Alby - Be Zen

Be Zen

About three hours into the infusion, Alby began to fidget and his eyes were darting around the room, jumping from the television set to me and then back again.

“You okay Dad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel right.”

“Should I call Jenny?”

“No, but if you wouldn’t mind, could you just hold my hand for a little while?”

I took his hand in mine and I could feel him trembling. My rock, it seemed, had been reduced to pebbles. “Relax, Daddy. Breathe slowly. Breathe in…Breathe out…Breathe in…Breathe out…”

“You know who you’re starting to sound like, don’t you?”

It was the mid-1970’s, I was eighteen, and Harvey had decided he hadn’t quite “found” himself yet. My brother was an adolescent during the 1960’s and embraced the Hippie mentality, which included a fervent interest in eastern religion. He searched for something that would fit well with his perception of what life should be or an ideology to which he could relate. His search brought him to India where he grew a beard and long, curly hair, donned an orange Nehru shirt that came down to his knees and wore baggy orange pants that looked like pajama bottoms. Around his neck hung a string of brown beads with a picture of Bhagwan Rajneesh, his guru, dangling from the bottom. (You might remember this guru – he’s the one who was investigated many years later in Oregon for tax evasion as he drove away in his Rolls Royce. . .)

Pearl and Alby were distraught. Their good little Jewish boy from New Jersey was living on an Ashram in the Indian wilderness, unreachable by telephone for months on end, and the worry nearly drove them crazy.

Pearl was on edge, her conversations always clipped as though she was in a hurry. Alby, whose normal demeanor was one of calm, was himself distracted and uneasy.

Pearl heard about a man who led massive therapy groups to teach people how to find inner peace. It was a popular if not questionable craze, attracting people from all walks of life looking for coping skills. Pearl convinced Alby, along with their best friends Ethel and Gerry, to attend a seminar in the hopes of finding a constructive way to deal with Harvey’s distance.

Alby found the whole idea quite suspect but kept his thoughts to himself; he knew better than to provoke my mother when she was on her last nerve. So, like a dutiful husband, he coughed up the ridiculously-exorbitant-but-I’ll-do-it-anyway registration and seminar fees and resigned himself to keeping an open mind.

As they left the on the morning of their seminar date, they reminded me that they weren’t allowed to make telephone calls during the course of the day, and therefore wouldn’t be in touch with me until they got home much later. I wondered about that for just a bit, but in my teenaged egocentricity the thought was fleeting. Only much later that evening did I realize it would have behooved me to give it more than a second’s concern. After all, if my logic were sound I would have wondered what type of class would keep them incommunicado for so many long hours.

Pearl and Alby sat in a massive ballroom at a Holiday Inn, surrounded by hundreds of people looking for that ever-elusive inner peace. Some were devotees of the program, some were newcomers, and some were groupies who followed their leader wherever he went. The attendees were a potpourri of working professionals to people whose last shower was nothing more than a stroll through the rain. Alby looked around, his suspicions building rapidly.

With pomp and circumstance and a lot of zip-a-dee-doo-dah, the leader strode confidently onto the stage and was welcomed with resounding applause and a deafening roar of screams and shouts. Alby chuckled aloud and Mom elbowed him, the ever-present behavioral compass of our lives.

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,” the man bellowed into his microphone and his captive audience replied in turn.

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” they screamed.

NOW he had Alby’s undivided attention. What could possibly be the point of this?

“You’ll soon find out that words are only what you want them to be. They’re nothing more than a string of letters put together to make sounds and we, as people, assign those sounds meanings. It’s all what you make it. FUCK doesn’t have to be bad; it could mean something as benign as “Here, have an orange.” We have made it nasty but we can mold things into what we want or need them to be.

“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK,” he continued. “Let’s all say it together! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK.”
Alby thought he’d fall off his chair with glee. This was going to be better than he ever imagined; a comedy show with an audience who didn’t know the joke was on them! He watched mom loosen up and actually chortled when he heard her scream “FUCK” on the top of her lungs. Gerry and Ethel were busy waving their hands in the air as though experiencing some divine intervention. Alby made himself comfortable as he sat back in his metal folding chair, waiting to see how the show’s next act would progress.

It didn’t take long to find out because Alby had to use the bathroom. Even in his younger years, his urges to urinate were sudden and emergent. When he had to go, he had to GO. He stood up and began to make his way across the row of seats, squeezing past “FUCK” screamers just to get toward the aisle.

“And you would be going WHERE?” the leader’s accusatory voice rang out above the “FUCK” din.

Alby stopped and turned to look up toward the stage.

“I’m talking to YOU,” the all-powerful Oz said, pointing a stern finger.

Alby was psyched now. “I’m going to the bathroom. That is, if it’s okay with you,” he answered sarcastically. The room fell silent. Not a “FUCK” in the bunch.

“It’s not okay with me, my friend. No one is allowed to leave this room. You take energy out and it interrupts the flow of your inner search.”

“That’s not the flow I’m concerned about right now,” Alby said as he continued to walk toward the rear doors.

“You can’t leave.”

What little dander Alby had was up. “Listen my friend, I took orders in school, orders in the Army, and sometimes I even take orders from my wife. I will not, however, take orders from you. So, as I see it, you can either back off now or you can watch me pee right here in front of everyone in the room. Your choice.” Alby stood tapping his foot, getting more and more pumped for a challenge. When he received none, he went to the bathroom to empty his bladder and was sure THAT was Nirvana!

When he reentered the ballroom ten minutes later Alby heard “Shit, fuck, piss” being chanted by a closed-eyed audience. “Have you found IT? Your inner self?” the leader shouted.

“Yes,” the majority called out in unison.

“Grab that self. Feel the weight of IT! Learn IT so you can always find IT.”

“Shit, fuck, piss!” Alby yelled out, but not for the same reasons as everyone else. For this I paid money? “Shit, fuck, piss,” he repeated as his own private reprimand.

When Pearl and Alby got home that evening, I asked them how the day had gone.

“Ask your father,” Mom answered angrily with more than a little annoyance.

Ooh, I knew this was going to be good. I was positively shaking in anticipation and didn’t miss Alby’s sideways smirk.

“Susie Q, did you know that if you really want to find out what you’re made of on the inside and you need to learn about your inner self, just have someone deprive you of taking a pee.”

I supposed that’s what it meant to be full of piss and vinegar.


By the end of the story Dad forgot that he’d been frightened only minutes before but it was so comfortable holding hands that we just didn’t let go.