rural drive through the hills of native shrubs and grass. I remember a country store and fruit stands along the way, and the advening waves were in the air.
The sleek blue convertible with the top down was even sleeker on the Pacific Coast Highway and on immaculate Sunset Boulevard among the gated gardens and homes of the movie stars. I had flashbacks of the dead body in the pool in Sunset Boulevard. I was the intrepid Gary Cooper in High Noon, and the song in my heart was Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling. I was Marlon Brando, the illiterate peasant who stood up and drawled “Zapata” when the official asked who had spoken and what his name was. I was the brooding, tragic Montgomery Clift pining for Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun.
But more than Burt Lancaster’s famous scene with Deborah Kerr on the beach, more than the Montgomery Clift or the Frank Sinatra character, it was Sinatra singing the prelude From Here to Eternity in the movie of that name that set me adrift on the dark waters of the imagination. Love is fugitive, like the ebb and flow of the sea. It springs up and gives, and then it takes away.
Downtown Los Angeles had its share of B-movie theaters, sleaze bars, old navy and army clothes outlets, cafeterias, and ten cent stores. The grander cinemas and expensive restaurants were on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in Hollywood. “Girls Girls Girls” was the flashing neon sign at venues where you could pay money to dance or sit with the hostess of your choice. At one place you climbed up the stairs, bought tickets for your minutes, and found your spot with the decent and indecent, rich and poor, American and foreign, young and wrinkled, all lonely men standing or sitting opposite the women waiting to be asked.
In those days there was a live band playing standards like Blue Moon and It’s Only a Paper Moon, but this was all soon to change to the broadcasting of recordings in the same jazz tradition: Peggy Lee’s Fever, Sinatra’s All the Way, and other songs he did in collaboration with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Teamed up with Riddle, Sinatra was becoming bigger than ever.
To the hostess’s chagrin, I asked her to abide strictly by the ten minutes I had. The richer men got the lion’s share of the time with the prettiest women, but this did not matter much to me. The couples shimmying and swinging and swaying to the music and the glow of the paper moon filled my aching, aching heart. The big anonymous city with its skyscrapers and night lights and amusements and movies and music helped keep me sane and tided me over the worst hours.
I was hermaphroditic, half seminary and half college, half Indian and half American, half religious and half worldly, half running away from and half craving for closeness with Ruth. I seemed to be on the fringe of everything there was.
One woman at the dance club actually reminded me of Ruth. She too was tall, with a touch of elegance and a pale shapely countenance. Ruth stood out in the crowd. Once in the cafeteria line I saw her standing quietly and looking straight ahead like a statue, as if she knew that she was the center of gravity. It was astounding, like California slipping into the sea, that my philosophy studies were going as well as they were.
Clueless as to what to do, but knowing that I had to do something, I had taken a chance. I went to her in the library and asked her if I could talk to her. We went outside and sat on the grass, and I did something I will never, never do again. I actually told her my feelings prematurely. She said that she had a serious relationship with her boyfriend going to college elsewhere. Nervous beyond your imagination, I ended the conversation there and then. I was relieved that I had gotten the matter off my chest. Finished and done with.
Actually it worsened the situation. The romantic tension between us seemed no longer something suppressed, but an outward and obvious fact.
Now as I watched this woman who resembled Ruth, the other women standing across from me, and the couples lost in each other on the dance floor, and as I heard the strains of Willow Weep for Me, it was easy to forget my love troubles. For these few hours I too was lost in the preternatural frenzy of ants finding sugar, especially on a holiday with its special party commotion and decorations and skimpy costumes the women wore, and I found solace in the precious few minutes of face to face, I and Thou conversation I could afford with the other. On New Year’s Eve I was not alone. On Christmas evening I had somewhere to go. On Independence Day I had something to look forward to.
You know she wants you somewhere deep down. She wants to come to know you better, but you do not give her the chance. You are shy, and you await the fullness of time. Here in this club you pay your money and there is little risk. You pay your money and you can dance cheek to cheek even with the pretty one, if she agrees to dance with you for a paltry ten minutes, strictly kept. You pay your money and now you stand out from the other men. Now the world can watch you float, glide on the floor and see what you really know, how cool, suave you really are, what poise you have. You are vulnerable, yes, but no one sees that now. The evening has been framed by Stormy Weather or the wail of a saxophone. Behind your streetcar of desire is the steam engine known as love, invisible in the night. No one knows, except a Sinatra song, the magnitude, the futile melancholy of your isolation. In the wee small hours of the morning, that’s when you miss her most of all.
9 | Mount Baldy
The courage to be in the face of nonbeing
I was forever in dire need of some kind of help to make the next move, the next advance of my life. If it was not for the special letter of recommendation from my philosophy professor Dr. Williams, I would not have been accepted at the Claremont School of Theology. I look back fondly and gratefully on him just as I look back in the same way on the Reverend Woodruff, the Yosemite chaplain. Both built bridges of transcendence to yonder shore for a person they knew had a spotty record and a tenuous existence in this country. They saw the fog of uncertainty enshrouding the young man’s life, but they also witnessed the fire of life in his zesty public campground ministry in the one case and the assiduousness of his class work in the other. They had faith, they must have had, that the young man would in turn someday build bridges for others.
Claremont is a town on the Eastern edge of Los Angeles County. It is the home of a consortium of colleges and graduate school, all private, and of the seminary to which I was admitted. This seminary did not feel cloistered to me. It had just recently opened its doors in that location, and consequently the student body was small and the buildings new and sparse. The architecture and landscaping bespoke cactus and open desert. Mount Baldy loomed to the north as Mount Tamalpais had done in San Anselmo to the west, but the former was dry, rocky, and gulchy.
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