There are times I feel awed by courageous acts of compassion.
This is one of those times. Blogging friend
Chris Lemig’s book
The Narrow Way comes out next
month and I’m honoured to be able to say a few words about it.
As the subtitle suggests, The Narrow Way is about Chris’s coming to terms with realizing he
is gay in a time and place where homophobia was the norm. His gut-wrenching
descriptions of the fear and self-loathing he experienced and his nightmarish
descent into substance abuse and suicidal thoughts are riveting, and surely
took great courage to write. How he managed to climb out of such a pit of
torment and make his way as a new Buddhist to India and Tibet is a gripping and
inspiring story.
Although I’ve kept my own words to a minimum, I hope these
passages will whet your appetite for a wonderful book that I had great
difficulty putting down.
From time to time, Chris quotes from his journal. Here is a passage verging on despair.
I
worry that everyone who sees me knows I’m spun.
My
face turns red and my hands turn cold and purple.
My
teeth are falling out and my breath smells a little like death.
It
makes me crazy.
I
don’t take care of my dog.
It
controls me. Sometimes I do it only hours after saying I wouldn't.
I
don’t even like it anymore.
It
defines me and that’s scary.
His drug use fails to produce the much-needed refuge.
I
take a hit and inhale into oblivion, letting my eyes roll back until I forget
who I am, who I was, who I might be. I hide, deny, evade and make another
attempt at this futile escape. But there is no escape. Even though I have
changed my name and moved once a year for the past eighteen years, even though
I have changed my story and lied through my teeth, the truth has found me out
every time. It tears through my body and mind like a chainsaw, unrelenting and
agonizing.
And doesn't make his struggle coming out of the closet any
easier.
I couldn't even see that it wasn't desire at all but the essence of the real me,
the gay me, just trying to get out. So I took the drugs wildly, hoping they
would help me to sound out that name with dry throat and tongue. I would snort
whole grams of speed in one great inhale, stay awake and stuttering for days,
make my way to the gay clubs and porno stores when I thought I had finally
broken through. But even then I could only stand there on the shore of that sea
of men and sex while the throbbing music and the desperate moans crashed over
me like waves. Sometimes I would hold those men in the middle of the night,
there in the dark little booths where I could get down on my knees and with
open arms and mouth finally confess. But mostly I would just bite my lip till
it bled and run for the door. Three years I did this. Nine hundred blinding
sunrises in a row. Then the bottom came up too fast and seeing the imminent future
of me, shattered and broken there on the hard, concrete earth, I called home.
And once out, it was far from a cakewalk.
I've been out of the closet for only a month when I find myself pinned down in the
back seat of the car. We have just come from the funeral of a friend who died
from crack cocaine. Her sister and her son, two people I once called friends,
are beating me half to death. We are drunk and angry and I have just said
something stupid.
“She
had it coming to her,” I heard myself slurring under my breath.
Now
I take what’s been coming to me for years and I will never again feel this
afraid, this alone, this powerless. Flailing fists smash my face, sending
electric shocks of violence to my brain. Fingernails tear at my eyes and I
think: “She’s going to scratch my eyes out. She wants me to go blind.” “Faggot,
faggot, you fucking faggot!” they scream. Or are they saying, “Fly caged bird,
fly”?
I
think I will go deaf from the screams that are filled with hate and loud enough
to shatter a stone heart. But my heart is not stone; it is flesh and muscle
beating two hundred times a minute as I start fighting for my life…
I was completely drawn into the book by Chris’s imagery –
whether the sights and smells of a drug hit gone wrong …
It
is three years before India and I am not going anywhere. Instead, it is four in
the morning and my eyes are wild and bloodshot as I pick through the carpet,
searching for tiny pieces of crack cocaine that may have sizzled off the end of
my pipe. My roommate sits on the bare floor of her room cooking up a fresh batch
on a tarnished, blackened teaspoon but I can’t wait to get another hit. I try
to smoke what turns out to be the clipping of a dirty toenail, and it fills my
mouth with the taste of burnt skin and rubber.
The temptation to use again, always just around the corner …
Four
days later without a drink or a cigarette and the cravings come in powerful
waves that threaten to bowl me over. “Just one drag, just one drink and it will
all go away,” say the voices of old demons still squatting in a back room in my
mind. “Stay quit, stay quit, stay quit,” says another voice, a voice that I am
just learning to trust, a voice that I’m beginning to recognize as my own.
I
chant the mantra to myself when the bargaining and the drafting of new promises
begin and the demons withdraw. Stay quit, stay quit, stay quit.
Or the sights and sounds and strangeness of India.
The
bus that will take me there from Delhi is an hour late. Plenty of time to
stare, dumfounded and open-mouthed, into the face of India as I wait by the
side of the road. I am clutching a sweaty bus ticket while she stares back at
me, unblinking and unashamed, with a hundred thousand expressions to fit a hundred
thousand moods. She is the young leper girl without a nose in bright blue sari
begging for rupees while she dances and twirls to tabla beats. She is the
prostitute leading the young man into the abandoned, graffiti covered shack
across the street. She is the cars, auto-rickshaws and motorcycles screaming
endlessly by. She is the three-legged dog covered in mange darting through the
traffic.
This
is not the face of India that I had expected or imagined.
Panic and despair as a long and carefully planned attendance
at a talk by the Dalai Lama seems to unravel.
Back
down Bagshu Road I run, following the black lines of the map that is burned in
my mind, all the way to the building marked Security Office. I am on the tips
of my toes, humming a little victory tune as I walk through the door. I have
made it! Ten thousand miles on this long, hard road. There is no stopping me now!
But
then, without any warning, I am stopped, suddenly and surely and dead in my
tracks. A giant chalkboard hangs at the far end of the hall and I narrow my
eyes in the dark to read and reread the tall letters that spell out in clear
and perfect English: THERE ARE NO MORE PASSES FOR HIS HOLINESS’ TEACHINGS.
“There
must be some mistake,” I say out loud. I close my eyes, imagine the website
that I thought I had checked and double-checked. Passes are only issued on the
first day of the teachings, it said.
There
is obviously some translation problem at work here, so I scurry from door to
door peering into the tiny rooms looking for answers. But no one is home. Then
I hear a stirring towards the back. In the very last office sits the only stern
Tibetan I have ever seen. He gets up from a rickety wooden chair and looks me
up and down. I have lost the ability speak so I wave and sign in unintelligible
gesticulations. I try to tell him that I want a pass for the teachings; that I
have just gotten off the seventeen-hour bus ride from New Delhi and the
fifteen-hour flight from America. I pantomime the past year of preparations and
planning and hard work. I explain in sweeping, arcing gestures all the magic
and synchronicity that has led me here, to this very place, at this very moment.
He
is unmoved.
“Didn’t
you read the sign?” is all he says. “Yes,” I manage in a whisper.
In the face of extreme suffering.
I
let my backpack slide off of my shoulders and I sit cross-legged on the cold
platform next to a pile of filthy rags. But it is not rags at all. Suddenly, it
begins to stir and unfold. I leap up, ready to run down the tracks in fear as a
human form uncurls itself from underneath a torn t-shirt smeared with dirt and
grime. It is a young man, no more than twenty, already broken beyond repair. He
is all bones now, sharp at the joints that threaten to tear through the
wrinkled brown paper sack that used to be his skin. His wispy beard and wild,
black hair are a nest for lice and leaves and bits of trash that have come to
rest there.
He
struggles to move and each bending of each brittle limb is a creaking agony. I
think he might be dying right then and there before my eyes.
…
I
am no more than ten feet away. I could take two decisive steps and help him to
his feet, take him to God-Knows-Who, to someone, to anyone for help. But I
don’t. All the meditations on compassion, the wish to free others from their
suffering and pain, are sucked out of me like air into the vacuum of space.
Instead, I stare, jaw dropped open, like a dumb, mute statue of stone. It takes
long, slow minutes for him to rise to his feet and when he does I think the
cool breeze coming from the north will blow his hollow bones and paper skin
down the tracks. As the apparition staggers off and disappears around the corner,
I wrap the memory of him neatly into an unlabeled box and hide it away on a
lonely back shelf in my mind. By the time my train comes four hours later,
chugging and steaming around the tracks, I will have already forgotten him.
A simple act of kindness.
This
descendent of the Bodhi Tree stretches her long, dangling limbs over me, just
like her forbearer did over the Buddha two and a half thousand years ago. Her
leaves shimmer and twist and dance in the warm breeze. Sometimes a score or more
of them break loose from her branches and spiral down to the earth. Pilgrims
swarm, giddily snatching them up before I can even think about rising. A young
Tibetan monk, ten years old, picks one up that has landed right in front of my
feet. He has an armful of them already and he cradles them to his chest like precious
jewels. He is about to return to the stream but when he sees me looking on
longingly, he turns and with a happy smile and bright eyes drops every last one
of them into my lap.
At last.
His
Holiness is still smiling and offering his blessings to the crowd as the car
pulls away. Our eyes meet for a split second. It is not the perfunctory eye
contact of politicians and celebrities but a genuine reaching out. For that
brief moment I know he is looking just at me, taking the time to really see me.
He smiles, then I smile back. I melt and dissolve right there before his eyes until
I am completely content and for the first time in my life I am certain that I
have come the right way.
Friendship and a call to action.
Monks
and nuns and pilgrims encircle us as we say our goodbyes. Finally, I let go of
Sonu’s hand and begin to walk away. I turn to wave one last time but he has
already disappeared. I have missed the point entirely. Yes, it is good to meditate,
to prostrate, to pray. But what good is this if it doesn’t help those in need?
A deep bow of gratitude, Chris. You made me laugh and cry.
Thank you for your kindness and courage to tell your story. I hope that many
who find themselves overwhelmed by despair, standing where you have been, will
know that they are not alone and that there is a way out, even though at times
it seems very narrow indeed.
Let me close with your quote of Joseph Campbell:
Where
we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own
existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
