Chapter 3 #2
“When will you know if it is something?” she said.
“Not until the very end, usually,” I said. “And even then I don’t really know.”
“I still haven’t read any of your books,” she said. “Sorry about that.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Books have long lives. They’ll be there if you ever want them.”
“I saw one at the bookstore the other day,” she said. “It was called… what was it? The Slow Game . What’s that one about?”
“That was my first one,” I said, forking a tortellini. “Kind of an outlier. I hadn’t figured out what I was doing yet. I used to have a whole sales rap down about it, but I don’t really remember it anymore.”
“I bet you can remember it,” she said.
She was right. It was easy to fall back into my old grooves.
I gave her the jacket copy overview of my first published work: a series of portraits of people who’d bloomed late in life, or who’d never bloomed at all, but whose influence had become apparent only long after the fact.
It was a book about people who’d appeared slow but who’d in fact controlled the tempo of their times.
That was how we’d framed it in the PR materials.
“Like who?” she said.
“Hakeem Olajuwon was a chapter,” I said.
“He was a center for the Houston Rockets. He was from Lagos, Nigeria, a beautiful guy. He was nicknamed the Dream. He looked like he was moving in slow motion out on the court, but when you checked the numbers, he was totally dominant. He led the league in rebounds twice, blocked shots three times. He hardly budged down in the post, but he just racked up the numbers. You could say that about a lot of big men. At least in a certain era of basketball. But Hakeem seemed especially slow.”
“Interesting,” she said. “Who else played the Slow Game?”
“Umm, Simon Rodia,” I said. “He’s the guy who built the Watts Towers.
Every day, he’d go out into his backyard and add a new little piece to his structure.
He’d bring out shards of broken glass, or seashells, or pieces of pottery.
And gradually his sculpture grew like a coral reef.
It took him thirty-four years, but he single-handedly created a ninety-nine-and-a-half-foot-tall monument that the whole world recognizes and loves.
One guy, walking into his backyard every day and adding to his pile. ”
“I like that,” she said. “He never made it to a hundred feet, though?”
“Nope,” I said. “Stayed at ninety-nine and a half. He didn’t fetishize the round numbers.”
There were other examples, too, some famous, some just people I knew.
I told her how I’d started collecting these stories in my teens, and eventually, in my late twenties, had realized I had some kind of book in my head.
Through these portraits, I’d extrapolated the idea of the “slow universe,” a pudding-like undertow to the bright, gaudy cosmos of streaking comets and flaming meteors.
The slow universe was a place of belated consequences and time-delayed realizations.
The book had ended up embodying the principle in a way, because I still got royalties off it, if increasingly meager ones.
“Funny, to write a first book about slowness,” she said. “That book did pretty well, didn’t it?”
“It did all right,” I said. “People like to hear those kinds of stories, it turns out.”
“Stories about slow people?” she said.
“Stories telling them they’re doing better than they think they are,” I said. “Or that they’re getting something done by doing nothing at all. People like to hear that work is happening without really trying.”
“Ha!” she said. “Was that your message?” Her eyes were suddenly alight. “It sounds so cynical.”
“I didn’t mean it to sound that way,” I said.
“Because it sounds like you’re a total charlatan,” she said, pushing her advantage. “Feeding people stories to make them feel better. Telling them what they want to hear.”
“Giving people comfort,” I said. “I think that’s part of what writing a book is about, giving solace. I’m not above offering solace.”
“Call it what you want,” she said. “Better an interesting charlatan than a hypocritical saint. In my opinion.”
She sipped her sparkling water. We’d broken the skin of something.
We finished our lunches, but neither of us seemed eager to get back to work.
I’d learn later that Sarah had already decided we were spending the afternoon together.
At the time I only knew she didn’t seem particularly worried about the library shift, and that my own workday was already shot. I rarely worked past 2:00 p.m.
We took a stroll through the farmer’s market, admiring the spring vegetables.
We had different methods for choosing artichokes, it turned out, and very different opinions about rhubarb.
We paused for a while and watched a clown performing a juggling routine to a Beatles medley on a boom box.
He had some incredible moves: two balls behind his back; three balls in front of his chest, hands swiping the air like a spasmodic bear; going wide, with high arcs; keeping the balls tight near his ribs; going under his knee.
And then, as the crescendo of “Carry That Weight” surged, he sped through all of them, one after the other, a pyrotechnic sequence.
We clapped and laughed and left a few dollars in his hat.
From there, we walked into the park, passing Hacky Sackers and Frisbee golfers, and circled the duck pond, where some geese were violently mating.
We headed up the trail, spotting a hiker wandering down from Ashland’s watershed, a dirty angel bounding through the tunnel of greenery.
Now it became my turn to ask the questions.
“So you grew up in California,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “Bay Area.”
“And your parents are from Germany,” I said. “Phil mentioned that.”
“Yep,” she said.
“What do they do?” I said.
“My dad is a coder,” she said. “My mom is a schoolteacher.”
“What grade does your mom teach?” I said.
“Every grade,” she said. “Kindergarten to eighth. She’s a sub now.”
“And you always lived in California?” I said.
“I was actually born up here, in Oregon,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “What part?”
“Out in the desert,” she said. “In the east.”
“What town?” I said.
“A town called Antelope,” she said.
“That’s where the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh lived,” I said. “Were you there when the Rajneeshees took it over? Turned it into the commune?”
“That was us,” she said. “We did that. We call him Osho, though.”
“You’re a Rajneeshee?” I said. Here was real information, possibly even the key to a life. My full attention was locked.
“Yep,” she said. “Born in the cult.”
She told me the whole story. Her parents were both German hippies, she said, which was to say, very serious, real seekers.
As young people, in their respective homes in the suburbs of Munich, they’d both discovered the writings of the Bhagwan and had each traveled halfway around the world to study with their chosen master.
When they’d first met at his ashram in Pune, India, it’d felt like fate.
They’d grown up about four miles apart, only to come face-to-face so far away from home. What were the chances?
Together, they’d gotten very deep into Osho’s practice—the morning meditations, the calisthenics, the riddling out of his aphorisms. When he’d moved his congregation to the United States, they’d followed.
“This is when?” I said.
“This is the late seventies, early eighties,” she said.
“It was a little late for cults, but they’d missed the big flowering in the early seventies.
So they ended up out in eastern Oregon when everyone moved there.
This is kind of the Slow Game, isn’t it?
Belated cult activity! They really went for it, though.
They had a lot of pretty out-there experiments going on in the ashram, even then.
Osho’s philosophy was based on free, open love between people, the destruction of the possessive ego.
That’s ironically why he had so many Rolls-Royces.
They were symbols of how little he cared about material things.
I was actually conceived in an orgy there. ”
“What a minute,” I said. “What?”
“That’s not how anyone puts it,” she said.
“How do they put it?” I said.
“They never put it one way or the other,” she said. “No one ever really talked about it at all.”
“How did you find out then?” I said.
“I pieced it together,” she said. “I grew up in a very normal way, actually. My parents left the ashram when I was still a baby. We moved down to California, started a life in the South Bay. My dad found work in the computer industry. It’s funny to realize how close we were to those times, because to me, the ashram was always just a fairy tale.
I have no memories of being there at all. ”
“So your parents were deprogrammed?” I said.
“No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “We had pictures of Osho everywhere. They always had friends in the commune. They never stopped believing, in a way; they just moved on to other parts of their lives. People like to think there are these hard breaks in life, but nothing ever really ends or goes away. Don’t you think? ”
“And they didn’t tell you anything about your conception?” I said.
“You’re very interested in this,” she said.
“How could I not be?”
“I don’t think my parents really knew what to say about it,” she said. “They didn’t want to confuse me. It didn’t really matter. But I remember the day it finally dawned on me. I was sixteen at the time.”
“What happened?” I said.