The Last Laugh Page 7

  “Okay,” said Joey. “So like I told you last night, there are many old habits that must be seen and must drop away for things to be complete. It’s all old habits. If you want a blue sky, you simply need a strong wind to blow away the clouds. Now, when you got home last night, what did you want from your friend?”

  “I didn’t want anything,” I replied. “I just wanted to share with him the joy I was feeling.”

  “If you didn’t want anything from him,” replied Joey, “then why the hurt and disappointment?”

  I hadn’t considered this. “I suppose I wanted him to feel good, too.”

  “And what would that give you, if he felt good, too?” asked Joey.

  I had to pause to consider. “It would allow me to feel close to him.”

  “And if you felt close to him,” asked Joey, “what would that give you?” This sounded redundant.

  “I’d feel more relaxed and comfortable with him.”

  “And what is in the way of feeling relaxed and comfortable with him, just as it is?”

  “Well, he’s given me a place to stay for quite a while now, and I feel kind of indebted to him. I feel like he disapproves of my coming here.”

  “That’s right, so you want his approval, right?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “And, aside from what happened last night, does your friend Paul like you or dislike you?”

  “Of course he likes me. We’re best friends.”

  “Does he basically approve or disapprove of you?”

  “We’re buddies.”

  “So would you rather run around in circles to try to get his approval or just recognize the approval that is already there?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Can you want approval and feel approval at the same time?”

  I had never considered this. I felt something drop inside me, like a stone into a deep well.

  “Could you let go of wanting approval and just have what is already here?”

  “Yes,” I said, back in last night’s mode, where I was more listening to my responses than speaking.

  “Very good. And is it all right for Paul to not understand what occurred for you here?”

  Each time, I had to check and feel to be able to answer him, as if I were a patient describing my symptoms to a doctor.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Is it okay for him to not like what occurred for you here?”

  “Well …”

  “Is it okay for him to have no interest in what occurred for you here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then what remains?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “Very good. What problem is there now?”

  “I love my children.”

  “Is that a problem?” He raised one eyebrow, keeping the other unmoving. I made a mental note to see if I could do the same thing, alone with a mirror. If I could, the kids would love it.

  “When I talk to my wife and kids, I still feel the agony of the separation from them.”

  “Does your wife love you?” asked Joey.

  The question stopped me in my tracks. The events of the previous months had been so contentious and difficult that my immediate answer wanted to be “No.” But as I started to mouth that single syllable it felt like a lie. “My wife, Rebecca, does love me,” I had to admit.

  “Good. And how about your children?”

  “Yes, my children love me, too.”

  “Good.”

  Joey put both his hands behind his back. “In my left hand,” he smiled, “there is peace. There is a peace that doesn’t care what happens in the external world. There’s a peace that comes from who you are, not what’s happening to you. And in my right hand,” he continued, “there’s looking for love. There is a lack of love. There is the constant fear of rejection and abandonment.” He brought both his fists out and placed them before me side by side. “Which hand do you choose?”

  I said nothing, which he took as an answer anyway.

  “Can you have both at the same time?”

  I had never looked at things like this before. “No,” I had to admit. I was getting back to the same brainless state of the night before. I was answering these questions spontaneously and only afterward trying to figure out what I had said.

  “Could you let go of this?” he said, holding up his right hand, “to have this?” holding up his left hand.

  Silence. My mind’s admission of defeat.

  He paused, and then dropped both his hands. “What problem remains?”

  “Right now, none. But I miss my children.”

  “Good,” said Joey. “Do your children love you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you love your children?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “Would you rather miss your children? Or enjoy love?”

  “But today they sounded so distant, so cold. My daughter was more interested in her new television than in talking to me.”

  “Which comes first?” asked Joey. “A feeling of missing? Or the external reality of estrangement? Before you phoned them, what were you feeling?”

  “I was missing them.”

  “Exactly,” said Joey. “You phoned them in a state of lack. Now once again … if you could choose in this moment between being the love or missing the love, which would you choose?”

  “Love,” I admitted reluctantly, looking at the ground.

  “And how about now?”

  “I choose love.” I tried on Californian-style enthusiasm for size and was surprised to find it felt quite acceptable.

  “And now?”

  “I choose love.” The more I said these words, the more they became a sensation in my chest. I wanted to burst into song, and I half-expected that the room would join me in a chorus if I did, perhaps even tap dancing.

  “Keep choosing love over missing and then tell me what happens.” He smiled and closed his eyes for what seemed like the longest time. When he opened them again, he said: “Don’t worry, you can relax. The blessings of thousands of angels are hovering over you. All will be well.”

  With that, he turned and looked at Sam, smiled again, and closed his eyes. The room was quiet. A few minutes later, the young man, Sundance, asked Joey some questions about his studies, to which Joey replied with the utmost compassion and interest. Carlos, meanwhile, was sitting upright as a statue staring fixedly into Joey’s eyes, in a state of rapture.

  When all questions and comments had been exhausted, Joey asked June if she would play for us. She disappeared for a moment and came back with a small harp. We sat together, listening to the melody. Joey’s eyes closed, and not a single muscle moved anywhere. There was no time remaining.

  When all was said and done, Joey once again pushed down hard on the arms of his chair, brought himself to an upright position, muttered “KYSH. KYSH,” and left the room.

  This time I made a beeline for Sam, determined not to let her get away. I felt light again. “Thank you so much for tipping me off about all this,” I began.

  She looked at me with those same penetrating blue eyes I remembered from the café that first night. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you came,” she said.

  I was struggling for something more to say when Alan poked his head back through the door. He had obviously followed Joey out of the room without my noticing.

  “Matt,” he said, “Joey would like to see you.”

  I rose to my feet, disappointed to be separated from Sam so quickly. My disappointment didn’t last for long.

  “And Sam,” continued Alan, “you too.”

  CHAPTER 7

  JOEY’S STORY

  When Sam and I entered the same little room where I had spoken with Joey the night before, he was nowhere to be seen. We heard some sounds from another doorway, and after a few minutes he emerged with a silver tray bearing three cups and a small plate of Turkish delight.

  “Do you like chai?” he asked. “Indian spiced tea, you know
.”

  “Great!” I replied. “Thank you.”

  Joey asked me about my job at the radio station, which guests I’d had on the show, where my house had been. He seemed to know plenty about everything. When I told him that the bank had foreclosed on my loan, he even knew a surprising amount about real estate, down to the minute details of the legalities involved.

  “And where are you staying now?” he asked. “Where is this garret with the mysterious Paul?”

  I explained that it was on the other side of town.

  “That’s quite a ways from here,” said Joey. “How do you get home?”

  “I take the bus,” I replied, my face flushing. Until recently, I’d never been without my own car.

  “What time does the last bus leave?”

  “Twelve-ten,” I replied. Joey looked at his watch.

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s plenty of time.” He settled himself into his armchair. Throughout this interchange, Sam was quiet, making slow and studious work of her Turkish delight. A silence fell over the room.

  “You’re a very good boy,” said Joey finally, looking at me affectionately. “I’ve waited a long time to find someone like you.” He paused. “And especially I like it that you have a family. Being a parent keeps your feet on the earth, you know.” He glanced over at some framed photographs on a little table. Sure enough, one of them showed a previous version of Joey embracing one teenage boy under each arm. “They’re grown now,” he said. “But they sure kept me busy for a while.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But that seems to be my challenge. If I hadn’t created such a complicated life, I think it would be easier just to stay in what you’re pointing me to.”

  Joey shook his head slowly. “No, that’s not the way,” he said. “That’s not the way. You’re here in a body to lead a human life. You don’t graduate from college by dropping out.”

  I wanted to know more about this mysterious man who seemed to have mastered the art of being human. I looked back over to the table at the photographs. There again was the autographed photo of JFK, grinning next to a younger Joey. A larger frame held multiple photographs, peering out through little ovals in the mat mountings. Some were faces I recognized, many I did not. In the middle of the table, crowning this hall of fame, was the most benign face of all.

  An ageless face, probably Indian, was radiating unspeakable peace. Wearing only a piece of cloth covering his pelvis, the man sat cross-legged on a rock. I was lost, gazing into those eyes. He looked very familiar.

  “I was twenty-five when I met him,” said Joey, following my gaze. “It was after the War, 1948. I was an engineer in the Merchant Marines, working on a ship running between America and Asia. We used to load up in Philadelphia or New York with machine parts, Ford motor cars, you name it. We’d unload in Bombay or Mangalore and then load up with stuff to bring home.”

  “How did you end up on a ship?” I asked him.

  Joey chuckled at my curiosity. “I guess you want the whole story. I was born in Chicago, 1923. My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholic immigrants. I was the second to the youngest of seven children. My father was a good man.” Joey stopped and looked at the floor, then sipped his tea. “Probably the best man you’d ever meet. When the Depression came in ’32, he lost his job at the car factory. We were dirt poor; there wasn’t any such thing as welfare and all that then. We had no family in the States; they were all back in Ireland,” he chuckled, “probably more dirt poor than we were. My dad tried to get all kinds of different jobs. Finally in ’33 he landed a job in another factory. He was so desperate trying to get the family back on track that he was working all the overtime he could get, fourteen, sixteen-hour days. Nobody minded about that back in those days. He was running a big sheet metal press when he fell asleep on the job. That was the end of him.

  “That left the seven of us kids alone with our mother, and we certainly didn’t have the money to go back to Ireland. Everybody pitched in and started working. When I was sixteen they sent me to school to study technical engineering. I think the family had me pegged as the best hope to be a breadwinner. After I finished, I went straight into the Navy, 1941, and worked on an aircraft carrier. Two of my brothers were already fighting. Only one of them made it home. When the war ended, I just hopped straight from the Navy to the Merchant Marines. It was the best I could do for the family, because all my expenses were paid, and I could send every cent that I made back home to my mother, my sisters, and my little brother.

  “Anyway,” Joey continued, “in 1948 we docked in Mangalore, that’s on the west coast of India. We unloaded all the heavy machinery we had on board: cars, two printing presses, lots of stuff. We were scheduled to load up the hold with manganese ore they mined in Karnataka. But India was very disorganized in those days. The poor buggers were trying to recover from more than a hundred years of British tyranny, and they didn’t have the cargo ready for us. We had ten days to wait.

  “One thing I didn’t mention to you was that when I was a boy in Chicago, I used to have a lot of strange visions. They thought I was a little cracked, I think. I always excelled at math because this little fella with a white beard and kind eyes would pop up in my mind and tell me all the answers. He used to come to me at night in dreams and tell me that he’d been waiting for me forever. I liked that line; I use it myself. More tea, Sam?”

  She looked startled, then smiled and shook her head.

  “So there I was in Mangalore in 1948 with nothing to do for ten days. The first afternoon, I walked into a bookstore and saw this guy’s photograph.” Joey nodded at the picture on his table. “It was the same face I’d been dreaming of all those years. I asked the clerk in the bookstore who it was. And he told me, ‘Well that’s the Guruji,’ and as he said it, his eyes sort of glassed over in reverence.”

  “Guruji?” I asked.

  “They’re all called Guruji there, just means teacher. More accurately, very much loved, First-Class, Grade-A teacher. That’s ’cause of the ji bit, see. It’s an upgrade. I asked where he lived, and the shopkeeper gave me elaborate directions to some mountain, a good day’s train ride away, over near the other coast. I knew I had to meet the guy, so I went straight to the train station, booked myself a ticket, and was on my way. I stopped off in a hotel a few miles from the place that night, and the next day I hired a taxi to take me to the mountain.”

  Joey turned to Sam. “It wasn’t what you’d call a taxi here. Just a cart and driver pulled by a bullock. Took all day to get there. Finally, the driver dropped me off in front of a group of buildings at the base of a mountain. I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there. Very colorful, it was, the women all wrapped up in those sari outfits. Bullock carts and donkeys everywhere. It was a beautiful town, too. The biggest temples you’ve ever seen in your life, with towers reaching right up into the sky. Dogs and pigs and cows everywhere you cared to look. Not like Chicago,” he chuckled.

  “I walked into the compound and asked if I could meet a Mister Guruji there. Luckily, the guy who greeted me spoke English, gave me a room, very plain and simple. Concrete floor, brick walls, plain wooden bed with a thin coconut mattress on top of it. But I was happy. For some reason this felt like home. After I got washed up and all, he led me into a little hall where a bunch of people were sitting, mostly Indians, with one or two Westerners, too. Then I saw my man. Turns out his real name was Ramana. He was half-reclining on a couch. A couple of other guys, very scantily dressed, were fanning him with big leaves. I sat on the floor along with the others.”

  Joey paused, as if listening to something deep inside, his face softening.

  “He turned and looked at me with the quietest, kindest eyes I’d ever seen, or that I’ve ever seen since. Didn’t say a damn word, just went on looking and looking, and the longer he looked, the quieter I got. I hadn’t the faintest idea why I was there or what was happening. I just knew that each minute that passed, I was falling into a deeper peace. Finally he spoke to me, in Engl
ish, and said just the same words that I’d heard in my vision. He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you forever.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew it was true. And I knew I’d been waiting for him, too.

  “I stayed there for eight days,” Joey said softly. “I never really knew what to say to him, so I’d just show up every minute I was allowed in that hall and sit quietly on the floor. He used to look in my eyes a good deal, and I’d look back into his, and neither of us said a word. Then came the last day before I had to take the bullock cart and the train back to the ship. This whole time the others were talking to him in a language I didn’t understand. Every now and then a Westerner would chirp in, but even in English, I couldn’t understand too much. Finally, I plucked up the courage to say something. I said to him, ‘I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you.’ He just looked at me for the longest time, and by the time he did speak, he didn’t need to, because what he said, I already knew. He said, ‘You cannot leave me and I cannot leave you.’ Then he asked me, ‘Can you find the one who leaves?’ And I looked. I tried to find Joey Murphy, but there was nothing there. All I could find was that same quietness that was looking at me.”

  Joey turned to me. “Just like you did last night, Matt.” I nodded.

  “When it was finally time to leave, I didn’t mind at all. I said goodbye, but even that seemed like a lie. He just smiled at me, like he knew and I knew no one was going anywhere. All the way back in the bullock cart, all I could feel was the stillness and the kindness in his eyes. When I got back on the train, all the noise and dust and commotion of India was resting in the kindness that I felt in his eyes. And when I got back to the ship, the body of Joey Murphy went through all its normal functions and duties, but I didn’t feel involved in any of it. I just stayed embraced in that kindness and that stillness.

  “We set off from Mangalore, I kept up with my duties, but it all felt like a silent movie, like nothing was happening. On the way back across the ocean, a wire came for me. Mama had died. Pneumonia, poor dear. I felt the grief in my chest, but even that grief, to lose the sweetest, gentlest mother anyone’s ever known, was welling up within that kindness and that peace, and I felt his eyes still caressing me. They gave me some leave when I got back to New York so I could go to my family and help put things in order. Everyone was all churned up, and I was too, but that kindness and peace just kept on growing and multiplying, and it overflowed onto my sisters and my brother, Pat. With mother gone and my siblings older, I didn’t have to come up with so much money. I asked the trading company if they’d give me three months’ leave the following spring in India. They thought I was crazy. I had to do several more trips back and forth to Asia, biding time to be back with my Beloved, with those deep eyes.”