Thomas Phalen
Things Aren’t Always as They Seem
My old friend Bruce came to me in a dream last night. I have not seen him in the flesh for years and years. The wind was blowing from the Northern Great Plains, steadily and cold, through the open window above my bed bringing rain, thunderstorms, and tornado watches with it. Bruce’s image came, too.
Bruce was a handsome, wavy chestnut-haired, brilliant young man with a disarming smile, who was at war with his brains, always seeking the small kernels of truth, always looking for something just out of his reach.
Our differences (he was the Jew, I the Mick) defined much of our relationship. We fueled each other’s best and worst. He was neurotic. I drank too much. We gave each other grief for all of it.
Bruce had been “in analysis” since the sixth grade, years before I met him. The damage those (witch) doctors inflicted upon his inventive and brilliant mind is beyond my reckoning. Knowing little about psychoanalysis and uninterested in curing my ignorance, I distrust psychiatry and believe that many in the field injure their patients. Bruce was treated at a time before targeted medications became available. Yesterday’s medications used to treat serious mental illness were crude hammers by today’s standards.
A social disaster, Bruce would variously confuse, annoy, insult, offend, or downright hurt people he encountered. I don’t think he always meant to, though often he did, and skillfully. He saw with rare clarity people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Sometimes he was petty in his cruelty. He would taunt heavy people for being fat, homely people for being ugly, or shy people for being hermits. He was master of the cheap shot and was not ashamed of it.
By turns, he could be cruelly frank and painfully honest, not unlike Holden Caulfield in his inability to countenance phoniness. Bruce disdained pretense and never allowed anyone the luxury of an excuse or convenient rationalization. He so scrutinized his own shortcomings, his own excuse-making defense mechanisms, that he was without peer in his ability to identify and vilify them in others.
The flipside of this power of observation and hyper-criticism was his proneness to obsequiousness, which manifested itself as embarrassing sycophantism. When he admired people, he aggrandized them, pandered to them shamelessly, and felt a tremendous inferiority.
I had more patience with Bruce than most of our fellows. I could tolerate his sullenness, judgmentalism, and sometimes anti-social behavior with less exasperation. He would sit in his overstuffed reading chair at Pomona College, where we were both students, knees pulled up to his chin, and writhe, tortured, over what were, to me, mere trivial things. He was not one of those histrionic types who thrive on self-made crises. Instead, he sincerely suffered from the absurdity and stupidity with which he found the world infected. Perhaps his crippling sensitivity caused his often hurtful behavior.
Bruce thought I was something special, that I was brilliant. For as bright as he was he should have known better. He admired my ability to negotiate my way around troublesome people with what appeared to him to be much ease. But I was not a “go-with-the-flow” kind of guy. He would joke that I reminded him of John Wayne and wooden toilet paper: I’d take no shit off nobody.
Bruce had a marvelous facility with language. His vocabulary was vast. He read widely: from the densest metaphysics and nineteenth century German philosophy to the Berkeley Barb and Penthouse Forum. He was a delight to pun with because nothing was too subtle nor lost on him. He spoke his English with punctilious accuracy, was fluent in French, and could hold his own in German and Spanish – remarkable for an American student in the late 20th Century.
His academic interests were eclectic. He studied, among other subjects, philosophy, English, European languages and literature, photography, auto mechanics, and physics. He attacked each subject with an unhealthy ardor. He was a competitive student with an unflagging sense of academic integrity. He was not bent on getting the highest grade; he was bent on mastering the subject completely. He felt a passion for the life of the mind. His cerebral cortex was an erogenous zone. He was a junkie for the quasi-sexual ecstasy of insight and devoted to the pursuit of academic excellence. Were it up to him he would have made Pomona College a true community of scholars committed to the ascertainment of truth in all its orgasmic diversity.
Bruce took just as enthusiastic delight in self-discovery as he did in the discoveries he made in his books. He was honest about his insights into the workings of own his head gleaned from his analysis of things he had done. His revelations to me about these were almost confessional, akin to the Mariner in Coleridge’s titular poem, or Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’ The Fall. I think his desire to tell me of things he found peculiar in himself (or lofty or laudatory or loathsome or frightening) was born of his need for independent approval of how he conducted his life. I also think he told me about certain self-discoveries simply because they delighted him.
Honey, one tablespoon a day, he said, had marvelous curative properties. (He force-fed me my one tablespoon every day.) Masturbation, he adamantly insisted, would cure insomnia. One quarter pound of dried mugwort leaves placed under one’s pillow gave one fabulous dreams.
Bruce was as curious about the processes of “evolutionary becoming” that had made the human mind as he was about his own perplexing thought processes. I think he got lost between the two equally vast and incomprehensible universes, the macro-world and the micro-world. He was disturbed that his mental processes were, if not unsound, at least not “normal.” He was not lucky enough to be one of those seriously mentally ill persons who have no idea they are not well. Bruce was painfully aware of his otherness and tortured by his inability to do anything about it. He could not control the fears that ate him alive and was simultaneously disdainful of those not “sensitive” enough to be wracked by those same fears. I lost sleep sometimes fretting about Bruce’s suffering, having no idea what I could do to help him. The best I ever did, I think, was to be his friend – to forgive his trespasses.
I was fascinated by Bruce’s preoccupation with symbols, his ritualism almost pagan. I admired it and tried to emulate his devotion. He observed the equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices with spontaneous and elaborate rituals. He used candles, songs, incense, drugs of various kinds, and in one case, summer solstice of 1978, we stood on the roof of a fraternity house in Berkeley and screamed and chanted in homage to the four directions of the compass. A howl to the north, a scream to the east, a bellow to the west, and a holler to the south: all at the exact moment the summer began.
He invoked the god Bacchus when he drank whiskey and followed the planets and his astrological chart. For a materialist, he was, ironically, something of a pantheist. He sought to sanctify the mundane. When he was wandering through France, he lit a votive candle for me at the Cathedral of Mont St. Michel. He did the same for me at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He slept at Shakespeare & Co., a Parisian bookstore that takes in young bibliophile vagabonds in exchange for work, so he could be where the ghosts of the deified authors in exile, Joyce, Hemmingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald had visited.
He worked up the nerve to seek out Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, while he was in Paris. Bruce was captivated by Foucault’s treatise Madness and Civilization. Bruce spent several days with Foucault, discussing his work – and all in French. He had to artfully deflect some rather persistent, but by no means threatening, sexual advances from Foucault. All in a day’s work.
Bruce and I (and many others) dabbled in the use of LSD during the early and mid-1970s, a time somewhat removed from the glory days of psychedelics. Therapists were not yet certain the drug should be written off as a psychiatric tool. Dr. Stanislav Grof came to Pomona College expounding upon his theories concerning acid’s beneficent effects on the mentally ill. Many of us went to his lecture out of curiosity about the drug we had been taking recreationally or, in my case, sacramentally, for rare glimpses of “the truth.” Bruce went, I think, to learn whether acid held an answer to his unhappiness.
LSD affords no cover for bullshit. One of the humbling and harrowing properties of this drug is its power to rob one completely of all pretenses. It makes one acutely aware of the web of social rules that govern even the most inconsequential of social interactions. The more formal and organized a social encounter, the more rigid and complex these rules become. One does not appear for argument before the United States Supreme Court in tie-dye. Observance of these unwritten rules is de rigeur to the maintenance of the somewhat delicate social fabric on which societal institutions are grounded; small deviations stretch the fabric, large deviations tear. LSD makes one feel it’s important to tear the fabric of social interactions, to break the rigid rules that have ossified around our societal institutions. “Tune in, turn on, and drop out.”
Bruce looked at LSD as a therapeutic tool for exploring the secrets of his brain. I think he found it intellectually dishonest to justify taking acid on the pat ground that it would “expand his mind.” That kind of thinking-by-slogan was anathema to him.
I don’t know how acid affected Bruce’s stability, such as it was, and perhaps I should have been concerned about it. But I remember fondly one very special time we tripped together. We dropped acid on our way from Berkeley to Stinson Beach one day in late summer. Bruce was driving. We began to come on as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to Marin County. The drive along Highway 1 became a marvelous adventure of discovery as the drug painted each landmark with weird and mysterious symbolism. Bruce held well to the road and commented maniacally on the spectacular erupting lashings and spangles of brilliances that colored the waving, weaving, quivering, fluttering, kaleidoscopic rainbow hillsides.
We made it to the beach with our brains screeching like grindstones scraping axe-blades. The fury of the acid made speech impossible and silly. Speech so poorly conveyed what was beyond speech. Spoken words were rank and imprecise when the drug gave one omniscience. To presume to tell one’s tripping partner something about what one is experiencing is to insult his intelligence. To dare presume he is not seeing, thinking, feeling exactly what you are trying to convey in words is the ultimate psychedelic sin: the unspeakable thing.
We walked along the beach at mid-afternoon blithering in silly omniscient perceptive ecstasy. The sun off the water made our eyes bleed. Bruce attacked the long bullwhips of kelp that had washed up and swung them around his head to give them a resounding CRACK!! of the whip. I studied shimmering beach stones and skipped them perfectly in the smooth receding water spread on the sand from a spent breaker.
The water on the stones, swimming and roiling, made the sun glint off shards of living jewels in all the colors of an electric rainbow, sparking, sparkling, and flaming. The ocean water purled and swirled a fountain of three alarm mother of pearl in a maelstrom of changing aquas and turquoise and reds and yellow-golds. I saw hurtling, dazzling, white-maned mustangs gallop out of the surf swells and ride the lathering dancing breakers to the shore. I heard their laughing neighing as they rushed and scattered as if in a panicked stampede. I felt no fear. The sky erupted in a roaring efflorescence of geometric flowers and a paisley fireworks of precious gems, jigsaw shapes cut from shimmering flames that streaked from horizon to horizon. We walked, fearless, under a daylight aurora borealis in a living sky breathing icy fire and silently exploding a conspiracy of dancing daystars streaming violet, neon blue, and electric lime tracers across the glittering, fluttering, rippling dome of the firmament as the earth turned a westering arc from the sun.
While the waves rode to the shore, we rode waves of rushes - whammies - the goose bump conspiracies that began at the hairs on our lower backs and ended at the crowns of our heads in brilliant crescendos. We walked for what might have been hours and miles along the glinting rainbow jewel strewn strand.
Eternity passed. The irresistible manic feeling that takes control when one is in the upward swing of an acid high began to loosen its manacles as the sun came to rest on the Pacific. The euphoric grip loosened slowly and fitfully like hands that relax after having held too hard and too long onto a window ledge for dear life.
We turned back to where we’d begun our walk along the beach and dared to speak, exchanging choppy phrases. “Good.” “Yes.” “Reminds me of everything.” “Yes, it does.” “It’s cold.” “I’m cold.” “Cold is me.” “Yes, cold.” “Good.” “Yes.” “Good movie.” “Yes.” “Movie.” “Are you in my movie or am I in yours?” “Mine is yours and yours is mine.”
The Marin County hills come right down to the water south of Stinson Beach, and we walked with our sunburned faces turned to the rust bluffs. There suddenly a silver shimmery glow above them, big as a shopping center search light. Faint at first, but we both saw it. We strode on, our eyes fixed on the Twilight Zone glimmer above the now crimson cliffs, each of us unsure whether we’d invented this alluring light out of the drug in our heads. We looked at one another. The unspeakable thing was back. Big slobbery smiles.
“AAAARRGGHH!!!” we screamed.
The silver gleam kept getting brighter, getting bigger. A spellbinding apparition. The bluffs were now deep burgundy and behind us the sun was a domed bloody slip of crescent buried in the sea. Just as the last sunlight drowned in the west the silver glare came up over the purple rise in its first concentrated flash. As we walked transfixed by the now insistent radiance, we still had no idea what we were seeing. Then the light began to take shape, the silver became the top curve of a glowing sphere gazing over the purple Marin hills like a cosmic Kilroy.
The full moon rise!
“AAAARRGGHH!!!”
We ran toward the rising moon laughing in childlike wonderment. We were exactly, absolutely in THE CENTER. We were at the precise place and at the precise time at which the full-faced white bone moon chased the bloody crimson sun around the watery blue earth. Bruce and I together on the shimmering jeweled strand in THE CENTER of time and space.
The rarest of rare moments forever.
~
It was another time on a different beach in San Francisco that Bruce and I watched another summer sunset. No acid this time. Bruce was telling me about atmospheric refraction and its effect on the sun’s light. He said that when the sun sets on the ocean, the long corridor of atmosphere we look through to see the sun acts as a mirror and reflects a sun that is already gone. He said that while we “see” the sun above the water, it’s already gone below the horizon, leaving us with the illusion of itself hovering over the water. Things aren’t always as they seem, he said to me with a smile.
~
Not long after, Bruce left Pomona College and returned to his parents’ home in Illinois. He enrolled in the University of Chicago, commuting to school and later finding rooms on campus. I received distressing reports that while he was home his folks would find Bruce peering into their bedroom windows in the wee hours of the morning. Why he was outside in the cold and dark terrifying his parents is something no one can know. On my way to New England, I stopped in Chicago and visited Bruce in his rooms on campus. It was a sad and chilling visit. He produced an antique gun that resembled an over-sized derringer. A big version of a small gun. He drew out of a desk drawer an assortment of ammunition, the shells mismatched and all of different calibers. Everything about the gun and the ammunition was laughably wrong. What was not laughable was the flat-affect seriousness with which he told me this was the gun and these were the bullets he would use to kill himself. Alarmed and angry, I insisted he give me the gun and the ammunition. Bruce attacked me, as only he could do, with withering vilification, for being a beggar and a mooch, accusing me of wanting to steal his property because I did not have enough money to buy my own. It was a silly, hurtful, untrue accusation, absurdly and intentionally missing the point. But its absurdity only highlighted how dark things had become for Bruce from that brilliant shining day at Stinson Beach lit by our electrified minds under the shimmering incandescent sun and moon. Our extraordinary day together in the center of time and space was an eternity gone.
I learned that Bruce had left us when his mother wrote to me several months after I’d sent him a Christmas card. I had wondered why he hadn’t written back for so long and when a letter arrived with her return address on it, I knew before I opened it that we had lost him. Bruce’s mother used the phrase “Bruce took his own life.” She did not tell me how he “took” it, nor have I ever learned.
~
More than forty years have passed since that magical moment on Stinson Beach, when together we broke through to the other side of perception and found ourselves in the center of it all, a moment that lives on still. I am, and he would be, an old man. But he came to me last night on a muscular frigid west wind out of the Northern Plains that gifted me the visages of the young men we had been, a west wind that carried Bruce on its wings not knowing that Bruce was already gone.
Things aren’t always as they seem.
Thomas Phalen is a retired lawyer, an Irish/American dual national, and has his Master of Philosophy degree in Creative Writing from the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
He has been published in more than a dozen literary journals among which are, The Lune, Blue Mountain Review, The Muleskinner Journal, Icarus, The Wild Umbrella, Third Wednesday, SBLAAM, Written Tales, Wilderness House Literary Review, Harrow House Review, The Scop, Does It Have Pockets, ArLiJo Arlington Literary Review, and Cider Press Review.
His chapbook, Losing My October, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2027. He was a four-time contributor in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a founding editor of The Muleskinner Journal.
