantra of Guru Rinpoche, who brought the dharma to Tibet and is especially revered by the Nyingmapa. I visualize his bulging eyes, his red tricorn hat, and his moustache like Salvador Dali’s. He is warm and tender and tough. Guru Rinpoche bears down on me like a rainbow.

Hopefully the monks will peek in my busted window, spy me slouched on my meditation bench in front of a Guru Rinpoche postcard, and put in a good word for me with the dharmakaya. This despite the fact that delusion, anger and desire (desire!) continue in me unabated, and my Buddhist Report Card clearly reads: Shows No Sign of Improvement.

On the other hand, an entire month has gone by, and I haven’t once wished I was dead.

Lucky, lucky, lucky life. Allowed to travel, allowed to write and to read. And my husband. Absolutely first-rate. What are the chances that someone so adorable would also have such an excellent heart? Why can’t I celebrate all these things – and accept that Tokyo is the price of them? Why?

Return to the breath. This moment. Now. This is what I am taught. Here in India, how easy it is come back. The present moment accosts me. Now insists. Speeding Maruti van, smell of cow shit, shoeshine boy, an old monk stumbling down the road clutching a fresh head of lettuce. India issues me continuous invitations, in the form of warm brown eyes and uneven pavement.

Returning to the present moment in Tokyo, I find myself alone. Even on a crowded train. Especially then. Who wants to be present in Tokyo? Who wants to be aware? Look around the Namboku Line, look on the platform at Meguro. See how we clutch our phones and stare dead-eyed into space. Who needs to be aware in Tokyo? The train will arrive at 8:11, exactly as if did the day before.

We are encouraged not to be aware. Drugged cattle are more easily transported. Should you happen to regain consciousness while riding on the train, you will find yourself staring at an advertisement for beer.

All day in Tokyo I move like a capsule through a tube. Like a ghost. If Tokyo were a picture, the caption would read: Let’s pretend none of this is going on.

Hopefully in time there will be monuments and museums to honor Tokyoites, who sacrificed their lives, and their children’s lives, to comfort, efficiency and convenience. Please disagree, if you like. But I have been watching for seven years -- and I do not intend to play dumb now.

The city of Tokyo is devoted singlemindedly to testing a hypothesis. It’s the largest experiment in the history of the world. The MacArthur Hypothesis, let’s call it – that happiness is achieved through ever-increasing amounts of technology, isolation, predictability and consumption.

Supposedly this hypothesis is now being tested all around the world. This is completely unnecessary. We in Tokyo have tested it already. We have taken it very, very far. And the results are clear. Happiness does not result. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work!

Generally it is enough to disprove a hypothesis a dozen times, or a hundred. But we go on and on. We disprove it 30 million times. And then we try again. And we are shocked when it does not work. How about more? More speed! More consumption! No matter how much it hurts, we go on, destroying our environment and wasting our lives, trying again, no matter what it costs us, no matter how much it hurts, like an alcoholic who is already coughing up blood, like an aging sex addict waiting to get fucked in the sling.

How can these monks believe that they can change the weather by waving a bell in the air! Then again, maybe I’m not one to judge. I come from a city where women believe they will be fulfilled by handbag.

As for the spectacularly dumb things I’ve done in pursuit of happiness – well, just scroll down.

I don’t have the answers obviously. (Actually, I was hoping we could work out the details together.) All I know is -- it’s time for something else.

Write in with suggestions, won’t you?

In the meantime, I’ll be here kneeling in front of a postcard, and trying to let the rainbow bear down on me.

A beautiful portrait of William Carlos Williams by Akemi Shinohara to go along with the essay "Cheerful, Lucky, Lost". William Carlos Williams, we love you!

And thank you, Akemi. It is an honor to be illustrated by you.

What I Found When I Was Lost

An Unseemly Love : Notes On Returning to Delhi

(Delhi, Aug 17.09)

From this rooftop the main bazaar appears a ruin. Or at least, the mud has won -- the details of the surrender are still being worked out. Meanwhile a gang of boys (blue, pink, orange, red shirts) have climbed to the highest crumbling rooftop and they are flying kites.

People told me, when I said I hadn’t seen Delhi in eleven years, that it had changed immensely. I’d hardly recognize the place. I braced myself accordingly, put my nostalgia on a leash. Well, I’m sure it has changed immensely and that everyone, out of regard for me and my fine feelings, worked overtime to put it back almost exactly as it was before, the last time I was here.

Of course, the sacred word internet is painted on every other wall and Pahar Ganj now sports more ATMs than chaiwallahs. The TVs are all flat screen and everyone who appears to eat regularly, and some who do not, is holding a cellphone and talking to it continuously in a loud authoritative voice. But to me it still seems the same Delhi, with new and glittery earrings. The new Metro must be truly significant. The middle-class may now teleport from place to place.

I was told auto-rickshaws had recently been banned. Cycle-rickshaws were banned some time ago. The streets are full of both. Last night I stumbled out of my hotel at midnight to find no one but the omelet-wallah and a man feeding his two camels. “Dude.” I said to myself. “I told you I was not making this shit up!” Camels, of course, are also banned.

Obsessing about camels, about cows and monkeys and elephants, about saris and sadhus – this is what foreigners do in India. We patronize, we exoticize, and we miss the point entirely. I am a recalcitrant repeat offender, shackled as I have been for almost twenty years with an unseemly love for India. Foreigners should come, and spend, and then go home again. It’s wrong for us to come back again and again, and involve ourselves, and pretend to appreciate things that are obviously beyond our comprehension.

The main bazaar looks as it did in 1991: as if a skinny cycle rickshaw wallah, stiffed on a fare, might bring down the entire district with a single well-aimed kick. In the rain the road is bubbling vat of brown mud. Even the elegant young ladies, who ordinarily walk around all day without a spot, as if defended by the god of hygiene, stand now at the edge of the street, peering out, figuring in advance exactly where they will step.

To tell the truth, it is quieter than I remember. The hassling seems less intense. I used to say “No thank you” 150 times between the gate of the railway station and my hotel. Now one refusal is often enough – what India is this! There was a time when, if I was accosted by a dreamy green-eyed Kashmiri carpet salesman, I’d laugh and wave and start to run. They’d pursue you for half a mile – until you had no choice but to go with them, drink six cups of tea, book a houseboat and buy a carpet. Now the merchants hardly try. Perhaps it just doesn’t work anymore: these travelers seem to move in sealed containers.

I have a fear -- maybe I’m paranoid -- but I worry people will think I love India because it’s spiritual. Let me make clear: I love India because I love Indians and this is where they live.

So often – crossing the street, peering from a rooftop, crammed onto a bus – a stranger meets my eye and shrugs and grins, as if to say, “It’s a madhouse isn’t it? But you and I will keep our sense of humor.”

And there is the way that questions are asked in a way that includes the correct answer: “You come to my shop yes you would like to buy something.” Last night, when I gazed longingly toward a South Indian snack shop, the cook just beamed at me and said, “Yes!”

Or this: today I went the ITDC office to book a city tour. The amiable young man wrote a ticket and passing it to me said, “Sir, I am asking you seriously -- if this tour is no good -- that you will not complain to me, sir – and that you will not let small money come between us -- because this is only one chicken, sir -- and I must eat this chicken every day.”

Reduced to a small puddle of language joy, I gazed at him adoringly. (The above is only a ham-handed approximation of his freewheeling spontaneous improvisation.)

“That was beautiful,” I said. He proudly raised his hand and we high-fived each other.

This afternoon, sitting on the rooftop at Sam’s Café, watching the boys fly kites, I came upon a poem by Elizabeth Bishop titled “Arrival at Santos”. Here’s a little of it:

. . . oh tourist
is this how this country is going to answer you

and you immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.

What I Found When I Was Lost

Days (With No Proper Container)

(Delhi. Aug. 19. 09)

This rat is obviously on a schedule. Every morning there he is, beside my table at the Appetite bakery, every day at the same time. Whenever he appears, I stand up, as though he were a prominent politician or religious personage. The rat darts straight up the wall – to work presumably – and all at once the foreigners start to chatter with each other, as though the rat has given us permission to speak.

*

The French tourists always want their breakfast served in a particular order. Every morning they explain this carefully. Never once do they succeed. They get it when it’s ready. But they do not think this is right.

*

I wanted to see Delhi’s new metro, so I chose a destination at random from the map. How about Mansarovar Park? Isn’t Mansarovar a sacred lake in Tibet? Or am I making that up? And “park” is always an attractive word, bringing to mind trees full of delicate flowers, and bushes full of pent-up marauding homosexuals. I am always in favor of parks.

Delhi’s new metro is exuberantly modern, except for the lighting, a flickering skim-milk gray blue, and the manners, which Delhiites brought with them from the bus. How many times have I wailed in Tokyo, “Why can’t they just act human?”

Well. Now I have my answer. No one lets anyone out or in, everyone pushes and shoves. Men sit serenely beneath the green ‘Ladies Only’ sign and do not even think of giving up their seats. Half the passengers have just this moment received an extremely important call. They shout. In Tokyo a man hurls himself into a seat – and at once turns his face to ‘off’. In Delhi a man grabs a seat and looks around smug and exultant, like a toddler who has just now mastered the potty.

*

At Manosarovar Park station, I did not find a park, much less a lake. Instead I found a busy village beneath the elevated train tracks, beneath a cool gray concrete roof, beside towering elephantine pillars. The place was strangely reminiscent of the vast temple complexes at Trichy and Thanjavur, somber somehow, worshipful. At the bottom of this was a paved road lined with cycle-rickshaws, charpoys, mounds of trash mulching in brown heaps, stands selling betel in shiny packets, walls built from the dirt and burlap or blue vinyl ceilings. Extreme poverty beneath a cathedral ceiling. The women tended small fires in pits; the men sprawled on charpoys woven from silver rope. Every minute or so a lorry barreled down the street, blanketing everyone with another coat of dust. If the residents of this village ever decide they need a motto, they could always use Thoreau. “We do not ride upon the train. The train rides upon us.”

*

Back at Connaught Place, I can’t handle it anymore and so I choose an a/c restaurant at random, climb two flights of steps, and find myself surrounded by Indians in enormous black cowboy hats. Mexican food in Delhi? Apparently so. I order some nachos. The servers glance nervously at my clipboard, afraid that I am writing a review. I ought to put it away, but I have to keep writing because every time I look up I start to giggle: big black cowboy hats, black western shirts and pants, red kerchief knotted at the neck, black cowboy boots with silver buckles!

*

This young man with the purple shirt and the long stick, who walks the way I’ve seen a fisherman steer a boat in shallow water. When I see his soft eyes and fledging beard at the window, I leave the café and stand in the street with him. I give him bills not coins. The tourists at the Apetite Café are annoyed with me. I am making the problem worse. As it is, we must keep our eyes on our plates lest we see grubby children touching their fingers to their lips as we savor another bite of hot buttered croissant. I can ignore the children. This man, however, is my kinsmen. We share the same defect. The withered leg I hate. I strap my leg into the brace and shove it in an elevated shoe. And I walk. He begs in the Main Bazaar; his dangling dead foot is his qualification. I see that he is beautiful -- and whole. We are brothers. I want to hold his face in my hands and kiss him.

*
If they ask,
I will say
I make
the days
experiments.

From these experiments, I make days.

*

An old woman in a soiled white dress pushes open the glass door and enters Café Coffee Day. “Good morning,” she addresses the room, as though she were a teacher and we were all assembled for class. “Is there going to be a sandwich today? Is there going to be coffee? I certainly hope so.” The old woman is smiling, her eyes are bright blue. She’s British, I think. Her diction is impeccable and her voice is as smooth as glass. She advances to the counter. She speaks but doesn’t look at anyone, as if she knows we are there but cannot see us. As if we are ghosts.

“I have, in my bag, water from a holy spring in Burma. It is absolutely precious but I have no proper container for it.” She waits at the counter, but she does not receive a coffee or a sandwich. The young Indian woman at the counter ignores her, sits there looking bored.

The old woman is now standing in the center of the room. “This woman does not want to be promoted. That is why she does not give me a sandwich. I have been robbed of everything and I am forced to beg. Which is a tradition in this country.” She speaks very carefully, as if this were a recitation and she has to get it perfectly right. The poems of Emily Dickinson would be ideal for this woman in a white dress, for this voice which is sweet and pure and entirely unnerving.

“She has been asked to feed me. The President of India asked all these restaurants to feed me. But she does not. Because she does not want to be promoted.” She walks back toward the glass door. “I am sorry but I cannot hear anything. Because of hypnotic suggestion that has been absolutely beautfully done. So I am very sorry but I cannot hear a word you say.”

When I paid my bill, I asked the lady at the counter how long the old woman had been coming to beg. “Oh it’s been about a year now.” Her voice was flat and bored. “She comes in every day.”

What I Found When I Was Lost

Breakfast at the Mali Restaurant

When I was 24 I threw myself in front of a train. Naturally, my timing and my aim were off. Sissy boy. Couldn’t hit a baseball, couldn’t throw a punch, couldn’t hit a Light Rail train -- not even with myself.

The Light Rail was new in Denver -- and turned out to have excellent brakes. The conductor stopped the train and cussed me out. “What is it you are trying to do?” Frankly, it was more embarrassing than anything else. I stumbled back to my friend’s house and didn’t tell anyone. My clothes were soaked. I said I’d fallen in the snow. As suicides go, it wasn’t much, but, hey, it was an attempt.

The next day I decided that, since I was going to kill myself, I might as well go back to India first. I’d been going to India since I was 18, prostrating to swamis and lamas, reading novels, getting dysentery, and cruising the bamboo at Cubbon Park. I stumbled off to India and got hooked back into life. Whatever works, right?

More than a dozen years passed, several different lives and countries, but, despite setting records for sustained neuroses, I never seriously considered killing myself again – until about two weeks ago.

I live in Tokyo now, where the trains are very fast and doubtless would have done the trick, but thankfully I was trying to be modern, also painless, and so I googled ‘Ativan lethal dose’.

Do you know what you get when you do that? You get 15,000 online dealers trying to sell you Ativan. Which pretty much extinguishes any warm and fuzzy Ronald Reagan- type feelings I have toward capitalism. On the plus side, there were so many budding capitalists that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.

When I am lost to myself, when the demons have spirited me away, I sit in the corner drinking beer, writing little notes to myself on scraps of paper. Two weeks ago, the morning after a hopeless night, while tidying up the beer cans and the scraps, I found a little note that read: I’m not going to kill myself because I want to eat breakfast again at the Mali Restaurant.

“Dude.” I said to myself. “Nice idea.”

I bought a one way ticket to Bangkok and here I am, eating rice porridge with pork, suspended in a humid cloud of fish sauce, green onions and monoxide, sitting outside at the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok.

Now that my insanity has been firmly established, I would like to tell you my mystic theory of restaurants. I believe in soul mates basically. Not for romance, but for dining out. Each soul receives, at conception, the name of a restaurant and that restaurant is the soul’s destiny, where the soul and the stomach are perfectly satisfied. (It’s better if you pronounce this in your best Osho-faux guru accent.) For some souls it might be a sushi bar, for others a hot dog stand on a sunny corner. Some tragic souls never seek out their restaurant -- they keep going back to Panda Express at the Food Court.

I’ll leave it to Hollywood to work out all the dramatic implications.

Anyway, the Mali Restaurant in Bangkok is the restaurant of my soul, the very best restaurant in the world. The Mali Restaurant has excellent food, of course, Thai and Western both, all very reasonably priced. Inside it’s dark and cozy with cushions and photos and bric-a-brac. Outside there’s an intricate wooden verandah that’s glorious if you don’t mind the street noise. The management and the waitstaff greet you tenderly, as if your mother had called ahead and asked that they be especially sweet to you.

However I suspect that the Mali Restaurant’s principal attraction for me is its strange and occult power, a bit of benevolent witchcraft. At the Mali Restaurant it is impossible to feel afraid or hopeless.

I have fled to the Mali in the thick of a panic attack, or after a day at the baths when I could have torn out my eyes from self-loathing. Demons can’t get inside the door. Mine can’t anyway. I can’t explain it otherwise.

Naturally I have my theories about this.

The Mali Restaurant is run by two men, a couple, one American and one Thai. Of course they are ordinary men, with complaints, with aches and pains. They are ordinary and at the same time I think it can also be said that they are beautiful experiments in human goodness. Experiments may have unforeseen peripheral effects.

The American was a soldier in Vietnam and, from what I’ve overheard, is haunted still. I heard him say once that he keeps his room smelling like a French whorehouse so that the smell of corpses won’t revisit him. It could well be that, in constructing a refuge from his own fear, he has created a safe haven for everyone.

The other man, the Thai, has a compulsion for preserving life. At the market he will buy frogs and even goats to save them from being slaughtered. Eavesdropping as I ladle up rice soup with pork, I note that he does not speak like someone who woke up and decided to be virtuous, but rather like a man who cannot help himself. He cares especially for dogs. He saves dogs the way other men drink.

The leftovers from the Mali -- the unfinished lunches of embassy staff, the leavings of sex tourists with too big eyes -- all go to stray dogs. But it goes much further than this.

Driving one night three years ago, he saw ahead of him a truck full of dogs. And he knew these dogs had been kidnapped and were being taken up North where they would be slaughtered and served in a restaurant.

Very upsetting, isn’t it? I would feel outraged if I saw such a thing. And I could also be relied upon to not do a damn thing.

From what I understand, he forced the truck to the side of the road, threatened the kidnappers, convinced them that he was a legal authority, and took possession of the dogs. A happy hijacking, in other words. Robin Hood for dogs.

And he brought the dogs all home. Dozens and dozens of dogs. Thankfully the managers of the Mali have some land of their own. He now operates a dog shelter and works to stop dog trafficking.

Courage on such a scale is bound to have effects. Don’t you think? Unintended, peripheral effects. By which I mean to say that I am just another of the dogs. Another stray, or house pet that got lost. A lucky dog rescued at random on the way to its destruction, who instead winds up eating breakfast at the Mali Restaurant.

What I Found When I Was Lost

Cheerful, Lucky, Lost

I’m no slave to fashion, but I like to think I do all right. Understated, masculine – i.e. undershirt and muscles showing. Overall I think I’m just as cool as any guy could be who carries a clipboard everywhere he goes.

No use for me is found and so I wander taking notes. Each page dated, printed neatly, labelled Hinduism, Ginsberg, Winesburg, Ecology. Notes on the streets of Bangkok, on the round-faced woman selling chicken with rice, hair tucked into her white cap beneath the tattered green umbrella. Ice melts from the cart of the melon vendor and drips beside the bicycle wheels. The British tourists wear plaid shorts, have awe-inspiring calves. I spend too much time looking down, I know.

If anyone looks at me I duck, bow, and smile wincing with vast agonized longing. Quite a little production, really. Then I resume taking notes.

The visiting Italian ladies have blonde-streaked hair and look always as if they are squinting at something bright – and suspicious.

There is a certain cheerful kind of being lost that, loneliness and small anxiety notwithstanding, seems an enormous privilege. All day I wander the street, eating noodle soup, chugging milk on the stoop of Family Mart, the one near Soi Twilight (or Soi Boy) that’s always full of spiky-haired young men in tiny powder blue shorts and white tanktops who shiver in the a/c as they wait to buy hair gel or a Coca-Cola.

Wandering then down the road to the Sri Mariamma Temple where the goddess is taking her afternoon siesta behind the curtain and the brahmins wake up just long enough to apply tilak and receive donations. I love this temple because everyone comes here – Thai, Chinese, Indian, European – to offer a tray with a coconut, a garland of marigolds and a carton of milk. No one notices one more foreigner. Even a few Theravadin monks are here, not bowing to anything but taking a good long look.

I do not believe in anything – all hokum as far as I’m concerned – but when the curtain opens to reveal the goddess I prostrate along with the others, then slip a 100 baht to Lord Venkateshwara, whose job it is to preserve the universe. Think about it: a job more hopeless than Obama’s. Naturally, I check in with Ganesha, who handles beginnings and writers. I do not believe in anything. I hold out some slim hope that I may yet be found mistaken.

At the travel agent nearest the temple I stop in and speak with ‘Rani’, who clearly views her size as one more reason to dress impeccably. Her English is precise and aristocratic, her tone world-weary. She has the quality I look for in a travel agent: an air of being in charge of the universe. Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy plane tickets and that is close enough. In three minutes she has booked me a one-way ticket to my own heart.

Back up the road to Soi Twilight, where it is twilight now: the boys are just arriving, playing pool, and laughing at each other. Here at Dick’s Café, a few johns are already in attendance too, red-faced men who smoke staring at the ground and glower at everyone except the boy across the way – last night’s boy or last week’s boy and maybe tonight’s boy as well – who waves, blows kisses and makes funny faces.

The johns. Trim well-moisturized well-to-do white men with angry puckered faces: the products of forty years of gay liberation. A liberation that turned out to be primarily a training in consumption: lube, poppers, draperies, gym memberships, vacations. Most of all, we consume each other.

Who has the manifesto for some other path? Who is calling us away from gaydar and manhunt, from our voracious pornographic cave? Where are our mentors? I fear that we have killed them off with the meth, or the bare-backing craze, or else trained them for nothing better than pouty-faced old age, buying boys on Soi Twilight.

Squinting beneath the color lights, I take notes and dream along with Bill Morgan’s new biography of Ginsberg: I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. It’s a great book -- though I fear it feeds my delusions of poetic grandeur. Most of all it makes me yearn for mentors and community. Some company, please.

Most of all, I love to read of William Carlos Williams and his open-hearted generosity even in broken-down old age. By 1956 Williams was going blind; Allen had to read his poems to him. Allen even showed up one night with his dad and Corso, Orlovsky and Kerouac. They got drunk and no doubt wore out their welcome with Mrs. Williams. Still, it appears the good doctor was charmed by them and wanted to hear what they had to say. William Carlos Williams, I love you.

Despite my obvious deficit in beliefs, purposes and social graces, tonight it is enough to be a quivering and observant fool, a fool half-hidden by the potted palm in the corner of Dick’s Café, keeping an eye on the johns and the boys in powder blue shorts, taking notes perpetually on my fool’s clipboard.

What I Found When I Was Lost

Return of Color

I prayed to God, God couldn’t be bothered. The Buddha remained Gone Beyond. Who showed up was Clarice Lispector (died, Brazil, 1977), wrapped in a shawl the green of dragonflies, looking utterly ferocious. She had no tolerance for self-pity. She took me by the wrist. She used her nails. The door was flung open. She led me out of the house, away from the alcohol and the collection of benzodapines. "You are going to the park," she said.

Ten days later, out the door of the Malaysia Hotel. The taxi cabs are flamingo pink, the motorbike men wear orange vests and the vendors blue caps. Everywhere death has not been nailed down there is green. I clutch the door frame. The guard (pink shirt!) smiles encouragement. Sweet Mary Mother of God: someone has turned on the color.

Depression is such a misleading word I wonder if the government isn’t somehow behind it. “Panicked frenzy of self-loathing” is somewhat more accurate, but I prefer to vote with tradition and say demons. And I do not believe in demons either – but try telling that to them.

The demons steal away the color, the world goes out of reach – it can be bumped against, it cannot be touched. What remains is a flabby putrified fly-swarmed maggoty self. The easiest test for depression is with a mirror: check for a corpse. (This also works the other way. Occasionally I think I’m just adorable. And this is a very dangerous sign.)

The demons are not impressed by prayer. They like to see me beg and bang my head against the floor. The demons like liquor and adore psychiatry. In Tokyo it is possible for them to get a visa to stay almost indefinitely.

Nonetheless a moment comes when one is released. Fuck if I know why. There is not a moment when the guard opens the door and says that one is free to go. More like the kidnappers throw you me the car. I find myself suddenly out on the street and still in prison clothes.

And there is a breeze, an actual breeze, which touches your skin and is not off-limits to you. There is a space around things. The sky goes up and up. Men are wearing pants that don’t hide much.

Almost immediately I become busy. That’s all right: the nice thing about being functional is you can do things. Life is underway and demands attention. Oh, hello, I’m in Thailand! Oh goodness gracious, I’m married aren’t I?

Looking around me now, I walk a little faster. This is no permanent reprieve. This open window may hover for a month, or be gone in an hour. There are repairs that need to be made, windows to be taped, books to read and suicide notes to burn. (Suicide notes must be written afresh for each occasion: this is how one buys time.)

Above all, there are people to be loved, people with sharp voices or curly hair, people smelling of shampoo and sweat and curry. People with problems of their own. Actual people with hands to be held, with real mouths and real ears to hear as you walk around together exclaiming, “My god, look at the colors!”

What I Found When I Was Lost

Notes From Past The Tipping Point

Don’t expect more than fragments, don’t ask me to make sense of things. Something happened, I got broken somehow, I don’t know how. My tipping point was – back there a ways. Like the Gangetic dolphin, the Amundsen ice, the ladyslipper. (You see how I put on airs.) What’s left is to be company to each other. As I am alone here at the infamous Malaysia, the longest-running sleazy cheap hotel in Southeast Asia, you’ll excuse me if I write a little.

Being neurotic is like carrying a heavy bag on one shoulder. You get sore, walk funny, and appear somewhat ridiculous. At the same time, it’s not such a problem, being somewhat askew. Certainly one has plenty of company. It’s fine until you one day you go to hoist your bag and pain shoots you in the face. If only one could simply call into work and say , “I’m very sorry. My mind’s gone out.”

The mistake is the same one we make with the oceans. We think we can dump in anything and it will just disappear. But a mind is like a back, it can be broken, and a mind is like the ocean – lose your balance for too long and pretty soon you’re killing off the dolphins.

Back in New Hampshire I saw a red cardinal and was momentarily incapacitated. I live in Tokyo, understand. Our bird is the crow. So I have some capacity for wonder still, that’s good to know, but not for crows or, for that matter, for live fucking shows, of which I’ve seen too many.

I was reminded of this fact last night at Tawan, the muscle boy bar, when the men donned golden masks, poured on the hot wax, and fucked each other in tandem and acrobatically, spinning like old-fashioned TV antennas. There’s more art in an evening’s cabaret at a bar of boys for sale than in a century’s worth of certain literary magazines: the ladyboys in spangles, gauze and plumes, lip-syncing flawlessly and looking better than the stars themselves, the bruise-eyed comedienne done up to look the haggard slut, mocking the audience and crying for lost love, and, yes, the actual fucking.

Purists reserve the word art for sonnets, for prose poems and pottery. I invite naysayers to try it themselves, to learn an aerobic jazz dance gymnastics routine and then perform it naked, on stage, slathered in baby oil, with a big thick dick up their ass. I'm certain Michiko Kakutani agrees: respect should not be reserved exclusively for sonneteers.

Is anyone still shocked? Was anyone shocked to begin with? Is being shocked just how we reassure ourselves? These sins are all humdrum, even straight people now attend gay sin dens. The open air gay bars on Silom Soi 4 have more tourists than actual queers, like a tribal village overrun by bus tours. I do my best to glare at straight men’s crotches, to look threatening and ravenous -- it’s no use. Even if you grab some tourist’s ass he just smiles sheepishly and says, “Thanks man, I’m flattered.”

As for the depraved steroid leather fetish fucking shows, well, even women go to them. Actual biological women, who have never had a penis of their own. Last night a woman sat alone at the table beside mine. She was in her late-twenties, a little heavy maybe, but long-haired and pretty. She was no wild child, her skirt was long and her shoes sensible. A graduate of Vassar possibly, B.A.Women’s Studies, followed by a Masters in Development from Brown. I mean, she looked the sort who could be expected to disapprove. The sort of person who might well take time to explain to you the brutality inherent in Jell-O desserts, and how gay porn oppresses women. Yet here she was, sipping her Coca-Cola and watching the boys deep throat each other. She looked bored.

The men on stage couldn’t help but give her a little extra attention. Most of them are totally straight after all and here was an opportunity to reunite work with their own interests and passions. Certainly she was lucky to be seated in the third row and not up front for the final number when a drag queen sang “Come as you are” and the boys did, one after another. (I thought it very conscientious of the management to go around first and put coasters atop all glasses.)

The women fled eventually, but not before she was quite thoroughly nuzzled and I did hear one muscle boy say teasingly “No tip necessary!”

I am still impressed by red cardinals -- how is it that all human things have had their color drained from them? These are days I feel I could beat even Ms. Joan Didion for Disenchantment Overall. “It is possible to stay entirely too long at the party,” says Ms. Didion, and she presumably has not even been to ‘boots-only night’ at the sex club called Church in Amsterdam.

* * *

That was the end of the slightly fun part of the essay. What’s left are complaints and ennui. The optional part of the tour reserved for depressives seeking company.

All my life I’ve been an enthusiast. That man dropped suddenly dead -- now it all just seems hideously repetitive. I note that religious faith and spirituality keeled over at this same point. Funny to discover what actually kills off faith, which is neither tragedy nor ecology. (Or are these now classified as one and the same?) My faith died off because no use was found for me. Selfish and stupid, I know, but such is the case.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of education, edifying chats with Allen Ginsberg, the Dalai Lama and the Empress of Japan, preposterous amounts of world literature of every stripe, all dumped into me like tomatoes into a food processor. Every teacher I ever had went to special bother on my behalf, time which they could have better spent on video games, on nail care.

Of all the things one for which one could become estranged from God, what sinks the boat is that the body of truth, the dharmakaya, turns out to be a suck-ass career counselor. No use is found.