Younger Roth MY FATHER’S CALIFORNIA LECTURES: EATING OUR WAY INTO THE FUTURE
“On a once starry evening of the telescope's unveiling, humankind, the earthling, became a universal sojourning spirit. Further it is written, on the day I was born Clarence Birdseye invented a frozen pea, while the great '52 Chevy Bel Air—belching its exhaust—redefining 'road-kill' at 3,215 pounds roamed the earth, and cameras using film created photographs on emulsion paper. Along with the Chevy, the aging telescope and camera were handed down from father to son, with the resulting photographs stored in family albums. Pages were turned, and one might laugh or smile or cry with memories. Once defrosted, frozen peas could not be stored, had to be eaten, and were blamed for other personal issues.
I own an old small black and white photograph of a young man sitting on the late morning grass in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles, California. The year is 1952. The young man is cradling a recently born infant in his arms. This photograph is worth gold. In the composition my father smiles down at his infant son. It is a smile of love. It is a rare moment.
Now my father is old, frail, ghostlike sitting, breathing in the corner of a room. Soon he will pass away, and I would like to write about what happened after this photograph was taken.”
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I've committed to a fog of memories the many cafes where we sat, while ostensibly I listened and the old man pontificated upon the subtle philosophical life, sucking grease like a wet-vac off heavy restaurant plates. At sixty-five I've not parented, though I survived being a bad seed, the troubled son who spent seventeen years living in my parent's home. I recall Mom imploring Dad, "Speak to your son, before he ends up in prison."
We made the rounds, Dad and I: pizza joints with plenty of sawdust on the floor; ancient Angelino beef-dip institutions—Philippe's in Chinatown—where manhole covers appeared to ripple in the summer heat; Dad's favorite Mexican food spot on Olvera Street; a roach infested chow mien palace in old Chinatown; The Apple Pan on Pico Boulevard in West L.A., where we waited in line to be piled at the counter like scavenger fish licking ketchup off white butcher paper; Pickle Bill's—more beef-dips, more sawdust on the floor; our Sunday evening pilgrimage to Paul Pink's Hot Dogs on La Brea Avenue where my uncle, Hot Dog Dave, put on a show for the crowd, laying out empty buns—six across one huge arm—and fixing an order of chili dogs, cheese dogs, plain or the works, simultaneously in under two minutes wrapped sacked and gone; a park bench and Hansen's natural juices in fifty-cent pint glass bottles from a vendor along Griffith Park's Ferndell, while a stream bubbled over rocks and nearby soccer games played free to watch on Sundays.
Over time we ate our way up to Northern California, where one fated afternoon Dad and I sat in the gull-squealing breeze off San Francisco bay, Thousand Island dressing dripping everywhere while we ate. Inhaling salt air, I wolfed a face full of the largest triple-decker cheeseburger on the planet at Fisherman's Wharf across from the Golden Gate Bridge. That day at the wharf my epicurean life transformed when the present became a past that ruined my pallet for every future burger. I felt angels delivering me into nirvana, and while slowing to relish this work of gourmet art, picking at browned French fries, my dad and I transcended reaching the other shore where all great grease foodies dream of dying. Here for the first time I believe I experienced my higher self—although, I don't remember how we got there.
Did life exist before that cheeseburger? I don't know, and something else I do not recall after his standard "Your mother wants me to talk to you," intro—I can't for the life of me remember my father's words. I do remember waking up from a deep sleep to find myself eating at Canter's Delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue back in Los Angeles.
Today I live as a raw foods and fresh juices junkie for over forty-eight years after leaving home. Dad is old and did not follow my lead up the food purity ladder. After two strokes and congestive heart failure, his body is ready for a turn in the road. We meet every three months or so. He offers me soda and chocolates. I look into his eyes shaking my head. A life relationship that worked better sometimes than others passes and I cannot remember my father's words.
Endless two-hour lectures for seventeen years up and down the California coast, and ten minutes into each one I stared spaced-out into The Great Void, having left my body and its false ego at the other end of a cosmic lifeline, slouching in sticky vinyl restaurant booths blowing paper wrappers off straws to stay awake. At those times I missed a chance to partake of familial love in the manner that our culture bestows love between generations; the parental lecture— at the time I didn't comprehend it. I was most concerned about my acne.
In those moments my father stomped away frustrated at his inability to dent a daydreaming, pimple-sprouting brick wall. Why can parents not comprehend that children are unrealized souls practicing on the learning curve of life? Push you may, we won't get it one millisecond before our time. One fine day a miracle occurs; the last pimple clears and a frightening, though brilliant, concept appears on the horizon of consciousness; my life belongs to no one else, and I alone am responsible.
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Today I live as a retired Integral Yoga therapist and psychoanalytic research scientist. I am married to a forty-four year love affair with an incredible woman. My imperfect life evidences itself over the years as a beautiful profound adventure. In the free-market economy I barely tread water; however, as a mystic sojourner traveling the bardo between birth and death I am a deeply fulfilled human being excited about living. I owe much of this to my father, despite the fact that he feels, after all of the arguments and lectures are done, he could have and should have done better.
What did Dad say while I listened? I couldn't tell you. How is it then that I thoroughly know this man: his values, convictions, his perceptions of the living journey? I apprised my father on numerous occasions that he gifted me with valuable tools I use every day of my life. It is this man who gave me vision to see beyond the locked doors of cultural conventions, meeting life in a creative fashion, and he accomplished this inconceivably difficult work when he was not sweating blood and trying to raise his troubled son, but simply while being the old man.
He nagged me loudly, interminably, and to no avail to read my schoolbooks. Although, without saying a word, he read for two hours every night: Playboy magazine, Henry Miller, Alan Watts, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver; from Huey Newton and Malcolm X to Jean Paul Sartre, Eric Fromm, Plato, and Aristotle. He smoked three packs a day of non-filtered cigarettes. So, I devoured the same books as my father and smoked his brand of cigarettes. I walked the way he walked and listened to jazz because he listened to jazz, and studied art because the old man studied art. I became an atheist and a pacifist on the one hand, and a raging tyrant on the other hand, because Dad was all of this and more.
My father held the human race at a distance, speaking of humanity with sarcastic disdain, at the same time championing thought and creativity. Without lecturing to me, my father taught me that human beings are phenomenally complex.
Dad stomped, glowering when angry. He grew red in the face, his eyes shrinking and straining behind his cheeks, and he had little success in hiding his inner personal life from his children. Opening the family relationship in this fashion creates a powerful statement. When conversations and behaviors do not take place behind walls, children see their parents as people in search of life, just trying to get it right. His opinions and views expressed in the company of others did not wait until the children were off to bed. No one told him, and he didn't know any better; so, I grew to see Dad as brilliant enough to realize he didn't yet have the most important answers, and searching for the truth, and deeply dissatisfied up against a world at best challenging to grasp.
I loved him then for who he was, how he lived, his imperfections driving me to adolescent madness—his "now"—not for his lectures concerning my academic, material future. Children know something they cannot express, and as adults we have forgotten; there is no future, only a perpetual now. This point is critical, not philosophical; it is reality. Parents might try explaining to a child that what they do now always affects now, and so, they are responsible for tomorrow's now. That conversation takes parental credibility, and an evolved attention span on our children's part. The rub, young children don't possess the attention span allowing enough time for parents to build credibility. Older children are in the process of individuating from the family and would rather place their attention elsewhere, even if in the backs of their minds their parents have attained credibility.
Now appears to be the only experience that drives home a point. Life lessons are hard learned. Parents wish fondly, and sometimes desperately, to help their children avoid the sting if possible. It is impossible.
Lecturing becomes an investment of hope in a future that is not now, that none can tell, and leaves all concerned wrestling with an intangible emptiness for the moment. As a son, I feel lectures are useless. If I were a parent (I have a cat—does that count?) I would be lecturing because it is in the nature of human generations to express love, caring, and compassion, frustrating though it might be, in this fashion. Pardon me while I give my cat—I call him my son—a talking to. Once again, he has left his toys strewn across the floor.
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What will I remember for the rest of my life? In my mind, as a son, I feel my father's parenting today as a tremendous force whose value I did not truly appreciate, until I began my struggle for deep inner-change later in life. I am blessed that while Dad never tolerated disrespect to his authority, he allowed me to know him as a person. The lectures he delivered are lost in time, and frankly I don't give a rat's ass.
In the toolbox I carry with me daily are reminders of the old man, whose words were few and direct, and only memorable when spontaneous.
One evening Dad and I walked the streets of Hollywood, skulking through bookshops, people-watching, and searching for answers. Lacking any tact in answer to a tough life, Dad faced facts head on. He glimpsed his son's road to the future. Without academic achievement I faced a journey eternally banging my head against my bad self. He could only help me one way—a gamble—show me his own life outside of the family unit; bare his thoughts to his son whom Dad knew had to sojourn where he'd already been. He wanted to soften the blows of night sweats and terrors by showing me a single box is composed using a single space divided: inside the box and outside the box. Thinking outside the box, one avoided being spiritually trapped in mundane quicksand of one's own making.
There's no place like Hollywood, California for soaking up local color, for learning to see life's canvas in contrasting hues. It was 1965 and we ducked into a psychedelic head shop. He opened a dialogue with the counter clerk. While I watched and listened, it struck me as obvious that Dad long ago traveled through, and left behind the "new" world of the Aquarian generation.
As a high school kid in the nationalistic forties, Dad dared wear the artist's earring and sell fruit on the streets alongside his friends Robert "Gypsy Boots" Bootzin, and eden ahbez [sic] who carved flutes and later composed the original song Nature Boy. Dad experimented with vegetarianism and committed himself to pacifism and socialistic thought. That evening he bought me my first issue of the Los Angeles Free Press, from which pages Allen Ginsberg's poetry, and that dirty old man, Charles Bukowski's prose, spoke to me.
Later we turned a corner into a world I didn't know existed, walking through the Beverly Boulevard art studio of Dad's old family friends, Vito Paulekas and Szue. The rooms above the studio where Vito, a sculptor; and Szue, a clothing designer lived were muraled with Fauvist nudes. One never knew if Lenny Bruce or Frank Zappa might "fall" by. This was not the land I pledged allegiance to when the school bell rang, not my mother's home, nor the world my father struggled providing me with, while he strangled his spirit living between two worlds. This road along the journey I had never seen before.
Late that night, we walked down the boulevard to Dad's car. We were coming from a socialist rent party. Sitting in the dark, the old man lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring. The ring grew in the air and he blew another ring inside of the first. After five minutes of silence he turned to me, remarking completely off-hand, "You know, there are so many ways to live in this world. People live unfathomable lives. Really! I mean they live lives you just would not believe. Never be afraid to talk to people. Ask questions. Question everything that everyone tells you. Life is an adventure! Learn. Investigate. Your life will be what you make it, man."
Back in the day, before the Sunset curfew riots, Dad and I ate at Schwab's Drugstore and walked Sunset Boulevard watching the women, and moving in and out of crowds drifting down from Laurel Canyon and the Hollywood hills above.
The old man took me for my first trip to the Bodhi Tree Bookshop on Melrose Avenue. The Bodhi Tree became my mecca for many years. In the middle sixties and early seventies, the Bodhi Tree offered the only bookshop in the city specializing in volumes dealing with Eastern philosophy and comparative religion. Bodhi Tree functioned as a hub, the meeting place for people of like minds. This was beat-bohemia, hippiedom, later to become the New Age. Books about Zen and Taoism began appearing in the family library, and I grew hooked on mysteries I could not yet fully plumb. D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts became my daily diet. My father also smuggled in and sold Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer through the black market while the book was banned in America. I worked in an art gallery days after school and spent evenings on the building's roof overlooking the city under neon lights and stars, reading all of Miller's books and later his letters. As I read the books in the old man's library a feeling overtook me, that I was already on a risky unsolved journey.
At times mere words failed to express my father's fears about my future. I felt the contradiction, the trap. After introducing me to his secret life outside of my mother's home, he wanted to warn me, "Don't take my path!" I felt another lecture coming on. With eyes wide open feigning attention, I drifted into a dream; years ago in Palo Alto, California, we sat side-by-side, pencil sketching a tree. I held up my sketch for him to examine.
"It's how you see it. Man, that's all that counts. Let's go dig the museum today—just you and me. Do you know Picasso?"
We reached a point where he taught me the road to spiritual survival in a bohemian world he hoped against hope I would reject. I pulled away during adolescence. No matter. The seeds were planted and I am still living off the sustenance of being my father's son. He was most displeased at my outcome, and in the end Dad gave up the bohemian life and all of its values to make it in his marriage, in the straight world.
Today we are like the Robert Frost poem, "…Two roads once diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by…." Like the trees we once sketched, we are from the same roots, yet we are branches having grown in two different directions. Speaking to one another is difficult.
Long ago, after a few well-chosen meals, the old man saw the karma train of near starvation and little mercy coming for his son, whom he loved in his way, and summoned—beyond the pressing odds of marriage and responsibility—the gall to stand for a short time on the tracks, to give me what I would need to make it in a world he found himself gradually leaving.
This profound gift to search for the infinite spirit in the finite life surrounding me I will always remember. "Nirvana," the sages say, "is to be found in the midst of samsara." Dad taught me that fine point when neither of us was paying attention.
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These are my ruminations while holding the old photograph; the kind that might cause one to smile or laugh, or cry with memories. Much is left untold in the interest of focus and economy of word. The point being that from an evolving son's perspective, a son is equipped by nature to watch his father and learn; to watch a father much closer than, with his love, a father could possibly watch his son. Understanding that Dad was just a man with his yes and his no helped raise me. I forgive trespasses preferring to live in the light of the old man's wisdom, a few good meals with sawdust under my feet, and the rest I leave to be cleared from the table.
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Dad passed away just a bit ago, and I guess he's out there somewhere with Hot Dog Dave, Vito, Gypsy Boots, and eden ahbez; all of them became my wonderful friends for life until they too passed on. Don’t lecture your children. Love enough to risk sharing with them who you are and you will be remembered.
~YB
Youngbear Roth resides with his wife of forty- eight years in Los Angeles, California where he has published essays on touch therapies and energy healing, as well as writing and story analysis for studios, stage, screen, and publishing. More information is available at the Authors Guild website.