The Teachings of Don B. Read online

“The ally helps the man of knowledge know and also helps him know that he knows.”

  “Do you have an ally, Don B.?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who is your ally, Don B.?”

  “Turkey,” he said, and laughed uproariously.

  I went away filled with a sensation of not having heard him correctly.

  June 17, 1968

  I had brought Don B. some food. We sat on the floor eating fettucine on rye in silence. I had noticed that although Don B. as a rule ate very little, whenever there were two sandwiches on the floor he ate both halves of his and half of mine, which I thought a little strange.

  Without warning he said: “You feel uncomfortable.”

  I admitted that I felt a bit uncomfortable.

  “I knew that you felt uncomfortable,” he said. “That is because you have not found your spot. Move around the room until you have found it.”

  “How do you mean, move around the room?”

  “I mean, like sit in different places.”

  Don B. rose and left the apartment. I tried sitting in different places. What he had said made no sense to me. True, I had been slightly uncomfortable in the spot I had been sitting in. But no other place in the room seemed any better to me. I sat experimentally in various areas but could discover no spot that felt any better than any other spot. I was sweating and felt more uncomfortable than ever. An hour passed, then two hours. I was sitting as hard as I could, first in one place, then another. But no particular place seemed desirable or special. I wondered where Don B. was. Then I noticed that a particular spot near the south wall was exuding a sort of yellow luminosity. I painfully sat over toward it, sit by sit, a process which consumed some twelve minutes. Yes! It was true. In the spot occupied by the yellow luminosity I felt much more comfortable than I had felt in my original spot. The door opened and Don B. entered, smiling.

  “Where have you been, Don B.?”

  “I caught a flick. I see that you have found your spot.”

  “You were right, Don B. This spot is much better than my old spot.”

  “Of course. You were sitting too close to the fire, idiot.”

  “But Don B.! What is this yellow luminosity that seems to hover over this particular spot?”

  “It’s the lamp, dummy.”

  I looked up. Don B. was right. Immediately above my new spot was a light fixture containing two 150-watt bulbs. It was turned on.

  I went away filled with a powerful sensation having to do with electricity.

  June 13, 1968

  Once again I had asked Don B. about the famous hallucinogenic substances used by the Yankees.

  Without replying, he carefully placed another book on the fire. It was Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum chemicum Britannicum.

  “When I sneeze, the earth shakes,” Don B. said, after a time.

  I greeted this announcement with a certain amount of skepticism.

  “Show me, Don B.,” I said.

  “The man of knowledge does not sneeze on command,” he said. “He sneezes only when it is appropriate and right to do so, that is, when his brillo is inside his nose, tickling him.”

  “When is it appropriate and right to sneeze, Don B.?”

  “It is appropriate and right to sneeze when your brillo is inside your nose, tickling it.”

  “Does each man have his own personal brillo, Don B.?”

  “The man of knowledge both has a brillo and is a brillo. That is why he is able to sneeze so powerfully that when he sneezes, the earth shakes. Brillo is nose, arms, legs, liver—the whole shebang.”

  “But you said a brillo was a devil, Don B.”

  “Some people like devils.”

  “How does the man of knowledge find his personal brillo, Don B.?”

  “Through the use of certain hallucinogenic substances peculiar to Yankee culture,” Don B. said.

  “Can I try them?”

  Don B. gazed at me for a long time—an intense gaze. Then he said: “Maybe.”

  I departed with a strong sense of epistemological obfuscation.

  June 20, 1968

  “The four natural enemies of the man of knowledge,” Don B. said to me, “are fear, sleep, sex, and the Internal Revenue Service.”

  I listened attentively.

  “Before one can become a man of knowledge one must conquer all of these.”

  “Have you conquered the four natural enemies of the man of knowledge, Don B.?”

  “All but the last,” he said with a grimace. “Those sumbitches never give up.”

  “How does one conquer fear, Don B.?”

  “One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said.

  “The right or the left?”

  Don B. gave me a pitying look.

  “Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?” he said. “One frog on each shoe.”

  “How does having frogs sewed to your shoes help one conquer fear, Don B.?”

  But Don B. had fallen asleep. I was torn inside. My most deeply held values, such as being kind to frogs, had been placed in question. I really did want to become a man of knowledge. But at such a cost?

  June 21, 1968

  Today Don B. looked at me for a long time. His gaze, usually so piercing, was suffused with a sort of wet irony.

  “Xavier,” he said, “there is something about you I like. I think it’s your credulity. Belief is very important if one wishes to become a man of knowledge—to truly ‘see.’ I think you might possibly be able to ‘see’ someday. But ‘seeing’ is very difficult. Only after the most arduous preparation of the heart will you be able to ‘see.’ Even though you are not a Yankee, it may be that you will be able to prepare your heart adequately. I don’t know. I’m not guaranteeing anything.”

  “How does one prepare the heart, Don B.?”

  “One cleanses it with either a yellow warmth or a pink luminosity. I don’t know which is right in your case. It varies with the individual. Each man must choose. So we will try both. But I must warn you that the experience is dangerous and sticky. Your life may hang on how you behave in the next hour. You must do everything exactly as I tell you. This isn’t kid stuff, buddy.”

  I was filled with a sense of awe and dread. Could I, a Western man, enter into the darkest mysteries of the Yankees without putting myself and my most deeply held convictions in peril? A profound sadness overtook me, followed by an indescribable anguish. I suppressed them.

  “All right, Don B.,” I said. “If you really think I’m ready.”

  Don B. then rose and went to a cupboard. He opened it and removed two vessels which he placed on the floor, near the fire. He opened a second cupboard and produced two ordinary drinking glasses, which he also placed on the floor. Then he went into another room, returning with a sort of crock with a lid on it, a small round yellow object, and a knife. All of these he placed on the floor near the fire. He knelt alongside them and began a strange, rather eerie chant. I could not make out all of the words, but they included town, pony, and feather. I wondered if I was supposed to chant too, but dared not interrupt him to ask. I began chanting, tentatively, “town-pony-feather.”

  Abruptly, Don B. stopped chanting and began whittling at the small yellow object. Was it this, I wondered, that generated the “yellow warmth” he had spoken of? Soon there was a small pile of yellow-white chips before him. He then reached for one of the vessels he had taken from the cupboard and poured a colorless liquid, perhaps four ounces of it, into each of the drinking glasses. Then he crossed his eyes and sat with his eyes crossed for some moments. I crossed my eyes also. We sat thus for four minutes, our gazes missing each other but meeting, I felt, somewhere in the neutral space on either side of us. The sensation was strange, eerie.

  Don B. uncrossed his eyes, blinked, smiled at me.

  He reached for the second vessel and poured a second colorless liquid into each glass, but much less of it: about half an ounce per glass
, I estimated. He then removed the top of the crock and took from it six small colorless objects, each perhaps an inch and one-half square, placing three of them in each glass. Next he picked up one of the yellow-white chips and rubbed it around the rim of each glass. Then he stirred the mixtures with his index finger and handed me a glass.

  “Drink it down without stopping,” he said, “for if you pause in the drinking of it the brillo which it summons, your personal brillo, will not appear. And the whole thing will be a bloody goddamn fiasco.”

  I did as Don B. bade me, and drained the glass in one gulp. Immediately a horrible trembling convulsed my limbs, while an overwhelming nausea retracted my brain. I flopped around on the floor a lot. I became aware of (left to right) a profound sadness, a yellow warmth, an indescribable anguish, and a pink luminosity. Don B. was watching me with a scornful smile on his face. I was sweating, my stomach was cramping, and I needed a cigarette. I saw, on my left, the profound sadness merging with the yellow warmth, and on my right, the indescribable anguish intermingling with the pink luminosity, and, suddenly, standing with one foot on the profound sadness/yellow warmth and the other on the indescribable anguish/pink luminosity, a gigantic figure half-human, half-animal, and a hundred feet tall (roughly). A truly monstrous thing! Never in the wildest fantasies of fiction had I encountered anything like it. I looked at it in complete, utter bewilderment. It was strange and eerie, and yet familiar. Then I realized with a shock of horror, terror, and eeriness that it was a colossal Publisher, and that it was moving toward me, wanted something from me. I fainted. When I revived, it took me to lunch at Lutèce and we settled on an advance in the low fifties, which I accepted even though I knew I was not yet, in the truest sense, a man of knowledge. But there would be other books, I reflected, to become a man of knowledge in, and if I got stuck I could always go back and see good old Don B.

  I WROTE A LETTER . . .

  I wrote a letter to the President of the moon, asked him if they had towaway zones up there. The cops had towed away my Honda and I didn’t like it. Cost me seventy-five dollars to get it back, plus the mental health. You ever notice how the tow trucks pick on little tiny cars? You ever seen them hauling off a Chrysler Imperial? No, you haven’t.

  The President of the moon replied most courteously that the moon had no towaway zones whatsoever. Mental health on the moon, he added, cost only a dollar.

  Well, I needed mental health real bad that week, so I wrote back saying I thought I could get there by the spring of ’81, if the space shuttle fulfilled its porcelain promise, and to keep some mental health warm for me who needed it, and could I interest him in a bucket of ribs in red sauce? Which I would gladly carry on up there to him if he wished?

  The President of the moon wrote back that he would be delighted to have a bucket of ribs in red sauce, and that his zip code, if I needed it, was 10011000000000.

  I cabled him that I’d bring some six-packs of Rolling Rock beer to drink with the ribs in red sauce, and, by the way, what was the apartment situation up there?

  It was bad, he replied by platitudinum plate, apartments were running about a dollar a year, he knew that was high but what could he do? These were four-bedroom apartments, he said, with three baths, library, billiard room, root cellar, and terrace over-looking the Sea of Prosperity. Maybe he could get me a rent abatement, he said, ’cause of me being a friend of the moon.

  The moon began to sound like a pretty nice place. I sent a dollar to the Space Shuttle Hurry-Up Fund.

  Drumming fiercely on a hollow log with a longitudinal slit tuned to moon frequencies, I asked him about employment, medical coverage, retirement benefits, tax shelterage, convenience cards, and Christmas Club accounts.

  That’s a roger, he moonbeamed back, a dollar covers it all, and if you don’t have a dollar we’ll lend you a dollar through the Greater Moon Development Mechanism.

  What about war and peace? I inquired by means of curly little ALGOL circuits I had knitted myself on my Apple computer.

  The President of the moon answered (by MIRV’d metaphor) that ticktacktoe was about as far as they’d got in that direction, and about as far as they would go, if he had anything to say about it.

  I told him via flights of angels with special instructions that it looked to me like he had things pretty well in hand up there and would he by any chance consider being President of us? Part-time if need be?

  No, he said (in a shower of used-car asteroids with blue-and-green bumper stickers), our Presidential campaigns seemed to damage the candidates, hurt them. They began hitting each other over the head with pneumatic Russians, or saying terminally silly things about the trees. He wouldn’t mind being Dizzy Gillespie, he said.

  CHALLENGE

  In 1981, the superiority of the Japanese-made book review to the faltering domestic product, long a source of concern to industry insiders (Publishers Weekly, June 10, 1979, “Those Snazzy New Imports”), was dramatically endorsed by enthusiastic American consumers as Japan’s U.S. market share rose to a stunning forty-seven percent. The sleek, space-efficient Japanese reviews were appearing everywhere, and it was clear that the big, clunky American reviews, whose basic design had not been rethought since the days of Orville Prescott, were in Trouble City.

  The soul of the Japanese review, rooted in the concept of Ma, or space interfacing with time, was large, forthright, ultramodern, yet warm. It was a soul that consumers found agreeable, spread out all over the coffee table on a Sunday morning, and one that wore its technology lightly, like a plastic raincoat. At the same time, bench tests of the new Japanese reviews disclosed a ferocious efficiency.

  The Nakamichi Model 500, for instance, was capable of deconstructing a book of average length in seven seconds, with 0.5 percent distortion, signal-to-noise ratio of 124 db, and a damping factor of 60—a technological feat well beyond the capacity of any U.S. review. American notices tended to be handwritten, typically by either John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates; the new Japanese reviews, on the other hand, were produced by teams of computer-directed, white-gowned specialists between bouts of singing the company song (“Forward, Nakamichi, Forever”). And there were, in the imports, numerous refinements that the plodding, bulbous American reviews could not hope to match. In the Sanyo Model 350, “highs,” or undue enthusiasm, were suppressed by a special microprocessor unit, which could itself sing the company song (“Greatness, Sanyo, Is Possible”). In March of 1981 Yamaha introduced the ultimate in politesse—a review with a sensational “muting” or self-canceling feature (although in fairness it must be noted that this was based on original research done in this country by Lehmann-Haupt and others). Nikko’s Model 770 came equipped with a three-foot clip-on extension probe that actually reached out and touched the reader’s heart-strings, aided by dual LED heartstring meters.

  There were, of course, variations in the Japanese product. Close readers (“review nuts”) could discern a mushiness in the midrange in some Mitsubishi reviews; the upper registers of a Yamaha review were, in some models, unpleasantly shrill; Subaru’s notices were thought to be “charitable.” (Sansui’s use of industrial robots in book-review assembly was not in itself considered innovative; The New York Review of Books had been using robots, usually British, for years.) Still, feature for feature and dollar for dollar, the Japanese entry was a brushed-chrome nifty and the native effort sad, drab knotty pine.

  Nor was the export challenge confined to the American market. In England, The Times Literary Supplement, never known for liberality in the matter of reviewers’ pay—“I would accept birdseed,” one Brit-crit famously declared—converted instantly to an all-Nippon mode, the Japanese having savvily modified basic models to permit maundering, a fave reviewer tactic in Albion. The imports were cost-effective—that is to say, cheap. An English novelist, renowned for his ability to turn out two lengthy Sunday Observer pieces an hour while writing a symphony with his toes, said for attribution, “It’s just bloody unfair!”—a plaint voiced again and
again by his colleagues worldwide. From the Irish Times through the Corriere della Sera and Le Monde to Stockholm’s mighty Aftonbladet, there was capitulation after capitulation, and big yen flowed toward the Ginza.

  In this country, perilously high levels of reviewer unemployment were reached. The Kirkus Service closed down plants in New Rochelle, New York, and Lordstown, Ohio. Publishers Weekly, already under pressure from the Department of Labor for its exclusive employment of thirteen-year-old girls, laid off its entire work force, using blue bubble gum as severance pay. Book World, The Washington Post’s lit. sup., wavered, and then fell; as of the issue of September 18, it was printed on rice paper and read back to front. The Saturday Review’s splendid quarterbrow pages looked like so many plates of sushi, and only The New York Times Book Review, where the editor-san brooded in his glass-walled office while frightened subeditors practiced the tea ceremony, held out.

  The National Book Critics Circle, under the leadership of Fremont-Smith, although stoutly maintaining in public its belief in global freedom of expression, made private representations to the President demanding savage import quotas, hinting that its members would have a thing or two to say about the Reagan memoirs (a projected $8 million blockbuster for S&S) when he got around to writing them. A noted Times daily appraiser announced that he would henceforth devote himself exclusively to his flower-arranging classes at the New School, and a celebrated Newsweek critic was observed entering the building wearing a beautifully folded black obi over his Paul Stuart worsteds.

  Inevitably, in December, the TBR too caved in, the contract going to giant Hitachi Industries of Osaka. As dejected Timesmen stuffed their attaché cases with clips of old reviews and half-consumed packages of Figurines, Hitachi’s Managing Director I. Yamaguchi was asked by media reps for the secret of his company’s success. “Ma knows best,” he said.

  THREE GREAT MEALS

  In this article I am going to tell you how to make three great meals using standard ingredients. By “standard ingredients” I mean things that can be found in any supermarket from one end of the country to the other. I am going to name names and tell you what brands I use, not because I am in the pay of these particular brands or have any fiduciary relation to them but because they are the ones I use daily and ones that I have found work well, day in and day out. In each case you will notice that the meal is geared to the person who does not have too much time to screw around but at the same time wants extra-good results, something a little better than what you would get if you just used these fine products straight, without informed guidance or nuance.