They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
“This Be the Verse”, Philip Larkin, 1971
For a century, my family has been preserving a bunch of factoids about their history, stories told to bolster our psychological positions in relation to acts that have long since been long forgotten by anyone else. Feel free, dear relatives, to tell me if you detect any falsehoods. Despite my best efforts, I’ve long since lost the ability to tell.
There’s something you have to understand about Jimi Hendrix. He wasn’t just another guitar player. His blue jeans were not of this earth. His white fringed jacket was a little harder to reckon.
In the winter of 1970, after a visit with my girlfriend in Chicago, I hitchhiked back to New York. I left in January just in time to get back to Columbia’s spring session. It was 17°F and snowing as I stood in my orange motorcycle jumpsuit on LaSalle at the entrance to I-90 with a sign that said New York. After a ride or two, I was picked up outside of Toledo by a Plymouth Duster pulling a trailer with four passengers already aboard, and the word “Daredevils” written down the side.
“Are you sure there’s room?” I asked.
By 1978, I had been in schools for 20 of my 25 years on the planet. All that education and my recent separation from my first serious girlfriend of the last five years gave me a garden-variety nervous breakdown so rather than do intellectual work, I found a job as a car mechanic. I had been fixing cars for spare cash in Providence while at Brown but I needed something full-time in San Francisco.
I watched the entire Fischer-Spassky chess match in 1972. Professional play is completely different from amateur games. For one thing, many amateurs play “blitz” or chess with a chess clock. A chess clock has two clocks, which add up the cumulative time each player has used. You move and push your button, which stops your clock and starts your opponent’s. Skilled players play through known openings very quickly, reaching well-known positions called “tabia” before slowing down and beginning to think. Many have memorized opening books, which recommend the best moves up to a point and deal with unusual or trick openings.
In 1979, when David “of the wandering Schlange” (German for snake) would periodically ooze off to find, as he called it, “futon-filler”, it behooved his invited guest to politely dismiss his odd figure of speech and praise his hospitality, if not his delicacy. Life in Kyoto was lonely at times for the single philosopher, however charming his roommate. “Don’t wait up for me, Watson,” he would say over his shoulder as he chose one from his wall of hats, “I might come back late.”
In 1974, Spanish men had to serve in the army for a period of three years. In Spain, the joke was: Why does a Spanish policeman’s hat have three corners? So he can lean against a wall easier. The next year, the dictator Francisco Franco died, which was a huge relief. Everyone understood that the draft law would not survive the new socialist government. Nobody knew when the draft would be abolished. Just as the Lost Generation of Hemingway and Fitzgerald were driven to France by Prohibition, an entire generation of the most intelligent and creative Spaniards came to New York, about 60,000 people determined not to spend their youth leaning against a wall carrying a submachine gun. In art, this explosion of activity was called the movida madrileña or the Madrid Movement.
I came back from San Francisco to New York in a rainy and cold January of 1980, and went to live with Brian Muni at 21 1st Avenue, a location that I called Foist & Foist. Brian, whom I had met at Brown a few years before when he was playing folk tunes in a college bar, was living with four or five roommates in a suite of rooms there. Before long, I found my own apartment on 12th Street.
I first met Joey in 1981 by running an ad in the Village Voice for a drummer wanted for a tour in Spain. He called and came over and I liked his wry smile immediately. He had a mop of black hair and evident sincerity and kindness. At 22, he seemed quite professional, a real rock ’n’ roller from Bayside, Queens.
In 1979, I flew to Kyoto to visit a friend. I had been obsessed with chess for the last year or so and had gotten a lot of practice. My friend couldn’t beat me even if I played blindfolded and gave him queen odds so he suggested, “Let me show you another game.” He showed me Go, and I hardly ever played chess again.
In 1986, I worked for a Japanese real estate broker in New York City that helped Japanese companies buy or rent American properties. Japanese salespeople in the office brought me customers and requirements. I then would find the appropriate property. The Japanese handled all the customer relations while I dealt with the property owner, the legal aspects, and the bargaining.
When I was 34 in 1987, I joined the Alan Lee Kung Fu Temple on West 27th Street for two years. I remember the year because many of the other students were 17, exactly half my age, and going to the toughest high schools in New York. Training consisted of one hour of exercise and one hour of lessons and fighting, or as we called it, playing. I was in good shape in those years. I stopped smoking and practiced my horse-riding stance while watching movies on TV. We conditioned our hands by pounding on bags of grain or beans, on concrete blocks and by breaking boards and bricks, which isn’t as difficult as it sounds.
I first went to Kyoto, Japan as a youth of 26 in 1979, where to my horror I discovered that even after three months of study, I couldn’t speak the language. At the time, my concept was to do a book on Nagisa Oshima, who you could say was the Godard of Japan, but I underestimated the difficulties and necessary budget. Forty years later, even though I’m now fluent, I am still amazed when I go to a small Japanese eatery that can’t possibly have a limitless menu, that the waiter will discuss what I can and won’t eat, as if there’s much of a choice in the first place. Rather than assure them that I am food macho, meaning “I can eat anything weirder than you have,” I prefer to name some far-out victual and say that I don’t quite enjoy it. “I really hate funazushi,” I explain, “but I like most kusaya.” Funazushi is historically one of sushi’s ancestors, a funa carp aged in salt for a year or four, intensely stinky and quite difficult to like. Kusaya is mild by comparison, being merely a fish that is fermented in aged sea brine, often a brine recipe handed down through generations of its craftsmen. Continue reading
I had a Jewish deli in Tokyo. Really. It was a sandwich shop that we set up across the boulevard from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the still extant Lehman Brothers of 1998. We served matzo balls and Reuben sandwiches to the bankers and to the U.S. embassy employees who lived up the street in a sort of dormitory.
In September 2003, JJ came to me with a deal. He had been working for six months for a Korean company called C&C Enterprise Co., Ltd., a typical Korean-English name for a “computer and communications” company specializing in public transit fare collection. They had an idea that was so simple, it had eluded the world for decades. Instead of transit agencies issuing their own pass cards to the subways and buses of Seoul, C&C’s hardware accepted credit cards at the transit gates just like any normal credit card transaction. The charge would appear on your statement at the end of the month automatically. The system had been running in Seoul for eight years successfully but no other city in the world had adopted it yet.
My immediate reaction was, “Brilliant! Why doesn’t everybody do it this way?”
Going to Columbia College changed my life the most. I stopped competing with the boy in the next desk and started competing with Aristotle and Plato, with Rousseau and Thoreau and Rimbaud.
In the middle of the journey of my life, after two years of college, I cast aside the mathematics and physics that had guided me and entered the dark wood of poetry and prose.
“Let’s see them get me to make a bomb out of this!” I chortled as I neatly wrecked my career.
