Nothing on My Mind Read online

  I follow the ditch through sage and meadow up to the open well. It’s eight feet deep, cribbed in with rotting pine poles. A few wild roses cling to the gravelly brim, the blossoms now turned to hips. Chewing one slowly, savoring the tartness, I lie down at the lip, elbows on the rotting top pole, and stare down into the cold, shadowed waters. A slight, cool breeze wafting from the treetops starts a convulsive shudder up my spine, and the shaking of my forearms loosens gravel that kerplunks down into the well.

  Bigfoot! Just as I lie here now, he lay. Twenty-five years ago, digging in the bottom of the well at sundown, my brother felt eyes upon him and looked up. A huge red gorilla face stared down, filling the opening of the well.

  My brother glanced away, then back up. It was gone. He climbed out of the well and ran the hundred yards down to the cabin, where I was cooking dinner. Strangely, he found that I, too, was in a state of panic. For the last half hour, working in the kitchen, waves of nameless fear had poured over me. Abandoning supper on the table, we drove into town and drank beer after beer, returning finally to the cabin only after the bar closed.

  Since then, in hundreds of comings and goings past the well, I always remember. Today, again, my eyes search out into the dark spaces between tree trunks for that tall, shadowy form, that huge red face.

  Nothing. Of course, nothing.

  “Well,” I think to myself, “I’ll never know. There are wilderness routes unbroken from here clear to the Northwest Territories and Alaska. But he’d still have to be damn clever to stay so well out of sight.”

  A dead squirrel floats in the well, its dusky red-brown fur puffed out from its body. Did it fall out of the pine overhead or lose its grip as it tried to bury pine cones in holes by the edge? The well is a death trap for squirrels. I dip it out with a coffee can nailed to a long stick kept here for this purpose.

  Leaving the well, walking up into open slopes of sage, I’m out of the shadow. The sun is already warm. The sage, crushed underfoot, is pungent. Then I’m up into lodgepole pine and, higher, into virgin Douglas fir.

  For an hour I wander the steep foothills, circling on and off the old mining road that worms partway up the mountain. I stop below the lowest of two tunnels and sit on the fan of broken rock that spews from the opening and sprawls down the slope—debris dumped from the mine. Pulling out my binoculars, I scan the Flute Reeds, then east to the Bitterroots, then down into the great basin that lies between the ranges, then back up to the Flute Reeds. Peak after peak shimmers before me in the glass. Lovingly, I remember cirques and lakes beneath them.

  I linger on a pass on the horizon ten miles distant—a V in the black cliffs with a delicate finger of snow reaching up almost to the cleft. I’ve never been over it. For years I’ve planned a crossing. “You better do it soon,” I think to myself. “How many more years will you still be agile in the mountains?”

  I stand. My feet slide on the steep fan of shattered waste rock. Years ago, I helped create this pile with Roscoe, my only neighbor, an unshaven, unsavory old man with a shock of short white hair. We met over thirty years ago, and on that day he held me at gunpoint, enraged at my encroachment on his mountain. We made our peace over whiskey, and from then on I saw him every summer.

  He would come up from Utah in a battered pickup, hauling a ramshackle trailer that he’d perch on the side of the mountain, then work his hardrock claims above. And each summer he’d tell me he was about to hit the widening in his vein of silver ore.

  “Just a few more feet into this devil mountain,” he’d say. We’d drill, place charges, light fuses, and then run fast down the steep slide rock to take cover behind a boulder.

  He’d count the blasts as the mountain shook. “One, two, three . . . Hey, where’s that last bastard? Ah, there it is!”

  Then we’d shovel the heavy rock into a wheelbarrow, wheel it to the mouth of the tunnel, and dump it, stinking with spent explosive, down the slope.

  At sundown, back at the trailer, we’d drink beer and build a fire outside the trailer door. He’d fetch steaks of poached venison from a meat bag hung far back in the shade of the pines.

  Throwing it in the fry pan, he’d wink, “Nothing like that good old mountain mutton!”

  We’d sit outside in folding chairs and eat—then drink some more, watching the fire die down and stars spread canopies out over the mountaintops. Then Roscoe would spin out dreams of silver and girls and easy street. By this time of year, he’d always be gone, heading out before snow could catch him.

  I kick at the rock and smile toward clumps of brilliant yellow aspen scattered on the hills across the valley, a rare red tree flaring like an autumn torch. Patches of heather, a darker red, splash the green-gray sage. Beyond, rising above creeks and bottomlands, I see the distant tumble of the Flute Reed peaks.

  “Yeah,” I think to myself, “this is what Roscoe really came here for. Like me. Not just to grub for silver. Not just to look for easy street. He never made a dime on those damn prospect holes.”

  I’m jarred back to awareness at the Crag by two hawks. My eyes have been cast down, my gaze coming to rest in soft focus on the patch of rock several feet below the elevation of my seat and about ten feet in front of me. Flying between me and the sun, the hawks throw their shadows directly before me, momentarily darkening my gaze. Now I notice the graininess of the rock shimmering in the sunlight, and variations in the lichen—some green, some gray, some a startling orange.

  Growing curious, I glance up to find the hawks soaring only a hundred feet above my head. In some mutual agreement, they wheel suddenly, then drop away a thousand feet and disappear in trees far below me on a low, distant hillside to the north. Excited, I rummage in my day pack for the binoculars and scan the horizon. No hawks. I give up, then notice they’re already back, now drifting high overhead.

  The sun, heightening toward noon, is hot. I’m thirsty. I strip off my long-sleeved shirt, pull the water jug out of my day pack, and drink. The water, which was cold this morning, is now lukewarm. I stretch out my legs, lean against a smooth upthrust rock, and scan again for the hawks.

  It takes several minutes to locate them. They’re distant, to the west, two spots against the blue sky. They play, soaring in closer and closer to each other, then apart, then together again until merged in one speck of brown moving against the sky. Suddenly the speck drops toward the basin floor, then they’re apart again, soaring up in different directions. I feel the swooping fall and sudden steep climb in my stomach and chest. In heartbeats, they cover distances that take me laborious hours through sage, timber, and rockslide.

  After drinking half my liter of water, I’m ready to return to my seat. This time I’ll be alert, attentive, one-pointed—aware of awareness itself. The trained mind, say the Tibetans, sticks to itself like bread dough.

  I massage a liberal dose of sunscreen on my bare arms and face to protect my freckled Scots-Norwegian skin. I sit down, cross my legs, and gently pull my attention back to the Crag, to the blue sky overhead, to the beginning of a familiar ache just below my left shoulder blade. My head must be drooping a bit forward. I sway gently forward and back, then from side to side, bringing my head and neck into alignment.

  I return to the breath, breathing in, breathing out, expanding my belly into the shape of a pot. I watch carefully the empty space between the ceasing of the out-breath and the beginning of the in-breath, the ceasing of the in-breath and the beginning of the out-breath. I count heartbeats in these spaces, holding the emptiness for three counts—three pulsations that surge up and recede in my chest, spreading out to fingertips and toes.

  “My version of an old yogic practice,” I think. “So strange that all this began with Huxley and Wasson and with Leary’s acid manual inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. What if I’d never gone to Berkeley?

  “Oops. Thinking thoughts again. Okay, Erik, count!”

  The voice in my head counts “One,” as I slowly inhale, then slowly exhale. “Two” (slow inhale, slow exhale).
“Three” (slow inhale, slow exhale). “Four” (slow inhale, slow exhale).

  “Uh-oh.” Now I’m remembering the Mixer’s Bar in the run-down Seven Corners neighborhood in Minneapolis. It’s the fall of 1961. I hear the Friday afternoon rush hour traffic creeping from the University of Minnesota over the long bridge that spans the Mississippi River. The university lies on the east bank. Here on the west bank begins a skid row. My elbows are on the long, scarred mahogany bar, installed when Seven Corners was the heart of a vibrant commercial district. My foot rests on the brass rail, there’s a double shot of the cheapest bourbon with a beer back foaming before me, and comrades stream in to begin drinking in earnest.

  Then it’s the Berkeley campus. I see in my mind’s eye the vista from the campanile across the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge, remembering the sound of bells after riding the old elevator to the very top of the tower on an afternoon softened with bay breezes.

  I count more fiercely. “Five” (slow inhale, slow exhale). “Six” (slow inhale, slow exhale). Thoughts crowd in. My breath, inexorable, scatters them like ninepins. “Seven” (slow inhale, slow exhale). Stubborn thoughts begin to form again, tenacious, insistent, demanding attention. I tense my body and force my breath and attention through them—the breath a great ocean liner forging ahead in shining mind stuff, tossing the mind waves back from the prow, scattering them back into the sea.

  “Seven” (inhale, exhale).

  I’m getting really foggy. I know it. I’m doing three things at once now—counting breaths and thinking thoughts and worrying about thinking thoughts. My mind shouts, “Stop it! Concentrate!” I straighten my spine and force muscular tension into my arms and legs and diaphragm. “It’s time for eight. Or—no—did you finish seven?”

  Now I can’t stop the remembering—and then the count is gone.

  3

  Berkeley—the Sixties

  IT’S BERKELEY, THE FALL OF 1962. I’M ALMOST twenty-two, beginning my first semester in the graduate program in English here, eager for a specialty in Middle English. I live in a basement efficiency apartment near Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland—a long bus ride to the Berkeley campus, but all I can afford. My folks send me one hundred dollars a month to cover everything but tuition and books. The rich kids have the lovely apartments on palm-studded streets that plunge down the Berkeley hills into the campus and on to the bay.

  At first I’m lonely. I know only Miscorski—an old drinking buddy, a math major from Minnesota who moved here two years ago with his B.A. in math. He earns a princely salary working for the emerging computer industry. On weekends he and his girl take regular pity on me and invite me to dinner at her house or to restaurants in North Beach and Jack London Square. We eat fine meals and drink stupendous quantities of beer and wine. Miscorski pays the bill. I leave the tip.

  Then, one afternoon after classes, heading for the bus down Telegraph, I bump into Rosenfeld, an old drinking buddy from the hip Seven Corners scene in Minneapolis. There he is, standing at Ludwig’s Fountain—huge, an immense stomach, hairy arms and chest, balding, a full, wide brown beard, horn-rimmed glasses, a great Jewish bear. At twenty-five he looks forty. I didn’t even know he was out here—and he tells me of other Minneapolis friends who are on their way to the Bay Area.

  I’m delighted. In Minneapolis Rosenfeld sold books in oddball bookstores—he calls himself a “bookman”—and he proudly tells me he’s working at a used bookstore that just opened in North Beach. In his off hours and after closing at night, he hangs out. I imagine Rosenfeld rolling his good-natured bulk up and down the streets of North Beach, greeting everyone at the bars and coffeehouses.

  Rosenfeld takes me home to meet his girlfriend, Samantha, and her two little kids. They’re renting a house down on the flats about a mile from campus. They offer me their spare bedroom for thirty dollars a month and babysitting on Wednesday nights. The room is so tiny the bed touches three walls and there’s no room for an armchair.

  I jump at the chance. No more long bus rides into Oakland to a damp, dingy, lonely basement apartment, with a few hot buttered rums before bedtime at one of the downtown Oakland bars, empty except for maybe an old man drinking a beer.

  Rosenfeld brews beer in plastic garbage cans. He owns an espresso machine. Friday nights he gives parties where friends gather for espresso, home brew, poetry reading, and folksinging. At my first soirée, Rosenfeld introduces me to Lisa, a young woman conservatively dressed in a skirt and blouse, her long, blond hair caught up in a severe bun. She works as a secretary on Telegraph Avenue and takes night classes in business. She sits on the floor in the corner of the living room, where she’s been quietly listening to an earnest young man playing a guitar and singing. As she stands up, I notice nylons and shapely legs. She greets me with a solemn smile and a slow, firm handshake.

  I settle into a routine of going to classes and studying late at the library. As a graduate student, I get my own work space in the Humanities Reading Room, its walls crammed with texts necessary to the scholar in English language and literature.

  Rosenfeld is concerned about my diminished life as a graduate student. As we stroll one crisp fall afternoon through Berkeley toward the campus to browse in bookstores, he smokes marijuana in a briar pipe, chuckling, delighted that the bourgeoisie and the Berkeley cops are too dumb to catch on.

  “You’re not in Minneapolis anymore,” he says, waving his hands urgently. Abruptly, he stops on the sidewalk and turns to tap my shoulder with the stem of his pipe. “You’re in the Bay Area, man, home of the gold rush, Mark Twain, earthquakes, Jack London, North Beach, and the beats. Did you come here to be a professor or a poet?” Clenching his pipe between his teeth, he eyes me meaningfully. “Grass opens the doors. Remember your Bible, ‘Knock and it shall be opened.’”

  This is all new to me. In Minneapolis, we drank. Every Friday and Saturday afternoon, and weekdays too, the East Hennepin Bar and, across the Mississippi, the Mixers at Seven Corners filled with an amorphous crowd of students, professors, poets, artists, musicians, truck drivers, mechanics, petty criminals, street people, and beatniks. Endless, intense discussions of art, politics, and the meaning of life became long, roaring drunks that spilled over into all-night parties.

  Here were the poet Jim Wright, the singer Dylan, and the strange Korean medical doctor with a Ph.D., a prestigious researcher on staff at the university, who like clockwork, once every weekend, wearing dark slacks, a white dress shirt, and a black bow tie, joined us and drank himself into insensibility.

  We were liberated, free, a little band of embattled beings standing against American corruption, the drab wasteland of the burgeoning suburbs, and midwestern bluenose conformity. We were an avant-garde lifting the banners of art and intellect and libertine ecstasy on the glass-littered pavement of those seven old corners where the university merged with skid row.

  As we resume walking, Rosenfeld expounds. “Listen, man. Grass is holy. Grass opens the doors of perception. Yeah, booze is okay now and then, but it makes you dumb. Really dumb. Head-busting hangovers—Christ, look at you last Saturday morning after getting drunk again with Miscorski? Sick for two days! Lisa comes by and you can’t even go out with her. Do I have to tell you this? You’re smart. You’re a graduate student!”

  I make no response. I can’t quite imagine not drinking on Friday and Saturday nights. But marijuana is alluring, evoking visions of jazz musicians and artists, of Greenwich Village and liberated negroes with berets and pointed goatees.

  “Grass expands consciousness,” Rosenfeld continues. “You know, man, I smoke a pipe and sit down and I write poetry—one, two, three poems in an afternoon—it’s lubrication, it’s oil. It just happens, they flow out of me. Grass short-circuits dead parts of the brain—parts killed by your parents, by the fucking schools, by General Eisenhower.

  “Do your profs at Berkeley know about any of this? Bullshit!” Rosenfeld pauses meaningfully, then goes on, “No way! You know that. It’s a game. They don’t give a sh
it about you writing anything. Or a real poet like Ferlinghetti, or Ginsberg, or Kerouac—forget it, the dumb fucks won’t read the real stuff. They don’t even really give a shit about the greats like Shakespeare or Auden either—all they care about is what some other big-name prof geek is writing about Shakespeare or Auden, and what they can write to pimp that geek and get a better job. It’s all career bullshit. You know it, man. It’s true. You can’t deny it.”

  I don’t deny it. Still, I don’t have a draft scam. And I can’t quite imagine not being in school.

  “Listen. Tonight I’m going to meet the man at the bookstore. I’ll split a lid with you. Twenty for the lid—that’s only ten bucks apiece. I know you’ve got that much bread. You know, if you had to, it’d be cool even if you were a little late on the rent. Just don’t tell Samantha I said so. Let Miscorski buy your beers this weekend.”

  “What’s a lid?” I ask.

  “Why, it’s an ounce of grass, man. You dig? People call it that because they measure it off in the top of a tobacco can.”

  “Well, maybe,” I say. “I tried it once with Lon and his girl in Minneapolis. Yeah, it was pretty cool! But that’s a lot of money.”

  “A lot of money!” roars Rosenfeld. “A lot of money! How much do you spend drinking booze with Miscorski—even when he picks up most of the tab with those death dollars he makes programming rocket trajectories?”

  “Hey,” I protest, “that’s not what he’s really working on. It’s something to do with some big system for an assembly line.”

  Rosenfeld slows our walk and rolls the alliteration of “death dollars” on his tongue a few times.

  “Not bad. I can use that.” He picks up the pace again.

  “Anyway, where do those drunks leave you by Sunday morning? The booze is killing your good times with Lisa. And when are you going to write some poetry? I see the Storlie biography now: he learned at the feet of the geek profs of Berkeley—and then became one.” Rosenfeld stops short on the sidewalk, his briar clenched between his teeth, and stares at me knowingly.