Dark Magus

I was walking on Date Street, and it was sunny. The sun here seems brighter than other places I have lived. It was clear, and you could hear faintly in the distance the sound of military maneuvers. I was walking and thinking about how close we were to the equator and whether or not that made a difference, when I saw a neighbor of mine. He was on his porch, where I often see him sitting and smoking. He's not a next door neighbor but someone who lives around the corner. His apartment complex touches my backyard, and sometimes I can hear him giving gentle commands to his dog or else listening to music. Once, while sitting in my backyard, I heard him singing along to "Blue Suede Shoes." It took me a moment or two to realize it was the Carl Perkins version, which made me smile. Anyway, I was walking by his apartment, and he was sitting on his tiny porch like he always does. He had long hair in a ponytail and an impressive black beard, graying at the edges. I tried to avoid his gaze, because I am uncomfortable in face-to-face interactions, but he saw me and said, hey you. I kept walking and he said it again—you, come here, I have a question for you. I stopped and looked at him, not quite sure he was talking to me. He was sitting in a very small metal chair with his legs crossed, and he held the cigarette away from his face as if he didn't want it near him, and that contradiction endeared him to me for some reason.

He wore green sweatpants and a black Grateful Dead shirt with the Steal Your Face logo on it. He wasn't wearing any shoes, and the bottoms of his feet, which I could see because of the way his right leg dangled over the left, suggested he never or rarely did. The porch was so small, there was only enough room for him to hunch in his little chair and the doorway that led into his apartment. Despite the aggressive tone of his questioning, his face was open and warm. Sometimes people assume a level of intimacy that just doesn't exist, which isn't always a bad thing. It's probably the way a lot of friendships are formed. I stared at him without saying much, and he gestured for me to come near. I put my hands on the little cinderblock wall separating his front yard from the sidewalk, and he kept gesturing as if to say come closer. I walked through the little pass-through where there wasn't a gate and came up to the first step leading to his porch. He said, you're my neighbor, right? It was then that I detected he had a slight accent I couldn't quite place. I nodded. Tell me, he said, what do you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict? I was taken aback. How was I to answer such a question? I nodded and then shook my head and made the kind of movements with my body that indicated I couldn't answer, that he was a stranger to me and I could only talk about such things with someone I trusted. As if he was fluent in my body language, he replied, come on, you're amongst friends here. There was only one of him, so I said, are there more of you in there? He said there were. He had houseguests, from Berlin, and they had definite opinions about it. And then he asked if I knew how Jerry Seinfeld had definite opinions about it. I nodded, having read a little bit about Jerry in the newspaper that morning.

Did I think, he asked, that one side was a little more innocent than the other, like even by a matter of one or two percent? I said it seemed obvious to me that there are no two parties to a conflict who are truly equal in their innocence or guilt: one has to be the more aggrieved party. It's the iron law of conflict, I said. Germany, for instance, was the more guilty party in World Wars One and Two, the US in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, etc. I didn't know what to say about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What about this one, he asked. I had an answer at the ready but I wanted to remain pokerfaced about it. You know, he continued, I like to think of myself as someone with a very true moral compass. Not true as in not-false, but in terms of straight or correct. And it's really hard for me to disentangle this one. I said it was complicated but maybe not quite as complicated as everyone would have us believe. Really, he said, go on. Are you talking, I asked, about the whole thing going back to the Balfour Declaration or are we limiting this to the recent troubles? Either one, he said.

As I continued to hone my answer, which had to be quite subtle, nuanced, fine in its depiction of the various ins and outs, he told me how they were up all night talking about it. His friends from Berlin were leftists, and as he said before, they had some very definite opinions about what was going on. He was a leftist, too, he pointed out, but more of a moralist. The main difference between him and his friends was they seemed to have a higher tolerance for political violence. He was too old for revolution, he said, he didn't have the time to start a country up from scratch. Besides, he thought violence in almost all cases should be strenuously avoided. In this we were in agreement. I told him I was a pacifist, and he nodded in what I can only call a kind of solidarity. They knew all the history, he told me of his German friends, plotting out each event for him so he could see the moral equation emerging out of the chaos. They sensed he was on the fence, and they were trying to win him over to their side. They knew about 1948 and 1967 and 1973 and 1992 and 1995 and 2006 and 2011. They had much to say about the Spielberg film, Munich, and also the lesser known Raid on Entebbe. He asked if I had heard of it, and I said, vaguely. He said it was made for television and did that thing with his hand to indicate it was iffy or just so-so. They seemed to know a lot, he said, but they were young, and he didn't know how much to trust young people who are always on their phones. It occurred to me that I still didn't feel comfortable speaking on the topic and regretted making it seem like I would be weighing in on such serious matters. With a stranger no less. I did have opinions, but I thought, what if I don't have enough information; what if I was wrong; what if my moral compass wasn't true? Sometimes context is key, and what if my knowledge of the context in this case was flawed—or worse, tainted by my own ideological biases. Plus, who am I to have an opinion, one that needs to be uttered? I mean opinions are fine, but why do we need to say them out loud?

I asked him how young they were, his German friends. He said, that's a good question and then gestured toward the steps where he seemed to want me to sit and stay a while. I didn't really feel like sitting on the ground. He could sense this and said, sorry, the steps are all I have right now. The living room is filled with my German friends, and I don't want to wake them to get another chair. You see, they're sleeping on the floor, and they were up all night playing Risk. My apartment is quite small, and I'd have to step over them, which I don't think would be very hospitable. And this chair (touching the arm of the one he was sitting in) well, it's really not fond of other people using it. I told him I didn't mind standing, and he made himself comfortable in his chair, offering me a cigarette—Parliaments. That brand reminded me of an old friend who was always trying to quit smoking. His name was Ian, and he smoked Parliaments. In that moment, staring at that pack of Parliaments, I felt guilty for having lost contact with Ian, but there was a break or schism that couldn't be resolved. The last time I saw him, he was on his way to Fontana to buy a car. I brought out a bottle of whisky, and he said he didn't drink anymore, and things got a little weird as in awkward. I occasionally looked him up, and he had been leading the interesting life of a peripatetic academic. I followed his minor exploits and various appointments at small colleges in Iowa and Missouri. He's married now with a daughter, and the woman he married keeps a blog on homeschooling and her frustrating experiences with fibromyalgia. They both converted to Catholicism, which has, in an ironic way, created a moral distance between us. I think it has to do with the particularism of their faith or how they have chosen to manifest it. I am a universalist, at least in theory.

Thinking about these things had the quality of spoiling my mood. I sensed an encroaching feeling of dread and tried to banish those thoughts by taking a cigarette from my neighbor. He leaned over to light it, and as I leaned toward him, I tried to look in the window and he caught me. I got the feeling he didn't particularly like me peering into his window, but I didn't see anything because his miniblinds were drawn, though some were folded and broken. But he just went on with the conversation. He told me how he used to think of it in terms of blame—who do we blame, whose fault. But now he thought of it in terms of responsibility—who's really responsible for this mess? There was, he said, a difference, however subtle, between blame and responsibility. Maybe it was only rhetorical, but he thought a more mature or nuanced person talked in terms of responsibility and accountability, and a hothead talked about blaming people. He said, these are really epistemological questions, questions of ultimate origins, and the language we use does make a difference.

He looked at his door and said, they're here to see Herbie Hancock, by the way, my German friends. He's playing downtown tonight. You know who they really love, though, is Miles. These motherfuckers love electric Miles. I said, Dark Magus, and he looked at me like he was just seeing me for the first time and said, fuck yeah. I thought the conversation might turn to Miles Davis, and I was trying to formulate something to say about In a Silent Way, which is my favorite record of his, the one I listen to in ecstasy or depression, but then he threw me a curve ball and asked if I'd ever seen the inside of a jail before. I hadn't. He said he had—DUI. He wasn't even that drunk, he didn't know what he blew, but it couldn't have been over a .10, maybe .12. Not the drunk tank either, he said, it was real jail—county—which he assured me was extra bad around here, because of the fascist Sheriff. Democrat or Republican he said doesn't matter when it comes to Sheriffs, these fuckers are all like little Hitlers. It wasn't worth talking about, he told me, but it did kind of ruin what little innocence he had left. The one good thing, though, was that he got to teach The Communist Manifesto to some of the guys in there. One of them, his name was Willard, saw him reading it one day and said, is that it, is that the thing they've been telling us about, warning us against? It sure is, he said he told Willard, there is a specter haunting this jail, and it's the thing that's going to save us from all this, pointing at the guard towers and the razor wire and the bulls who sat there playing with their little collapsible batons. And then they got a little study-group going. He wasn't there that long, but before he got sprung loose, they did read and study it. They did, he said, talk enough about it to disagree with Marx and Engels on one key point—the necessity of utopian experimentation. Emancipation, he said, shouldn't be an all or nothing proposition. That phrase stuck with me as I made the short walk back to my house, and I'm still thinking about it now as I lay in bed listening to the palm trees groan and weep under the strain of the wind.