Tape 9, Side B
[Begin Tape 9, Side B]
So you kind of had a little warning there. You got the first notice and then…
Seemed like I had several months to play around with before I had to report. I went to take the physical or whatever and passed that, so I wasn’t gonna get out of it that way, and you know I just didn’t care really; I was being very what I thought of as Zen about the whole thing, you know: let these people do whatever they want; it doesn’t make any difference to me; let’s just flow with it: I’m not going to take any action to prevent it or to encourage it. In other words, I wasn’t going to go down and enlist. I wasn’t gonna enlist and I wasn’t going to disappear or try to get out of it. It didn’t have anything to do… It wasn’t real is sort of the way I was experiencing it.
How do you mean that?
It was all part of the cartoon that was going on in the background.
So it just didn’t feel like it was anything serious.
No, and I knew it wouldn’t get that… what was serious was what was going on over there, and even then—this was like mid-1965—the full effect of it hadn’t hit everybody, but it was war, and body bags were coming back, not as many as it proved to be, and the papers were full of: Secretary McNamara says he needs 500,000 more men, you know, all that sort of stuff. And it looked like it was gonna get hotter and hotter, but I knew there was no way that I was going over there where it was serious.
Okay, so that was one of those things you said: Not going to Vietnam, not gonna shoot somebody. Right.
Yeah, but again, following the path of least resistance in order not to disrupt my little world too much, I’ll play along with this for a while because it really doesn’t make any difference where I am or what I’m doing. That was my thinking.
Oh really? You could live your life anywhere.
Yes. It didn’t make… right. At that time the way I was experiencing it was that it didn’t make any difference what you did or didn’t do. I was under the influence of so many different things that I was picking up from all this reading, plus I was starting to actually think about who I was and what I actually was like, because I hadn’t really thought about those things before. You know I was starting to formulate… it’s the curse of reflection and advanced thinking, you know, turning it back onto yourself. Up to that point I was just bouncing merrily along, and so it took a while, it took several years actually before I could actually do it all the way, but I was starting to pin myself down, starting to think: well this is what you want to do; so this is what you’re like; so these are the things you like to do; you know, just starting to categorize.
Whereas before you had just let it flow…
Hadn’t thought about it.
…and you had dipped in here and there but not consciously thinking: This is the kind of thing I like.
Right, just responding like a unicellular organism [laughs]; Oh heliotrope: Oh light! I’ll go that way. I like light.
That’s for me!
Food!
But had you started to feel kind of attached to your reel-to-reel tape recorder, your records, your stereo, being near movie theaters, all that?
No, I had not. I mean I liked all those things but they didn’t, I mean the objects, I was prepared to let all the objects go, whatever the objects were.
That was like with your models and your pipes…
Right, those objects didn’t…
You could just jettison those.
And all those people too. All the people that I knew and knew me, that I had some relations with, they weren’t attached to me either. I’d learned many, many years earlier how to make sure that that didn’t happen or how to slip out from those bonds. So they didn’t have anything—in fact I think I was telling you before I was thinking it was gonna be real amusing to just drop out of sight, just completely drop.
Where’s Michael Conkin?
[Silly voice] Boy wait’ll they find out. If only I could be there. But you can’t be there.
But now this strangely attired hip guy into all these strange and interesting things, how did you picture yourself fitting in, or maybe not fitting in, to the military?
I had no illusions at all that I was gonna fit in, but I had no vision of how it was going to be either because I wasn’t thinking; I was either not able to think in those terms or I actually did not, you know I had schooled myself not to think in those terms, because I was trying not to… I was thinking of things like duality and non-duality, the separation of mind and body, and you know just all sorts of things: Love is the law; Do what thou wilt: sort of a strange Augustinian, Aleister Crowley kind of a mixture there. And the Zen stuff was there too, and also just a lot of, because I was reading all this Indian philosophy too, a lot of Indian fundamentalist philosophy like the inherent illusoriness of all things. So all these things were kicking around and a lot of them made sense, and I was trying to base everything on my—you know that’s when I started really thinking about social conditioning and that sort of stuff--and I was trying to base everything, all my actions and reactions on actual, A: on my actual experience and not some made up version of it that ‘the man’ tries to put on you [laughs], or society or whatever; so it was all new, every moment was new because I was jettisoning all the old stuff, spontaneously as I went along; so it didn’t make any difference what they did, what was gonna happen, I just knew I’m not gonna go over there where A: they would be shooting at me, and B: A was first: where they could possibly be shooting at me and B, where I would have to shoot at them. I wasn’t gonna go there, and I didn’t have any… just as with the spirituality or the simulacrum of spirituality that you grow up with in America, in Protestant America, I didn’t have any relation to that god or any of that stuff. I didn’t have any relation to the United States of America as a country that I owed something to or anything: there was none of that; that was just as fictitious as everything else. But here I was, you know, on this earthly plane [laughs], and here was another one of those doors that was opening. It had to do with… a lot of it was I was, I mean I was moving from microcosm to macrocosm, back and forth. One of the things I loved to do was take the undestined walk: you know I would just go out my door in the morning and I’d just walk in no particular direction until there was some sort of barrier like a red light and then I’d go another way or I was walking fast and somebody was in front of me and I’d go this way or that way or I’d reach a crossroads and I’d just have to go one way or the other and I’d do that for hours and hours; sometimes I wouldn’t get very far from where I started off, just travelling around in circles; sometimes I’d just go way way way far, way far away. That’s was so absorbing and so instructive because it didn’t make any difference. At any point in time, you know, wherever you go, there you are. You take whatever you are with you. Plus it gives you a lot of time to think, if you’re just wandering around in circles, not bumping into people. And those were the things I was thinking about, which was… not questions of identity really, I wasn’t really able to do that yet, but I was… questions of reality. It’s reality and illusion again, all that stuff I was trying to escape from in the writing I had to deal with on my own.
In real life.
But I thought I had it all figured out. It was very clear to me. Yeah. This is all basically just a cartoon or a game or a dance or whatever metaphor you used and all you had to do to get to experience it to the fullest or to get the most out of it, if you wanted to think like that, was to be aware, and you didn’t have to think about what you were aware of, in fact if you did, that probably ruined it. Yeah, and that’s when I started doing Zen meditation, which had to do with, you know it’s not… at least my version of it, zazen stuff, it didn’t have anything to do with koans or mantras or anything like that. The mantra thing was reduce everything to that one sound, just keep going and going until you reduce everything to that one sound: then get rid of that sound. Then where are you? Then what are you doing? And koans, you know, something to busy your mind with while you were opening other doors of perception, but I was attracted to the zazen way of just being open, just opening up and observing; and also Krishnamurti was a very big influence there because, you know, it was just ceaseless constant admonishment to question yourself, to not accept anything: People ask me da da da da… Why do you think that way?! It wasn’t mocking, it was: if you really think that way, try to think about why you think that way, or if you really believe that, act on it and keep acting on it until something happens.
Take it all the way.
Take it all the way. Act on your assumptions; consistently act on your assumptions, and then see, and then ask yourself: Where am I now? And don’t let any gurus direct you at all, especially me [laughs]. That was his thing. That’s the thing I hated about Krishnamurti: always whining about how people were following him and doing… I liked the other part, but all that whining was… But it was just relentless, he wouldn’t… whatever topic he took up, it always had that behind it: Ask yourself, don’t ask me, don’t ask anybody else, so I was asking myself, and you know I answered it all satisfactorily.
So you really felt by this time, I mean before this did you have sort of unsettled…?
Before there was no reflection, not even any idea that there should be reflection, although you could see other people thinking about that: I was just automatically doing things, and finally, you know, as I was on this path finally it came full circle and I was automatically doing things again and not worrying about it [laughs]. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last twenty years; doesn’t make any difference [laughs].
So you did sort of come back to in a way the sort of freshness of your first taking that path? I mean it became self-conscious for a while, this self-examination….
Well it became deliberate. It became deliberate because it was so new to behave and think in this way, so I had to remind myself to do it, but that’s part of it too is constantly—how do they always phrase it?—constant mindfulness, and that’s nothing but a certain kind of self-consciousness, but it’s I suppose more graceful than the other kind of self-consciousness because the goal is to really pierce the mystery: so you’re not doing it to buttress a position supposedly; --it’s almost like the scientific method: you’re not doing it to buttress a position, you’re trying to find out, but it’s inevitable that there would be self-consciousness. The other difference is that you question the idea of Self. You have to think about what does it mean when you say ‘I’ do this or ‘you’ or any of that. You have to try to figure those things out. And there’s a certain amount of effort in it. And I was reading about all these different kinds of yoga: gnyana yoga and hatha yoga and prana yoga; and then I realized that the whole Indian thing is just extremely intellectual, you know, so I gave that up [laughs].
You kind of rejected it in a way?
Yeah, I realized that I would never get there.
Because it’s so systematized?
I’d have to study it. Yeah, I had to study it.
[Laughing] Yeah, you seem like more of a Zen guy.
Yeah, as soon as I read things like ‘the stink of Zen’, I knew exactly what that meant, and ‘If you see a buddha in the road, kill him’: I mean I knew, I felt I did, knew exactly; that attracted me, plus no gurus you know, and although there were holy men there were also holy fools; that was very attractive; I could be a holy fool, if I had to pick a role. So all this stuff was just roiling around and it didn’t make any difference that I was going to be drafted, and again, I thought it was funny. It had a great amusing value: Hey me, somebody like me, in their army, that’ll be a hoot, and it was [laughter].
So you did kind of pull it off.
Oh yeah.
I mean you had the experience that you—of course it sounds like you weren’t really imagining what the experience was gonna be--but you had…
I was ready for some surprises, you know, and I got a few. I would have been happy to be surprised. It was all surprising because it was all brand new. So I was more or less ready to go, and you know in a way I didn’t want to because I had such a sweet deal there, but in another way I did because it was different, it was new and different and anything, anything might happen; you know, what would happen if I were ordered to go to Vietnam, what would I do then? I said I wasn’t gonna go but I didn’t have a plan or a formulation or anything like that; I was gonna wait and see. Maybe that wouldn’t happen, maybe it would.
So you didn’t think of that possible eventuality of being asked to go to Vietnam or told to go to Vietnam as a negative or as an anxiety provoking thing?
Yeah, no, that was… because I knew that that would be a serious moment, that your freedom could be really be restricted or I don’t know, you might have to do something drastic; I don’t know, I mean it was always out there.
But did you take it as kind of a challenge, I mean that you might have to deal with that?
Yeah, I guess so. Let’s see, mister smart guy, let’s see what you’ll do with that, mister big talk [laughter]. You’re not going to Vietnam? Maybe you will wind up killing people. Anything could happen, so let’s see. You can do anything, can’t you? You could be a cop. Oh yeah okay, I could do that: I could be a cook; I could be a dishwasher; I could be a mass murderer [laughs].
Or as actors say when they audition for roles: I can be taller! [laughter]
But that will be then; that will be who you are then, and who you are now, you go with this, who you are then you can’t control or predict, you know: Let’s let that develop; that was my thinking. And so I spent a few months working at The Golden Hull restaurant, which was down in…
The Golden Hole?
The Golden Hull—yeah, it wasn’t that bad [laughs]. It was The Golden Hull. Restaurants were starting to be built on the new strip of Redondo Beach pier, and this, you know, it had a big ship shape: huge restaurant, it was a real restaurant with a real chef and a crew of sous chefs and helpers.
What was your position there?
Dishwasher. I got a job as a dishwasher.
So you started back down the…?
And that was some heavy-duty dishwashing: huge pots and very hard work, and also a little prep work, you know, like huge vats of Green Goddess Dressing, I helped to do that. But the guys that I dishwashed with were all Mexicans, you know, Mexican guys, in here illegally. Yep.
So the communication skills that you’d developed at the other restaurant for…?
That came in a little handy, you know, I could insult them and say: ¿Te gusta puñatas? you know, I could say all sorts of crazy things to them. There was one guy there, he was under five feet tall but he was extremely… he was like a bull, and he was a very slow guy, very slow; he was like a busboy--I just remember those gold jackets they had to wear—and he had very slow reactions; and I used to hang out with these guys after work, you know, thirty of them lived in this old house that’s one of the last houses, and it was urban renewal going on all around. They’d work real hard all day and then they’d get drunk all night and then they’d go back to work: that’s all they did, and then they’d send all their money…
Not even wait for the weekend? Every night?
No, every night, every night, and they’d send all their money home. And the one guy, this one guy he was [laughs] he was… they’d say ‘Tell him, insult him, tell him stuff’ because they thought it was funny that I knew certain phrases and things.
They told him to insult you?
No, they told me to insult him. I said: ‘Hey, Jose, tu eres mijo, yo soy tu padre! He’d look at me real slow, do a slow take—he thought that this was all funny too, this was his sense of humor—said: ‘I am your son? You are my son!’ and then he’d kind of move at me—he was very strong—he’d say: ‘I like for you to go to Bietnam!’ [laughter] That was what he was always telling me.
Did they know that you were going into the army?
I guess he did. I guess I’d told all them; I hadn’t told the bosses. He used to do thumb wrestling; it’s like arm wrestling but with thumbs. He could beat anybody, you know, where you link thumbs; it’s like arm wrestling but the only point of contact is thumbs. He was amazing; I mean if he really ever did get a hold of me I’m sure he’d wipe the ground with me, but he was funny too, you know, he’d say that; he’d get real insulted and shake his fist and say: ‘I am your father! You’re not my father. I am your father.’ And then he’d kind of smile slyly. Well, you know, oh, there’s another thing: I used to start coming in real early, so I’d have to get up at like three-thirty in the morning and walk from Manhattan Beach to Redondo Beach, and walk down the railroad tracks past the Southern California Edison Company and all the boats, the fishing boats were just setting up down there at the Redondo Beach Marina: oh that was just great.
So was this a little like your paper route, when you were just out there early in the morning?
Yeah, I like that getting up early: yeah, get up early. To do the beginning of the day setup prep work, the only other guy there was this great big Jamaican guy. He was a chef, he was like the boss, you know, he was fifty years old, six-foot-five, really broad in the shoulders, really strong, and he had a wandering eye or maybe a glass eye or something like that, and he use to [laughs], I could come in, we never did any work, you know he’d cook steaks and serve bourbon: so four o’clock in the morning we’re eating these huge steaks, drinking bourbon [laughter], and the rest of the day was just a blur. But he also, he’d get a little drunk and he’d start telling me he wanted to kiss me or something like that, or ah…. He said: ‘Come on mahn, just one leetle kiss, you know.’ I understood that he wanted a little bit more than that: ‘Oh come on, mahn, it’s not gonna… you’ll like it.’ [laughs]
This was a continuation of your sexual education [laughter].
And so one time he grabbed me from behind: ‘Come on mahn, let’s just do it…’ and he started whining at me, and as I told you I was doing a little karate stuff then…
Uh oh… those three fingers…
I had the tips of those fingers—it’s like hitting somebody with the end of a two-by-four when you get that slab callous in there--and he had me over there and I just reached up and went pop on his Adam’s apple and he dropped like a sack of potatoes and never messed with me again.
It really knocked him out?
It was just a tap because you know you can really do some damage if you really drive it in. It’s like getting popped with a little bit of two-by-four: pop! [laughter]
It’s amazing what you get out of books [laughter].
That’s right, it’s a plea for literacy. But that was great, the steaks and the bourbon at four o’clock in the morning. Well so you know I did that for a while and then I… something happened… I needed to borrow some money; I wanted some money from my brother and he said he’d loan me the money but for collateral he would take my stereo system, which was a great big piece of furniture really.
One of those home entertainment units?
Exactly. I thought that was really swell [laughs].
So had you told your brother you were going?
No. So he loaned me a hundred dollars and took that, and that was good because I didn’t know what to do with that anyway; and I got rid of all my stuff; I guess I just had a suitcase full of stuff.
Did you sell your records or give ‘em away or…?
I don’t know, I don’t remember, probably gave ‘em away, I’m not sure. No, no, I gave him all my records with the record player too: he can have all that stuff.
So all the stuff you’d accumulated that whole life. What did you get down to?
I guess I had my little X9 suitcase that I still had from the Catholic home.
X9, okay, all right.
Yeah, when I was X9. It still had a little tag on it that said X9. It was a little black suitcase.
And your life really could fit into that?
Well yeah, that’s all I had to carry stuff around in. Did I store anything? I don’t think so. I didn’t have much, just… The only thing I kept really that I carried around with me at that point were those Ben-Hur books [laughs] that I stole from the home.
Oh really, you kept those?
Yeah, I kept those; those were precious. And that’s all I remember. I don’t think I stored anything… no, I don’t think so. And I just had some clothes, maybe… I don’t know what else I had, that’s all I had. Nothing came with me. So I reported to the Los Angeles California Induction Center with my suitcase, you know, I’d given my two-weeks’ notice and said: ‘Oh look, I got drafted! Darn. See ya.’ ‘Cause there was this thing you know, this was one of my aces in the hole, if I ever got out supposedly you’d get your job back, so, you know, I didn’t want to just walk away from them.
You mean it was a law: you couldn’t lose your job behind getting drafted?
Right, they had to rehire you or something like that.
So just in case, you weren’t burning your bridges.
A little safety valve there, just in case, so I didn’t flip anybody off or give the owner a hard time. You know I said that was a huge ship looking thing. Well in the beginning it wasn’t gold. They were just starting up, so that was one of the first things I did was paint the whole thing gold, and some of it was hanging over the water; well that was cool, got some painting skills in there. So anyway there I am—that was just a painting digression [laughs]: I was just thinking Well how’d that thing get to be gold anyway?
You did it.
Yeah, I certainly did. So now there I am, induction center, I see…
--We’re just about at the end of the tape so let’s make a picture.
…the buses are all lined up ready to take people. You know you had to go in and get one last physical and get some kind of papers and assignment… and you know, you had to line up and sign up and reenlist now.
And did you have to make some decisions about what… or was it Army…?
I had long hair then.
Was it automatic that you were going in the Army?
No, no it wasn’t, because they were drafting for the Marine Corps then, and they didn’t tell anybody that until we got there. They made some announcements like that: We’ll be drafting for the Marine Corps too today, so some of you may… da da da da da…
And that would have been automatic? If they had your name marked off as a marine you’d go, or you’d get a choice?
No, they were counting off.
Oh my god.
They were counting off. This is an interesting little tale there. How much we got here? Want to leave it there?
We’re right at the end. That’s the end.
Okay.
[End Tape 9, Side B]
So you kind of had a little warning there. You got the first notice and then…
Seemed like I had several months to play around with before I had to report. I went to take the physical or whatever and passed that, so I wasn’t gonna get out of it that way, and you know I just didn’t care really; I was being very what I thought of as Zen about the whole thing, you know: let these people do whatever they want; it doesn’t make any difference to me; let’s just flow with it: I’m not going to take any action to prevent it or to encourage it. In other words, I wasn’t going to go down and enlist. I wasn’t gonna enlist and I wasn’t going to disappear or try to get out of it. It didn’t have anything to do… It wasn’t real is sort of the way I was experiencing it.
How do you mean that?
It was all part of the cartoon that was going on in the background.
So it just didn’t feel like it was anything serious.
No, and I knew it wouldn’t get that… what was serious was what was going on over there, and even then—this was like mid-1965—the full effect of it hadn’t hit everybody, but it was war, and body bags were coming back, not as many as it proved to be, and the papers were full of: Secretary McNamara says he needs 500,000 more men, you know, all that sort of stuff. And it looked like it was gonna get hotter and hotter, but I knew there was no way that I was going over there where it was serious.
Okay, so that was one of those things you said: Not going to Vietnam, not gonna shoot somebody. Right.
Yeah, but again, following the path of least resistance in order not to disrupt my little world too much, I’ll play along with this for a while because it really doesn’t make any difference where I am or what I’m doing. That was my thinking.
Oh really? You could live your life anywhere.
Yes. It didn’t make… right. At that time the way I was experiencing it was that it didn’t make any difference what you did or didn’t do. I was under the influence of so many different things that I was picking up from all this reading, plus I was starting to actually think about who I was and what I actually was like, because I hadn’t really thought about those things before. You know I was starting to formulate… it’s the curse of reflection and advanced thinking, you know, turning it back onto yourself. Up to that point I was just bouncing merrily along, and so it took a while, it took several years actually before I could actually do it all the way, but I was starting to pin myself down, starting to think: well this is what you want to do; so this is what you’re like; so these are the things you like to do; you know, just starting to categorize.
Whereas before you had just let it flow…
Hadn’t thought about it.
…and you had dipped in here and there but not consciously thinking: This is the kind of thing I like.
Right, just responding like a unicellular organism [laughs]; Oh heliotrope: Oh light! I’ll go that way. I like light.
That’s for me!
Food!
But had you started to feel kind of attached to your reel-to-reel tape recorder, your records, your stereo, being near movie theaters, all that?
No, I had not. I mean I liked all those things but they didn’t, I mean the objects, I was prepared to let all the objects go, whatever the objects were.
That was like with your models and your pipes…
Right, those objects didn’t…
You could just jettison those.
And all those people too. All the people that I knew and knew me, that I had some relations with, they weren’t attached to me either. I’d learned many, many years earlier how to make sure that that didn’t happen or how to slip out from those bonds. So they didn’t have anything—in fact I think I was telling you before I was thinking it was gonna be real amusing to just drop out of sight, just completely drop.
Where’s Michael Conkin?
[Silly voice] Boy wait’ll they find out. If only I could be there. But you can’t be there.
But now this strangely attired hip guy into all these strange and interesting things, how did you picture yourself fitting in, or maybe not fitting in, to the military?
I had no illusions at all that I was gonna fit in, but I had no vision of how it was going to be either because I wasn’t thinking; I was either not able to think in those terms or I actually did not, you know I had schooled myself not to think in those terms, because I was trying not to… I was thinking of things like duality and non-duality, the separation of mind and body, and you know just all sorts of things: Love is the law; Do what thou wilt: sort of a strange Augustinian, Aleister Crowley kind of a mixture there. And the Zen stuff was there too, and also just a lot of, because I was reading all this Indian philosophy too, a lot of Indian fundamentalist philosophy like the inherent illusoriness of all things. So all these things were kicking around and a lot of them made sense, and I was trying to base everything on my—you know that’s when I started really thinking about social conditioning and that sort of stuff--and I was trying to base everything, all my actions and reactions on actual, A: on my actual experience and not some made up version of it that ‘the man’ tries to put on you [laughs], or society or whatever; so it was all new, every moment was new because I was jettisoning all the old stuff, spontaneously as I went along; so it didn’t make any difference what they did, what was gonna happen, I just knew I’m not gonna go over there where A: they would be shooting at me, and B: A was first: where they could possibly be shooting at me and B, where I would have to shoot at them. I wasn’t gonna go there, and I didn’t have any… just as with the spirituality or the simulacrum of spirituality that you grow up with in America, in Protestant America, I didn’t have any relation to that god or any of that stuff. I didn’t have any relation to the United States of America as a country that I owed something to or anything: there was none of that; that was just as fictitious as everything else. But here I was, you know, on this earthly plane [laughs], and here was another one of those doors that was opening. It had to do with… a lot of it was I was, I mean I was moving from microcosm to macrocosm, back and forth. One of the things I loved to do was take the undestined walk: you know I would just go out my door in the morning and I’d just walk in no particular direction until there was some sort of barrier like a red light and then I’d go another way or I was walking fast and somebody was in front of me and I’d go this way or that way or I’d reach a crossroads and I’d just have to go one way or the other and I’d do that for hours and hours; sometimes I wouldn’t get very far from where I started off, just travelling around in circles; sometimes I’d just go way way way far, way far away. That’s was so absorbing and so instructive because it didn’t make any difference. At any point in time, you know, wherever you go, there you are. You take whatever you are with you. Plus it gives you a lot of time to think, if you’re just wandering around in circles, not bumping into people. And those were the things I was thinking about, which was… not questions of identity really, I wasn’t really able to do that yet, but I was… questions of reality. It’s reality and illusion again, all that stuff I was trying to escape from in the writing I had to deal with on my own.
In real life.
But I thought I had it all figured out. It was very clear to me. Yeah. This is all basically just a cartoon or a game or a dance or whatever metaphor you used and all you had to do to get to experience it to the fullest or to get the most out of it, if you wanted to think like that, was to be aware, and you didn’t have to think about what you were aware of, in fact if you did, that probably ruined it. Yeah, and that’s when I started doing Zen meditation, which had to do with, you know it’s not… at least my version of it, zazen stuff, it didn’t have anything to do with koans or mantras or anything like that. The mantra thing was reduce everything to that one sound, just keep going and going until you reduce everything to that one sound: then get rid of that sound. Then where are you? Then what are you doing? And koans, you know, something to busy your mind with while you were opening other doors of perception, but I was attracted to the zazen way of just being open, just opening up and observing; and also Krishnamurti was a very big influence there because, you know, it was just ceaseless constant admonishment to question yourself, to not accept anything: People ask me da da da da… Why do you think that way?! It wasn’t mocking, it was: if you really think that way, try to think about why you think that way, or if you really believe that, act on it and keep acting on it until something happens.
Take it all the way.
Take it all the way. Act on your assumptions; consistently act on your assumptions, and then see, and then ask yourself: Where am I now? And don’t let any gurus direct you at all, especially me [laughs]. That was his thing. That’s the thing I hated about Krishnamurti: always whining about how people were following him and doing… I liked the other part, but all that whining was… But it was just relentless, he wouldn’t… whatever topic he took up, it always had that behind it: Ask yourself, don’t ask me, don’t ask anybody else, so I was asking myself, and you know I answered it all satisfactorily.
So you really felt by this time, I mean before this did you have sort of unsettled…?
Before there was no reflection, not even any idea that there should be reflection, although you could see other people thinking about that: I was just automatically doing things, and finally, you know, as I was on this path finally it came full circle and I was automatically doing things again and not worrying about it [laughs]. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last twenty years; doesn’t make any difference [laughs].
So you did sort of come back to in a way the sort of freshness of your first taking that path? I mean it became self-conscious for a while, this self-examination….
Well it became deliberate. It became deliberate because it was so new to behave and think in this way, so I had to remind myself to do it, but that’s part of it too is constantly—how do they always phrase it?—constant mindfulness, and that’s nothing but a certain kind of self-consciousness, but it’s I suppose more graceful than the other kind of self-consciousness because the goal is to really pierce the mystery: so you’re not doing it to buttress a position supposedly; --it’s almost like the scientific method: you’re not doing it to buttress a position, you’re trying to find out, but it’s inevitable that there would be self-consciousness. The other difference is that you question the idea of Self. You have to think about what does it mean when you say ‘I’ do this or ‘you’ or any of that. You have to try to figure those things out. And there’s a certain amount of effort in it. And I was reading about all these different kinds of yoga: gnyana yoga and hatha yoga and prana yoga; and then I realized that the whole Indian thing is just extremely intellectual, you know, so I gave that up [laughs].
You kind of rejected it in a way?
Yeah, I realized that I would never get there.
Because it’s so systematized?
I’d have to study it. Yeah, I had to study it.
[Laughing] Yeah, you seem like more of a Zen guy.
Yeah, as soon as I read things like ‘the stink of Zen’, I knew exactly what that meant, and ‘If you see a buddha in the road, kill him’: I mean I knew, I felt I did, knew exactly; that attracted me, plus no gurus you know, and although there were holy men there were also holy fools; that was very attractive; I could be a holy fool, if I had to pick a role. So all this stuff was just roiling around and it didn’t make any difference that I was going to be drafted, and again, I thought it was funny. It had a great amusing value: Hey me, somebody like me, in their army, that’ll be a hoot, and it was [laughter].
So you did kind of pull it off.
Oh yeah.
I mean you had the experience that you—of course it sounds like you weren’t really imagining what the experience was gonna be--but you had…
I was ready for some surprises, you know, and I got a few. I would have been happy to be surprised. It was all surprising because it was all brand new. So I was more or less ready to go, and you know in a way I didn’t want to because I had such a sweet deal there, but in another way I did because it was different, it was new and different and anything, anything might happen; you know, what would happen if I were ordered to go to Vietnam, what would I do then? I said I wasn’t gonna go but I didn’t have a plan or a formulation or anything like that; I was gonna wait and see. Maybe that wouldn’t happen, maybe it would.
So you didn’t think of that possible eventuality of being asked to go to Vietnam or told to go to Vietnam as a negative or as an anxiety provoking thing?
Yeah, no, that was… because I knew that that would be a serious moment, that your freedom could be really be restricted or I don’t know, you might have to do something drastic; I don’t know, I mean it was always out there.
But did you take it as kind of a challenge, I mean that you might have to deal with that?
Yeah, I guess so. Let’s see, mister smart guy, let’s see what you’ll do with that, mister big talk [laughter]. You’re not going to Vietnam? Maybe you will wind up killing people. Anything could happen, so let’s see. You can do anything, can’t you? You could be a cop. Oh yeah okay, I could do that: I could be a cook; I could be a dishwasher; I could be a mass murderer [laughs].
Or as actors say when they audition for roles: I can be taller! [laughter]
But that will be then; that will be who you are then, and who you are now, you go with this, who you are then you can’t control or predict, you know: Let’s let that develop; that was my thinking. And so I spent a few months working at The Golden Hull restaurant, which was down in…
The Golden Hole?
The Golden Hull—yeah, it wasn’t that bad [laughs]. It was The Golden Hull. Restaurants were starting to be built on the new strip of Redondo Beach pier, and this, you know, it had a big ship shape: huge restaurant, it was a real restaurant with a real chef and a crew of sous chefs and helpers.
What was your position there?
Dishwasher. I got a job as a dishwasher.
So you started back down the…?
And that was some heavy-duty dishwashing: huge pots and very hard work, and also a little prep work, you know, like huge vats of Green Goddess Dressing, I helped to do that. But the guys that I dishwashed with were all Mexicans, you know, Mexican guys, in here illegally. Yep.
So the communication skills that you’d developed at the other restaurant for…?
That came in a little handy, you know, I could insult them and say: ¿Te gusta puñatas? you know, I could say all sorts of crazy things to them. There was one guy there, he was under five feet tall but he was extremely… he was like a bull, and he was a very slow guy, very slow; he was like a busboy--I just remember those gold jackets they had to wear—and he had very slow reactions; and I used to hang out with these guys after work, you know, thirty of them lived in this old house that’s one of the last houses, and it was urban renewal going on all around. They’d work real hard all day and then they’d get drunk all night and then they’d go back to work: that’s all they did, and then they’d send all their money…
Not even wait for the weekend? Every night?
No, every night, every night, and they’d send all their money home. And the one guy, this one guy he was [laughs] he was… they’d say ‘Tell him, insult him, tell him stuff’ because they thought it was funny that I knew certain phrases and things.
They told him to insult you?
No, they told me to insult him. I said: ‘Hey, Jose, tu eres mijo, yo soy tu padre! He’d look at me real slow, do a slow take—he thought that this was all funny too, this was his sense of humor—said: ‘I am your son? You are my son!’ and then he’d kind of move at me—he was very strong—he’d say: ‘I like for you to go to Bietnam!’ [laughter] That was what he was always telling me.
Did they know that you were going into the army?
I guess he did. I guess I’d told all them; I hadn’t told the bosses. He used to do thumb wrestling; it’s like arm wrestling but with thumbs. He could beat anybody, you know, where you link thumbs; it’s like arm wrestling but the only point of contact is thumbs. He was amazing; I mean if he really ever did get a hold of me I’m sure he’d wipe the ground with me, but he was funny too, you know, he’d say that; he’d get real insulted and shake his fist and say: ‘I am your father! You’re not my father. I am your father.’ And then he’d kind of smile slyly. Well, you know, oh, there’s another thing: I used to start coming in real early, so I’d have to get up at like three-thirty in the morning and walk from Manhattan Beach to Redondo Beach, and walk down the railroad tracks past the Southern California Edison Company and all the boats, the fishing boats were just setting up down there at the Redondo Beach Marina: oh that was just great.
So was this a little like your paper route, when you were just out there early in the morning?
Yeah, I like that getting up early: yeah, get up early. To do the beginning of the day setup prep work, the only other guy there was this great big Jamaican guy. He was a chef, he was like the boss, you know, he was fifty years old, six-foot-five, really broad in the shoulders, really strong, and he had a wandering eye or maybe a glass eye or something like that, and he use to [laughs], I could come in, we never did any work, you know he’d cook steaks and serve bourbon: so four o’clock in the morning we’re eating these huge steaks, drinking bourbon [laughter], and the rest of the day was just a blur. But he also, he’d get a little drunk and he’d start telling me he wanted to kiss me or something like that, or ah…. He said: ‘Come on mahn, just one leetle kiss, you know.’ I understood that he wanted a little bit more than that: ‘Oh come on, mahn, it’s not gonna… you’ll like it.’ [laughs]
This was a continuation of your sexual education [laughter].
And so one time he grabbed me from behind: ‘Come on mahn, let’s just do it…’ and he started whining at me, and as I told you I was doing a little karate stuff then…
Uh oh… those three fingers…
I had the tips of those fingers—it’s like hitting somebody with the end of a two-by-four when you get that slab callous in there--and he had me over there and I just reached up and went pop on his Adam’s apple and he dropped like a sack of potatoes and never messed with me again.
It really knocked him out?
It was just a tap because you know you can really do some damage if you really drive it in. It’s like getting popped with a little bit of two-by-four: pop! [laughter]
It’s amazing what you get out of books [laughter].
That’s right, it’s a plea for literacy. But that was great, the steaks and the bourbon at four o’clock in the morning. Well so you know I did that for a while and then I… something happened… I needed to borrow some money; I wanted some money from my brother and he said he’d loan me the money but for collateral he would take my stereo system, which was a great big piece of furniture really.
One of those home entertainment units?
Exactly. I thought that was really swell [laughs].
So had you told your brother you were going?
No. So he loaned me a hundred dollars and took that, and that was good because I didn’t know what to do with that anyway; and I got rid of all my stuff; I guess I just had a suitcase full of stuff.
Did you sell your records or give ‘em away or…?
I don’t know, I don’t remember, probably gave ‘em away, I’m not sure. No, no, I gave him all my records with the record player too: he can have all that stuff.
So all the stuff you’d accumulated that whole life. What did you get down to?
I guess I had my little X9 suitcase that I still had from the Catholic home.
X9, okay, all right.
Yeah, when I was X9. It still had a little tag on it that said X9. It was a little black suitcase.
And your life really could fit into that?
Well yeah, that’s all I had to carry stuff around in. Did I store anything? I don’t think so. I didn’t have much, just… The only thing I kept really that I carried around with me at that point were those Ben-Hur books [laughs] that I stole from the home.
Oh really, you kept those?
Yeah, I kept those; those were precious. And that’s all I remember. I don’t think I stored anything… no, I don’t think so. And I just had some clothes, maybe… I don’t know what else I had, that’s all I had. Nothing came with me. So I reported to the Los Angeles California Induction Center with my suitcase, you know, I’d given my two-weeks’ notice and said: ‘Oh look, I got drafted! Darn. See ya.’ ‘Cause there was this thing you know, this was one of my aces in the hole, if I ever got out supposedly you’d get your job back, so, you know, I didn’t want to just walk away from them.
You mean it was a law: you couldn’t lose your job behind getting drafted?
Right, they had to rehire you or something like that.
So just in case, you weren’t burning your bridges.
A little safety valve there, just in case, so I didn’t flip anybody off or give the owner a hard time. You know I said that was a huge ship looking thing. Well in the beginning it wasn’t gold. They were just starting up, so that was one of the first things I did was paint the whole thing gold, and some of it was hanging over the water; well that was cool, got some painting skills in there. So anyway there I am—that was just a painting digression [laughs]: I was just thinking Well how’d that thing get to be gold anyway?
You did it.
Yeah, I certainly did. So now there I am, induction center, I see…
--We’re just about at the end of the tape so let’s make a picture.
…the buses are all lined up ready to take people. You know you had to go in and get one last physical and get some kind of papers and assignment… and you know, you had to line up and sign up and reenlist now.
And did you have to make some decisions about what… or was it Army…?
I had long hair then.
Was it automatic that you were going in the Army?
No, no it wasn’t, because they were drafting for the Marine Corps then, and they didn’t tell anybody that until we got there. They made some announcements like that: We’ll be drafting for the Marine Corps too today, so some of you may… da da da da da…
And that would have been automatic? If they had your name marked off as a marine you’d go, or you’d get a choice?
No, they were counting off.
Oh my god.
They were counting off. This is an interesting little tale there. How much we got here? Want to leave it there?
We’re right at the end. That’s the end.
Okay.
[End Tape 9, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:25 PM
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