Chapter 2: Silverman Hits The Wall

The afternoon breeze coming in off the ocean swirled gently through The Convent’s lush courtyard, careening off white cala lily, yellow iris, pink azalea, purple bougenvilla, and foot long black blooms of a thirty foot Bird of Paradise that hugged one white stucco wall. Then, having added a mixture of soft floral aromas to it’s salt sea base, it shinnied over the red tile roof to continue its trip downtown. David Silverman, seated in a third floor window overlooking the gardens, fountain, walkways, and graceful iron gate that often framed the faces of wandering tourists, saw none of its gentle and welcoming aura. Staring straight ahead at the blank screen before him, all he could hear were spasms of uncontrolled laughter coming from inside his head...

“Ha... Ha... Hoo... Hoo... Hee... Hee... Check out Silverman and what he’s going through this time. Ho... Ho... Ho... Hoo... Hoo... What a panic. And if you think it’s fun from out there, you should see it from in here. Talk about convoluted. Yuk. Yuk.”

An unbroken string of economic failures projected themselves on the blank screen behind his eyes and they all led to blanker walls where the future was supposed to be. Automaton-like, his fingers moved and confessed his sins and weaknesses to the rest of the world.

He had been a good writer once, had sold short stories and poetry and how-to’s and all the rest of the freelance repertoire to some of the best magazines in the country. But Collier’s and Life and Look weren’t around anymore. And humor. He used to be good at humor. It’s just that nothing was funny anymore. At least not to Silverman.

Author? Right there in front of him, hiding in the bowels of his computer were at least half a dozen books lined up just waiting to be placed on the front rack of bookstores, right next to the check out counter. But the agents didn’t see it that way. Was it all the publisher’s fault in not being willing to take a chance, as he wanted to believe, or was it because he just wasn’t in tune with what people were interested in reading about?

He remembered having this same thought a number of years earlier, reading about the book at the top of the New York Times’ best seller list. It was an exposé by a couple of baseball wives on what life married to a sports’ star is “really” like. He had cringed at the time, both from what he viewed as the banal level of median human intelligence on one hand and how much of a snob he was for thinking so on the other. He cringed again at that memory and the realization that nothing had changed. He still wanted to write about what he wanted to write about and nobody else seemed to care.

Book editor? Why not? Hadn’t one of the books he’d edited been nominated for a Pulitzer? Sure, and he’d gladly do it again if someone would hire him out of the blue, but that had already happened once this life and you never step in the same pile of shit twice.

As for commercial editing gigs on magazines, he’d done that, too, for a fancy New York slick. But it wasn’t enough just to be a good editor anymore, to help a writer organize ideas into a coherent, cogent work. These days it required specialized computer knowledge of systems and graphics and web pages and internets and a whole bunch of technology that kept changing so fast that it wasn’t enough to be an expert in writing, you needed to be an expert in computers. Staying on the leading edge even of editing was something for the kids, the young ‘uns, not for him.

“Go back to teaching economics. You did that before, you can do it again. You enjoyed that.”

Shelly’s encouragement was well meaning but equally unattainable. It had been ten years since he had taught economics and the flyers on the bulletin boards were not looking to hire instructors rapidly approaching retirement age. A fresh out of Ivy league youngster just itching to read freshman papers in an introductory course on the history of Western thought was the more likely scenario and he didn’t fit the bill. By following his inner visions and interests, he had studied himself into a corner and, for all intents and purposes, was valueless to the academic world.

“Ah yes, Silverman. And what have you been doing over the past few years?”

“Well sir, I’ve been studying philosophy, spirituality, and Eastern mysticism, since I truly believe it has much more connection to the root of reality and happiness than economics and business. However, I do need a job.”

With so many teachers out of work he would simply get passed over by candidates with more current curriculum vitae and more of an interest in the subject. Scratch that off the list.

So what else had he done in the past that he couldn’t fall back on?

City planner? Zoning officer? That was a lifetime ago, fresh out of college with his degree in economics and looking to avoid a job in sales. While other graduates in his department had received multiple job offers from big companies, he had scrambled around in the public sector, knocking on doors, sending out resumes. He had finally landed a position with a small town planning office, then joined the state department of development, and a private land use consultant after that. But what did it matter anyway. It was just an additional skill so old on the resume as to be meaningless.

A great sigh escaped his chest and filled the room with frustration and shaking his head to clear it, he reached for the coffee and took a gulp... the warmth of the outside of the cup entering his fingers as he drank of the warmth within. A rush come over him as he realized he was experiencing the writing urge again, the creative urge, and it felt so good. It didn’t bring in the income dammit. Not yet. Bt this in truth, was what he loved doing, what he had always loved doing, the yellowed manuscripts surrounding him attested to that.

Depressing as his thoughts were, he could sit like this for hours, letting those thoughts inside his head well up and come out through his fingers onto the screen in front of him. The only question was, did he have something to say, something worth while that others were interested in reading. He sighed a deep resigned sigh. Wasn’t there someone, anyone, who was also experiencing what it was that he was experiencing?

The ‘here and now’ closed in on him again. How useless he was. He couldn’t even go out and resume the well meaning career that he loved as a home health aide, even though he was state certified to do so. That was a more recent useless skill he had gotten into because of his blind friend Don, suffering from diabetic kidney failure and only sixty years old when he died. Once a week he’d go over to Don’s, taking him to dialysis, reading to him from the Bible, as well as from his own manuscripts. Don had put things into perspective...

“Ya know, David... if ya wanna write somethin’ that’s gonna take care of people’s souls, then ya really oughta learn somethin’ about takin’ care of people’s bodies.”

...and he had enrolled in a home health care course, earning minimum wage, class time included. He had been the only man and the only white skin in a group of sixteen. After certification he had worked as an aide for almost two years with stroke victims, alzheimer’s, parkinson’s, cancer, quadreplegics, feeding, bathing, changing diapers for $5.25 an hour. People will pay a mechanic $75 an hour to take care of their car, he often thought, but how little they are willing to pay someone to take care of mom or dad. But even that needed skill was beyond him now.

His back had gone out while lifting a quad and putting him onto the toilet. David had felt the twinge as soon as it happened but he couldn’t let go of his charge. Then, fifteen minutes later he had to take him off the toilet and put him back in the motorized chair. One hundred eighty pounds of dead weight. Living person, dead weight. There was no choice.

That was on Thursday. On Saturday David had fallen flat on his face in the garden with the lightening bolt pain in his back, unable to move his legs. His fifth lumbar had gone out in the line of duty said the doctors and after scores of tests and retests and forms and more forms he was getting lifetime chiropractic care from the State in exchange. Big deal. But he couldn’t lift stuff any more and that’s why he couldn’t do home care much as he loved it.

The string of blemished pearls went on and on, doubling back on itself mobius fashion, removing every possibility of meaningful desirable work from consideration. A voice rang out in his head. It was his own and he screamed at what he heard.

“I can always pump gas.”

It was the line he used with Shelly to claim that he wasn’t completely useless, that when push came to shove he really could bring in an income. Had it really come down to this? Was that all that was left?

What a fakeout. Looking in from the outside his reality really didn’t look so bad. It was spent at his computer in a San Francisco penthouse, overlooking a lush courtyard, a pot of freshly brewed coffee within easy reach, living the scene he had seen in his vision when he quit the corporate world twenty-two years ago to "become a writer".

And it’s not as if they were living hand to mouth, at least not at the moment. When they had sold the house in upstate New York to come here so he could go back to school they had paid off all their debts, zeroed out the credit cards, erased all the minuses, eliminated the red from the balance sheet. They had a little money in the bank, some small investments, a financial cushion. Was it forever type security? No. Is there ever any forever security? No, not at all, at least not in the material world.

Yet there was no escaping the seething discurrent of diametrically opposed energies between him and Shelly. Over and over, year after year, it had raised its ugly head, a cancer that ever threatened to rip them apart - present pleasure vs long term security. The grasshopper and the ant tearing at each other’s throats again. Not that they disagreed on how nice it would be to have both. That part was easy. But stuck in a life that hadn’t dealt them an unlimited supply of readily available resources, they weren't always in agreement on how to allocate the ones they had. That and the fact that his contribution to the family coffers had been next to nil, a fact she never let him forget.

It was so frustrating. Was he to blame that people paid her good money to sit in front of a computer terminal and play with numbers while they paid him bupkus to sit in front of his and play with words? Wasn't that what she wanted to do? No, not at all. He knew the answer even before he formed the question. Shelly wanted to play, too. To feel the freedom he was experiencing at that moment. He couldn't stop till she was where he was, only then could they be themselves.

He continued staring at the computer, suspended somewhere between inside and outside, inside where the thoughts and visions lived in his head and outside, where words representing those thoughts and visions kept appearing on the computer screen in front of him. Trapped between two worlds that were not very well in sync, he was diligently searching for an escape hatch in a life that was tearing him apart and closing in on him at the same time. Uncanny, he thought, how far he was being stretched in opposite directions by two sets of forces, both of which he knew to be real.

Of course he could always make things right in his next life, but that was another story and Silverman was not about to justify his fuck ups in this one by falling back on reincarnation, even if he did believe in it.

“It takes thousands of lives to reach perfection”, ochre robed gurus had told him as he sat on the floor cross legged in front of them. As if that made things easier. As if that were a palliative that could soothe his ego for blowing this life to smithereens.

“It’s all right, David. Everything is as it should be because, by my astrological calculations, you still have seven hundred some odd lives left to go before you reach enlightenment. Everything is just fine whether you screw things up this life or not because you are supposed to come back and do it over and over and over until you get it right. Get it? Got it? Good.”

Bullshit. Silverman wasn’t buying. What if this were the life where it was supposed to happen and this coming back again and again just an excuse for accepting weakness and coddling imperfection? What if?

His inhale was strong and he could feel resolve coming in with the breath. Why not, why not at all? Why shouldn’t he strive to live the perfect life, to be perfect, the perfect Silverman, the perfect reflection of God, the best he could be? He was no raw beginner. He’d been given too many gifts this lifetime, too many talents, too many incredible spiritual experiences, the kind you read about in the lives of saints for this to be his first time out of the chute. He’d been through this before, many many times. Hadn’t he learned anything? Enough already with clinging on just below the summit of the mountain by his fingertips.

Why shouldn’t he visualize himself as an instrument of the Divine, an active center of the dynamic world-spirit, a creative artist, an architect of new, higher values? Hadn’t his life been given him with all its impulses and urges, thoughts and emotions, talents and handicaps as the raw material for him to fashion into a thing of beauty and joy, by whatever means he could? What if this were the life where he was supposed to touch the absolute absolutely? What if it were and what if he blew it? What then, eh?

How cruel was God anyway? If he weren’t supposed to reach it why had he been allowed to see it? And if he could see it why shouldn’t he be able to reach it? And if he could reach it why was he so far away from it with his marriage, his finances, his health, his sanity all going straight to hell in a hand basket and every other stupid metaphor he could think of? Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Huh? Why? Why the fuck why?

The resonance of the front door swinging shut reached David’s awareness. He muttered a quiet heartfelt prayer and paused in his typing.

"You've been smoking again. We've got to talk." Shelly had returned earlier than expected and stood in the doorway, hands on hips. He looked at her and smiled. She had that look on her face that told him he had that look on his face.

"We were supposed to be together today and you're stoned."

"I'm not stoned. I’m high."

"Enough with the clever wordplay. You smoked. Don't deny it."

"I smoked. I won't deny it. But there is a difference between being high and being stoned, you know."

"I couldn’t care less. I just want to know why you smoked when we were supposed to be together today and you know how I hate you when you’re stoned?"

“I’m not stoned.”

“Whatever.” He could hear the level of frustration rising in her voice. “Why did you smoke?”

He took a deep breath and tried to come across as logical and rational sounding as possible. "You said you had things to do till three and we'd be together then. I knew I'd be back down by the time you got back home."

"Is that it? Anytime Rochelle walks out of the house you grab a puff because you can't do it when she's around?" David sighed as Shelly shifted into overdrive.

"You're stoned everyday aren't you? Every morning when I leave for work you smoke and stay high all day, don't you? I can tell when we talk on the phone. Well I've had it. You say you planned on being separate from me till three. Well, fine. I'm making myself something to eat and I'll eat alone.”

She stomped out of the room, pausing in the doorway to hurl the final missile. "You're going to have to choose between me or pot. I'm tired of being married to an unemployed addict. Either stop smoking and get a job or move out." The sound of her voice stayed in the room long after she left.

Dammit. He hadn't wanted this. All he had wanted to do was keep working on the book. He didn't get into these writing moods all that often and he felt like taking advantage of it while he had the chance. Well, it looked like he would have the chance.

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