“A Passage to India”

Allen Pearl was the founding editor and publisher of Pearl Files, an exclusive e-newsletter distributed to several thousand media insiders, Golden Circle and average alike. Pearl Files chief correspondent Allen Pearl covered topics such as general literary gossip, literary gossip pertaining to author Colson Whitehead, literary readings, book deals Pearl happened to read about in the New York Times, book parties he wasn’t invited to but did hear about firsthand, and the matter of Jonathan Lethem. Pearl also wrote reams about his love life, such as it then was. Begun in 1999, Pearl Files was derailed, briefly, by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, only to return, undaunted and with renewed focus, with Pearl Files volume 3, issue 19, which many readers, Golden Circle and average alike, still consider the pinnacle of Pearl Files, though Pearl Files archivist Allen Pearl begs to differ, but whatever. In summer 2002, Pearl Files and its parent company, Pearl Files Media LLC, came under fire from Dave Eggers, Jonathan Ames, and Lethem, among other luminaries. Lethem demanded from Pearl Files subscription manager Allen Pearl a list of all 49,000 subscribers, Golden Circle and average alike. Ames called Pearl Files executive editor Allen Pearl a “moral monster,” right to the man’s face. As for Eggers, he was not pleased with Pearl, not at all. Well, Pearl took a break. He tried a few times to pull together a new issue, but he never could swing it. The magic, as Pearl Files contributing editor Allen Pearl liked to say, was no more. The truth was, Pearl was weary of the bitching. Some people, it seemed, liked what he did, thinking it funny, funnier even than the television. And some did not. But isn’t that always the way? Well, anyhow, fast-forward to 2009. Allen Pearl lives with his mother in Seattle. He is soon to embark on a ten-year retreat, during which he will learn, among other things, to warm himself with the inner fire, to fly, and to transfer his consciousness into the body of another man. He is just ending a relationship with an aging chef whom he met at the local Shambala center, and he is at work on the unauthorized biography of a major living American novelist. Readers, subscribers, friends, as you know, it was once Allen Pearl’s way to speak about himself. Seven years ago, Allen Pearl was—I was—living in a one-bedroom apartment on the south end of Park Slope. I was a block from the cemetery, and yet I never went there or thought of my impending death. Rather I spent my nights venturing out in capes, ties, crepe de chine. By day, I wallowed in regret and reflected over a man. Subscribers, readers—whatever—I called him MR. NEW YEAR’S, and when I met him at the tender age of 24, he was obese and spoke with a thick impediment about which it proved difficult to be charitable. Anyway, one night, he followed me around a bar. I told him: No, thank you. I told him: I prefer men who can form sentences. I spoke these words slowly, and loudly, for maximum cruelty. A year later, I passed before a gay club and someone called my name. I turned to see Mr. New Year’s, and I didn’t even acknowledge him. I walked on. I worry I might be boring you, but look, years passed, OK? Mr. New Year’s lost weight, and he began to dress in complicated outfits—suits and shoes, the works. He hadn’t shed his impediment, bless him, or developed what one might call intelligence, and yet, suited and mod, he stole my heart and then he trod upon it. I spent 100 nights drunkenly spilling bowls of turkey soup on my laptop, utterly destroying whole issues of the Pearl Files, my highly regarded albeit infrequently published e-newsletter, a compendium of tips, gossip, and inside information sent out exclusively to insiders. One night I lit my apartment on fire with a pot of forgotten macaroni. I woke up on street corners with citations in my pockets for unremembered offenses, crimes, if you can call them that, such as public drinking, public intoxication, leaping from a cab, urinating on an officer of the law, exposing myself to a waitress. Vanities! Dust! And yet there was an undeniable splendor to it all. Readers, seven years have passed since I have delivered you hard-hitting news and insider information, maybe more—for who among us is arrogant enough to count?—and today Allen Pearl writes you from North India. I know what you are asking. “Why, Pearl? Why the silence?” You will be heartened to know that, while your frantic emails to me went unanswered, I did skim some of them—including three, then four, then (I do not exaggerate) 600 from a certain subscriber who has just sold his series of entertaining and ribald memoirs to HBO. (Hello, Mr. Jonathan Ames, sir! Pearl is looking forward to seeing the actor who plays you show his penis on the TV. Should be almost as cool as seeing yours. I digress, though!) Readers! I will answer your questions at some point, but first, allow me to set the scene. I am writing to you from a house in the foothills of the Himalayas. The house, formerly the home of my guru, is now a longer-term housing option for students of a certain advanced age. It is probably difficult for you to picture me here. I imagine you hear “India” and your mind fills with dusty streets, traffic, exhaust fumes, crowds, a dalit picking up rice grains from the parched earth. In fact, to envision my surrounds, you might call to mind New Hampshire, or the Rocky Mountains. Picture precipitous cliffs, winding dirt roads, and pine trees. The landscape here, groomed for tea farming, has one peculiar aspect: Its hillsides are graded into shelves of horizontal plots, each shelf of flat land perhaps 30 feet by 30 feet, then a drop of four feet, and another shelf of flat land. Can you see that, subscriber? Picture creeks running blue and a bunch of boulders ranging in size from two to 20 feet in diameter. The stones come in many peculiar colors—pale blue, mineral pink, sandy yellow, alabaster white. On the roadsides, families of monkeys sit hunched over, regarding cars with bitchy indifference. The village where I reside is small. It is a settlement of Tibetan refugees. That means, subscriber, that it is inhabited not by Indians, but by people who have fled the Communist regime in Tibet—orphans, old men who walked over the mountains on foot, etc. So the village is very small, then, tiny really, and the houses are constructed roughly, but Pearl’s house, his resting place for now, is actually beautiful, by any standard. It is two stories tall, white, and sits high atop a hill just below the cremation grounds. The home is surrounded on three sides by a white wall. Within the walls, a garden. Through the garden, a path. In short, Pearl likes it here, he does. Where once it would have been his way to detail some sort of petty romantic entanglement, he is today a different man. Truly. Perhaps you note a certain remarkable calmness in his prose. Here is a bit of backstory now, for those of you readers who are into that sort of thing. In the weeks preceding the advent of my silence, I became involved with a man-whore. I will not give you his name. I won’t do him that slim honor. Suffice it to say that my man-whore was ambitious, and he was not a fan of the Files. On one of our early dates, I showed him an issue-in-the-works and then waited to receive his praise. He read several lines and then stopped. “This is so depressing!” he said. I turned to short fiction, and weeks later, he reviewed my short stories. “You are dismissive of characters who are not yourself!” he said. I didn’t respond. What could I say, really? But my man-whore thought I was confused, that I needed help understanding him. “I can show you what I mean,” he said, “if you want.” Finally, he reviewed my novel: “You haven’t written it yet!” The voice of the man-whore took on an authority for Allen, and Allen—I—never one to feel constricted, found myself afflicted with writer’s block. When I put a word onto the page, I immediately thought, “Have I earned the reader’s interest?” and “Who are my characters? What is my story?” and then “Will my man-whore approve?” I became a silent reader. I read two and three and four times my man-whore’s meticulously crafted fiction. But sadly, readers, inexplicably, this new voice haunted my reading of his work, and I found myself asking questions. “Was this detail really piquant? Was it even relevant? Wasn’t all this just kind of a hazy and confused, pathetic and ill-thought quest for love?” My words cut my man-whore to the quick. He lost sleep. He began pacing. He beat me. Once, he hopped out of bed naked and declared, “I just want to be worshipped!” Another time he hopped out of bed similarly attired and announced, “I’ve never had a kind thought about anybody!” Not long after, he hopped out of bed a third time and, still naked, said, “Murdering my mother doesn’t seem like a half-bad idea just now!” And then he was gone. He left only a note, “Allen, I’m seeking… the truth, or myself, or… something.” (Ellipses in original, trust me.) The year was 2002. It was late fall. Winds blew. There were piles of dead leaves and trash-can fires. Bums got frostbite, disappeared, and then turned up days later with no feet. There were days and then there were nights, and then days and nights, some days, some nights, day, night, etc. Don’t make me spell it out, people. You’re sensitive too. You know how it goes.

I learned of the fate of my man-whore from MY NEIGHBOR, an invalid whom I kept in cereal and preread issues of Us Weekly. My neighbor was a person, in retrospect, whom I probably could have loved, but no matter. That night, the night I learned my man-whore had become a follower of the guru known also as ANDREW COHEN, I, Allen Pearl—that’s I!—threw my velvet coats into the street and lit a fire. All of my velvet coats. “Who is Andrew Cohen?” you are asking. Thank you for asking. In the 70s, or maybe it was the 80s, Andrew Cohen went to India for a couple of weeks and came back enlightened. He got all these followers, normal and intelligent middle-class Americans, thinking that they too, in a couple of weeks, could be enlightened like him. He told them not to worry about work. When his followers became unenlightened itinerant people, Cohen grew angry and frustrated, and he began to experiment, willy-nilly, drawing from whatever religious tradition happened to cross his desk. Some followers became stable. Some fucked each other silly. Some did a bunch of regression therapy and moved to Australia. He turned his students against each other. He drew them in and then he kicked them out. He took their money, he sued them, he infantalized them, and so on. Bad apple, Cohen. Pearl no like. It was, when Pearl found this shit out, like 3 a.m., if that, and this was in Maine of all places, where 3 a.m. is the new 6:30, if that makes any sense. Anyway, Pearl heard a voice—a feeble, halting voice, one that hadn’t spoken in decades. Pearl wasn’t sure but he thought it might be his own inner voice, because it said, “Burn your coats, Allen.” Pearl, who adored his coats, was a bit taken aback. So he asked this voice, “Um, which ones, specifically?” The voice answered right back, “Burn all your coats, Allen.” (Emphasis the voice’s.) Well, after a little more back and forth, it became clear that my inner voice, if that is indeed what I was conversing with, would not waver or equivocate that night. Velvet, let me tell you, sister, does not burn easily. And when it does burn, it stinks like you can’t believe. I think I smell it sometimes still. Anyway, in the morning, after retrieving one of the coats—an old favorite, lightly singed, purchased at a Salvation Army in Columbus (Ohio)—Pearl went to the house of the MAN-WHORE’S GURU. Pearl will be honest here, and forthright: I had evil designs in my mind as well as some of the most ornate imprecations I have ever invented. I fully intended to throttle this man or at least tear out clumps of his hair with my teeth. And yet, seeing him, Pearl felt not anger, but a certain sadness. It was as though, looking into his sparkling eyes, I saw sanity, and in seeing sanity—simplicity, kindness—laid out before me was my own complication, my own foolishness, and my own loss. I wept for many hours. “Allen,” Andrew said. “Let’s break the sound barrier here. What’s brought you to me today?” I told him it was funny, really. I said, “Mr. Cohen, I came here today to find my lover, and maybe to insult you.” I looked up at him and smiled. The man had undeniable charisma, even charm. And he seemed sort of nice in a way, like a geography teacher or the guy who fixes the computers and can make them run faster. I was, naturally, upon my knees. Mr. Cohen nodded encouragingly. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I thought maybe I’d call you a charlatan, and a fake.” Mr. Cohen’s face darkened. “Because I didn’t know you, I mean. I didn’t know… Oh, Mr. Cohen.” At this, I began to cry again. Forty-three minutes later, once my tears had ceased, Mr. Cohen laid a hand upon my head. “Allen,” he said, “do you know how to meditate?” I guess I must have shrugged then, probably in the weakest of manners. “I can refer you to a place in India,” Mr. Cohen said. Which, give or take, is how I came to spend a drunken week at an Osho ashram in Goa. Namaste, bitches! You fucking eunuchs and half-wits! You mouth breathers and managing editors! Look at yourselves, with your parties to celebrate the launch of literary magazines and your short films to promote books. Your mass emails and Tuesday drinks. What are you about, man? What do you want? Tell me, please. In your glorious quest to be inoffensive, a big pal to everyone, just, you know, getting along with every celebrated dick in the room, have you not in fact become nearly nonexistent? Like a spot of lukewarm water puddling on a broad and empty table? Or are you perhaps a man who sometimes cries out? Who awakens hard with nobody beside you? And who then thinks, in so many blubbery, ill-chosen words, hard-on meet hand, hand hard-on? Tell me, do. But know that I do not care. I bid good-bye to all that. “I want,” as William Gass writes, “to rise so high… that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” Subscribers—my readers—Allen Pearl has had a spiritual awakening. Allen Pearl has found that he doesn’t care what you think. Allen Pearl has found that he awakens late in the morning, spends several hours puttering in the kitchen in his robe, does perhaps 100—but perhaps only five—prostrations, and then goes on a walk, down to town, where he finds he has little to do. He buys an orange, returns to the house, sits before his typewriter, and types out several lines. He looks at the hillside. He wonders what, ever, anyone should do. He sits quietly—meditates, if you will—and tries to ignore the seductive lights—the rainbows and geometric whirls—beckoning him, as though to spirit realms. Pearl knows what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Give me a fucking break, Allen.” First of all, don’t call me Allen. You don’t know me from shit in the bowl, do you understand me? Second of all, Pearl would like to feel you out, as a somewhat select (in terms of marketing) group of insiders. You see, Pearl’s having a real bugger of a time convincing MEGHAN, his representative at VINTAGE BOOKS, in New York City (hey, girl!) of reader interest in a semiautobiographical trilogy on the subject of his awakening. As I have tried explaining to Meghan, the trilogy is about my awakening but it is also about entertaining readers and telling them ribald tales, something I know my readers enjoy. Please cut and paste the following message into the body of an email and mail it to . Dear Meghan (if I may), Like the other 300,000 longtime readers and avid fans of Allen Pearl’s Pearl Files, I am aware that you are his representative at VINTAGE BOOKS. I have obtained your email address through a little bit of detective work in order to express my spontaneous outpouring of interest in reading his as-yet-unpublished semiautobiographical trilogy on the subject of his awakening. I understand the stories in the trilogy are both ribald and entertaining, which is a combination I’ve come to enjoy and treasure, being as how I’m a devoted follower of Allen Pearl’s Pearl Files. While I have long awaited the day when Allen Pearl’s beloved Files are available in book form, I have now focused ALL MY HOPES on this new prospect: a semiautobiographical, in-depth, no-holds-barred biography, somewhat in the style of that biography of Naipaul, except with A LOT more ribaldry. I am filling with anticipation now. I can tell you with no hesitation that I would not only buy several copies of the proposed trilogy in hardcover, I would also do everything in my considerable power to secure interviews with the author (Allen Pearl) in major magazines and TV outlets. Truly, [YOUR NAME GOES HERE] PS: Please do not publish Allen Pearl’s trilogy as a series of paperback originals. I mean, you can do them that way if you must, if you simply have no other choice, but I personally would prefer the books in hardcover form. Thanks, Meghan!

Once you have completed your homework, you may wish to hear the conclusion of my tale. Long story short, I quickly forgot the man-whore. My week at the Osho retreat center in Goa ended, and I found myself on the receiving end of a bill for 2,300 American dollars, most of it lost somewhere between the bar and the bar. Well, of course, I did what anybody in my place would, I fled into the night, and for several years, I wandered India with nothing to my name save a wooden staff, a plastic bowl, and a handful of ashes to cover my naked body. I will be narrating a fuller version of these events in my semiautobiographical trilogy, which remains, cruelly, as yet unpublished. Last night, while seated in Buddha Hall, Pearl received a dream about his future life, a vision, if you will. This vision—or dream—came in the form of an answer to a question that had been nagging at Pearl off and on for the past few days: What the fuck am I supposed to do next? In the dream, Pearl had taken a new lover and together they adopted a baby from an orphanage in Bucharest. The Romanian nurses, who looked like a couple of porn stars, explained that the baby was named after a moderately priced local dessert, but Pearl decided on sight to rename him Melvin. Pearl’s new lover was very kind. Beatings were quite rare and over quickly. (I kid, sorry. I am uncomfortable around true goodness. It scares me.) Pearl’s new lover was gentle and spoke softly, more softly than any man Pearl had known. What was odd, though, was that Pearl never saw his lover’s face. No matter how Pearl turned, his lover too would turn, so that his face remained always obscured. It was maddening, but, in time, it came to seem just part of the cosmic deal: You get a kind lover, but you cannot look upon his face. The Greek myths are full of such bargains. The Greeks really knew how to screw a hero over good. Well, anyway, Pearl’s new lover had a job in New York City that paid him in money, so raising dear Melvin fell to Pearl, who set Melvin on a blanket and then lay down beside him and spoke sweet nonsense into his ear. Where did the nonsense come from? It was like another language. It flowed from him in waves. Pearl pretended to be a radio that could tune in the sounds of a dozen different animals as well as, for some reason, a cartoon Frenchman who always inquired of Melvin, “N’est-ce pas? N’est-ce pas?” Once, when Pearl and his new lover had company over, Melvin spit up, a dramatic and quick projectile sort of spit-up, and everybody in the room just laughed and laughed. Everybody but Pearl. What was so funny? Pearl didn’t understand. Was it the suddenness of it? The inappropriateness? Pearl didn’t get the joke. He went to Melvin’s side, picked up a handy blanket, and dabbed at his mouth. He dabbed rather than wiped because he worried that wiping even a soft blanket across Melvin’s face would irritate his skin. Also, and this is, admittedly, weird, Pearl did not want Melvin to think for even a fraction of a second that he was being suffocated. You see, readers, Pearl also pictured himself as the baby, imagining what it would be like to view the world from a blanket spread out at the level of ankles. This exercise led Pearl to conclude that a blanket wiping a baby’s mouth could become a source of anxiety. Are you all right? Pearl whispered. Are you all right? He kept saying it. It didn’t matter that Melvin couldn’t answer. He said it for himself. On cloudless days, Pearl and Melvin went to carnivals, baby stores, all the places. Pearl wore Melvin strapped to his chest but held him with one hand cupping his back, so the boy didn’t bounce so. At the baby stores, father and son competed with the neighborhood mothers to claim the cutest outfits on the sale rack. Pearl fought those bitches tooth and claw. You should have seen these women, with their bladder-shaped handbags and their Filipino nannies in tow. The mothers would say, “Juicy, get me another shopping bag, pronto!” And the nannies would answer, “Bottle of milk?” No, shopping bag. Milk? On and on. Oh, readers, it was rich! What a time! Pearl woke from this vision coated in a light sweat. It had grown late. Had he been dreaming? Outside it was dark and still. No sounds to speak of. Pearl tried to get straight back to sleep, not because he was tired, but because he wanted to return to the world that contained his new lover and little Melvin. Pearl would have scratched his way through prison walls to get there. But sleep sought eluded him, as it usually does. Instead Pearl passed the dark morning hours in silence, awake, gazing at the marble floors, which seemed ever so slightly to shiver. Hyenas and jackals called out. Pearl stood, his knees cracked, he stretched and retired to his room. And for the first time in seven years, he opened his laptop and he began to type: “Dear Mom, I am stranded in India without any way to get home. I am living in rags…”