“It seems we lose the game before we start to play.”
Those words from Lauryn Hill’s song “Everything is Everything” always resonated with me.
“We never argue.” I told my boss when I was twenty-two. I was aiming to relate how perfect and idyllic my life with my parents was to him. I was living in Paris and not ever planning on moving back to the states.
He stared at me, wordless.
Right then, I knew something was up. I had said something wrong. And I was wondering how to backtrack.
Of course, he didn’t straight up reply that that policy was abuse. He finally said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about that.”
Looking back, I recognize that at that time:
a. I was not going back to this “perfection” and
b. I was keeping up my parents’ cover story.
Because of me, my father has two Facebook accounts. One that is blocked by certain people who have blocked me, and one that is open to them. On the non-blocked version, a woman I never met wrote a comment about how great my parents were. Yes, the golden couple – once they walked in the door, the entertainment began. The problem is that my belief that my mother actually loved my father (the only person I considered that she did love) ended when I realized she had sent all the previously published materials to the archives and the unpublished materials disappeared. It’s then that I knew that the dark triangle narcissist that was my mother had curated his life, as always, but the ultimate cut was this act.
The materials that Keith used to write the memoir of Richard Brautigan have disappeared. The notebooks, the correspondence, the unpublished works. Vanished.
It will never be possible to untangle my mother from my father’s life. They were together for fifty plus years. And everywhere I turn, she has inserted herself into his career. And then the end of her life brought to the forefront the smear campaigns, the fraudulent identities, the poison pen letters – the endless vitriol that she produced backstage and, when she could, she pushed assertions that could be swallowed into the limelight, disguised as victimization with nauseating results.
“Did you ever see him in a wheelchair?” I asked my aunt.
“No.”
Yet there is a mention of a wheelchair in his papers in connection with the lawsuit. The time when my father was suing Naropa.
“I felt that was your mother’s project.” I was told by a friend.
“He sounded confused when he talked about it,” another person told me.
Isolation, alienation. I had heard about these “problems” back around 2000. After I tried to help untangle whatever was going on from afar, my parents refused to talk to me about the matter anymore. After his death, I learned that my father had won the case and lost a community.
Most of what I have at home are Keith’s letters to me and the letters he sent to Michael Sowl. My father had three themes in his life, his growing up in the Northwest (as related in his books Harem Scarem and First Thing Coming), his years between 1965 – 1989 in which he was involved in the creative world of the Bay Area that included his friendship with Richard Brautigan (related in his books Gush, Rhino Ritz, Mordecai of Monterey, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America), and his Buddhist identity in combination with Naropa.
I decided to put Keith’s academic papers and anything to do with Naropa on Substack. So I have been reading the letters that I have and transcribing them. My father repeated much of the same information, the meat of whatever newsletter he had to share, but with different details to me or Mike.
Later, in essence, Keith was “disgraced” and “outcast” in his “triumph”, but I am guessing that that was a long time ago and Naropa has evolved and moved on. Their program looks worlds away from that of 1989. And perhaps these matters have some historical value.
Or do they?
Rereading the letters my father sent me evoke a slight feeling of exasperation. That “where the hell are you?’ vibe I know too well. But he was definitely enjoying himself, his letters are full of energy and hope. The community he had entered at Naropa was a community engaging in knowledge seeking and intending to look at the world a different way. A group of creative people aiming at social change, turning away from traditional Americana life while having a great time.
I had to think about this a bit. I mean here it was again, staring me in the face, my mother had invented herself to be a “Jew-Sami” through lies and manipulation, and my father had taken on Zen Buddhism and was calling himself “Bear Sage.” Totally ludicrous scenario.
It’s all about stories, isn’t it?
I decided it was time to get out of the house. I went to see three films.
The first, One to One: John and Yoko, definitely fit the time frame of the passages in Mordecai of Monterey and Downstream from Trout Fishing in America that I had been working with these past months. The montage of the era and the innocence and almost slow-mo world compared to the United States of America in 2025 was striking.
The second was Das Verschwinden des Josef Mengele – a film about psychological aspects of identity, guilt and isolation. I think I was looking for more insight. The most cinematically brilliant moment (and horrific) was the replay of Mengele’s crimes in the concentration camp to the music of Schubert and Richard Strauss. The conviction of beauty, the intent of perfection, the grim manipulation of what the “future” should hold was masterfully shown in this juxtaposition of the stripping of human rights and dignity while holding culture up as the culprit and as responsible.
I nearly cancelled my ticket to the third film. I really wanted not to go. I wanted to go to bed at five o’clock in the afternoon and call it a day. That’s how badly I didn’t want to go. The organizer of the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival stood up and announced that since they programmed a series of films which had a racist slant, they were featuring the Inuit film as counterbalance.
“Already a bad start,” I thought, sitting in my seat and determined to sit through the matter.
Why was I there? Because all those years I had been indoctrinated to believe that the culture, the family that I came from were the “wrong” ones. Again, that old isolation tactic. Who were the “real people, the ones with true values”? Why, the Inuits! Those “pure and exempt from all evil doing” Inuits. And in my past life the felony committed here was not overt racism, it was narcissism using racism as an excuse.
The film organizer also explained that there were aspects of the film that were not going to be clear as they pertained to the Inuit culture and Wrong Husband was not made to explain these aspects to a non-Inuit audience. “At least he got that far,” I thought.
It’s about stories, isn’t it? I had just sat through a heart warming romance film with mythical characters saving the day and set in the Arctic. I thought about my father’s letters which I will continue to transcribe and set on Substack as part of a “Naropa” archive, and I will continue to work on Routine Apparitions and tell the story through a story, and I will continue with the compilation of materials to create a bio/autobio of my father’s life.
“Well,” I thought, having transcribed the last chapter of Downstream from Trout Fishing in America for Substack, “I’ll only do this once.”
