Chapter 6. Healing Blues
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover
Lee and Arthur's living room was furnished with a door supported by two bookcases that was Arthur's desk, the 20-dollar-a-month piano Lee rented and played, a beat-up stereo, a beat-up record collection, and a beat-up steamer trunk with two legless red chairs on it. There were jade plants at each end of the desk and Arthur’s Selectric typewriter was equidistant from either end with blank paper piled to its left. Behind the blank paper was a 500-sheet typing-paper box with what he'd written over the summer in it, face down. There were partially-burnt candles in holders by each jade plant and a ceiling light that Arthur could turn on and off using a wall switch by the living-room door. A small gas fire was built into the one internal wall and above it was a single gray shelf they called the mantel. The overhead light was on. It was night, and Arthur and Stephen, alone in the house, were talking about Arthur’s imminent ambulation.
"I haven't felt this ridiculous since I suspended disbelief when the Gummer was going to blow God wide open in Houston," said Arthur.
The Gummer was Stitch’s Guru Maharaj Ji, who had toured the United States in 1974 when he was thirteen. Tour advertisements had proclaimed that at the Houston finale he would blow God wide open, and Shell and Arthur had talked of exactly how that might manifest.
"Were you ever into him?" Stephen asked.
"No. Kind of like I'm into my miracle cure. I feel I have to try to take Dr. Lang seriously because I take Lucia seriously. She really does believe, and I think Lee does too, though differently, a little less unreservedly. With the Gummer, me and Shell kept thinking about how it would be if the kid really were God, I mean in a way the rest of us aren’t. We were living with Jake and Ruth then. Jake wished he were into Ji or could even take him seriously--at least he said he did--, and Ruth just thought it was all nuts." Ruth was Arthur's sister, Jake her husband. "Six of Shell's Hunga Dunga friends" (Hunga Dunga was a San Francisco commune) "stayed overnight with us going from San Francisco to Houston and then going back from Houston to San Francisco. Ji's initiates got what they called the knowledge. Going east, four of Shell's friends had it; all six had it going home, so they were blissed--blissed their word. With the knowledge you literally taste the nectar and see the light, which means something specific, isn’t metaphoric. Shell went back to San Fran with them."
"You want a beer?"
"Good response. Sure."
Stephen went to the refrigerator in two steps, got two Olympia beers, opened them, and handed one to Arthur. Arthur held his in his left hand, his fingers cupped around it, his thumb gripping it naturally. He raised the can in a toast, said, “It’s the water,” the Olympia advertising slogan, took a sip, and resumed his story.
"The guy Shell tried to get the knowledge from was on probation because he'd already revealed the secret to two non-initiates. Leave it to Shell to seek out a renegade holy man. He didn’t want a guru, just wanted the nectar and the light. The Gummer gives it all to you, but you have to beg--which is a rational rule. Begging is part of giving yourself up to find yourself, getting yourself out of your own way. I'm glad I ain't gotta believe in anything for this Lang gig."
"Do you think anything is going to happen to you?"
"I gotta call it a long shot, though metaphorical healing is probable enough. One way or another, I'll be better."
Better had special meaning to Shell, Arthur, Stephen and their friends, whose theory it was that the worse things got, the better opportunity one had to learn and grow from the experience and thus improve one's character; virtually all event could be deemed better.
Several hours later Stephen, Carol, and Lee were in the living room and Arthur was reading in bed in the bedroom. Three of the bedroom's walls had been white and the fourth purple when Lee had rented the house, and they remained so. The big double-waterbed frame rested on cinder blocks and the only other furniture in the room was a small white dresser and a rented Hoyer lift, the Hoyer a cumbersome but useful device by means of which Lee could lift Arthur in a sling and swing him to or from his chair with minimal effort. The previous spring Arthur had learned to transfer unassisted but also clumsily, unsafely, and laboriously, and Lee usually helped him. Arthur had had frequent skin breakdowns from pressure before he had begun to sleep on a waterbed in 1972, but he had had none since. Now he put aside his book and with his left hand took hold of the triangular bar that hung from a chain screwed into the ceiling above him--his left was his stronger arm--and shifted his position slightly by lifting his back a few inches off the bed. He lacked effective trunk muscles but his biceps, triceps, and shoulders were useful.
A rare wave of overwhelming discouragement washed over him. He wasn't discouraged because he thought he would not be healed; his paralysis simply was, and he didn’t spend any time at all wishing it weren’t. Why was he feeling overwhelmed? Was it that he resented that so many of his friends, in particular Lee, had so fervently embraced the promise that he would be healed? He thought in part it was, although he knew their hopes both well-meant and innocent and heartily disapproved resenting them (he would have disapproved still more denying his perverse response). Other influences feeding his mood included his recent writing and not writing and, probably most important, his ongoing dullness with Lee; he missed her and he knew that she missed him. Her love for Rusty he thought would be no threat if he could only reconnect to her.
His thoughts circled back to his resentment at being surrounded by friends and acquaintances expecting a miracle. The expectation might seem to Arthur dull-witted and objectionable, but to insist March 2 would find him no less paralyzed than had December 2 seemed mean-spirited--not to mention that it contradicted his radical-agnostic code of unknowing. He grinned ruefully.
"Silly boy," he said to no one.
He decided he had read enough and was ready for sleep. Stephen and Carol had left and he called to Lee to ask her to come in and help him with the covers. Rusty was parked in his truck in the parking lot, and Arthur was more glad than not when, after having helped him, Lee turned out the light in the living room and left the house. He had assumed she would; Rusty was about to leave for a month or two in Mexico.
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover