by
Don
Calarco
by
Don
Calarco
Note: Each of the chapters in this manuscript was written continuously, without edit and without professional concern or attention to proper rules of puctuation, grammar or valid use of the English language. Please don't take offense to the this poor excuse, but most of the material here was written only moments after awakening from a deep sleep. Written as the author speaks (and thinks) and is intended to be read as such. Any distractions caused by misuse of appropriate grammar or literary formalities is apologized for in advance.
IF HE FALLS ASLEEP...TAKE HIS SANDWICH
A CHRISTMAS MEMORY - Gianna's story
THANKSGIVING - A THOUGHT TO REMEMBER
IF YOU READ MY BOOK... I'LL READ YOURS
This book is dedicated to the voice in my head, whose encouragement,patience and personal
committment since my youth, has lead me to challenge more than I ever thought
I could; to venture further than I ever thought I would; and to achieve more than I have
ever dreamed. This inspiration has caused me to search deep within my memories to recreate
the stories contained here.
And to the many friends who have engouraged me to put some
of my thoughts in print. Mostly, I needed to get it down on paper before I started to forget.
Thank you, it was fun! I also wish to thank the voices in my head and the voices that come
in the night and the voices that whisper in my ear. I know who you are, I know where you
are and I'm in no hurry to join you, so sit back and enjoy all of this..but don't stop
sending!
PREFACE
“The more one knows…the less one needs to believe”
He was scribling on the sidewalk with a large piece of chalk as she was carelessly walking around him. I was making my way to the end of the curb, where the tables and chairs make a sudden stop she was probably on her way home from work and couldn’t care less that she was walking over someones creative work. The waiters hung around that corner and it was always easier to get service. The coffee shop was just beginning to fill with the after-theater crowd.
A lot of them had come to see him perform. Many came from as far away as California and New York. I had even met a few people from Australia and Europe. The largest group that seemed to be attracted to him have lately been members of the Baby Boomers. The offspring of one of the most explosive periods in American Life. They had come to see a one hour show or an all night jam session, depending on how the crowd reacts to him.
This was the sixth, or so, time I had been to see him in Chicago and I guess the only reason I kept coming back and keep following him, is that I noticed something the very first time I came to see him. It was his grin!
I got there sort of early. I guess I wanted to catch him in the act of being normal. I had heard from friends that this was going to be the most enlightened or the funniest routine I will ever see. I first thought I was coming to see a comedian. Hoping to pick up some tips from a veteran performer. I had spent some time in the Second City Players group at the famed club of the same name. My routine was beginning to sharpen and I was headed in the right direction, or so I thought!
One of the guys in the troupe had a small group around him backstage and I walked in expecting to hear a new comedy routine. Instead, he was talking about a guy who was performing on the sidewalks that run down Rush street. Some of his audience laughed and others cried during the same performance. He can either make you laugh harder than any comedian or you will be caught in a trance and hang on every word he says and on every move he makes. "His hands...watch his hands" one guy would say.
He was talking about the power that every performer dreams of having. The power to truly move a crowd with your performance. And that was something I just had to see.
Well anyway, I got there early and he was sitting on a stool at the edge of the bar talking with maybe three other people. It looked like they might have been his back up band. It was the typical routine with the real pretty girl accompanied by the two strung-out looking guys.
I pulled up a chair and sat to his left and he instantly turned to me and said, "please join us". I politely turned toward the group and ordered my drink. He was in the middle of explaining something and they were laughing, but I didn’t get the joke, so I guess you had to be there!
He began drawing with chalk on the sidewalk. I hadn’t seen chalk for some time. Even the teachers in schools today were using high tech transcribers instead of old chalkboards. The bar had an opened wall and the standing room only crowd stood on the sidewalk. On really good nights they stand in the streets. Much later I heard that each time he has shown up at this location he was written citations for obstructing traffic.
So he began drawing. When he wasn’t drawing, he was talking. When he was talking he stood up and walked through the crowd talking to people like they were all there to see him.
His presentation was that of a college professor trying to make a point. At times he spoke so softly that only a small handfull of the crowd could hear. Other times he yelled so loud that people (who were not paying attention) would yell back at him to shut-up!
As I watched from the bar he seemed to be talking to me. Although there were at least a hundred people gathered by the time he really started to get into it, he looked like he was walking around the crowd explaining some master plan to me! But, I wasn’t getting it!
He was scribbling with a large piece of chalk on the sidewalk and people were walking along side him. Some of them were taking notes, others were asking him questions and he was answering. When he gave the answer it was as though he was inviting everyone to join in on the conversation. I still wasn’t getting it.
I worked my way to the center of the crowd that was following him. The interesting thing was that I had to go through several layers to get there and each one was clearly, almost symetrically gathered in circles around him. I imagined that if we were looking down on this crowd with an infra-red camera we would see how cold it was at the outer ring of this group and how warm it was in the center.
The outer ring was made up of a group of people that had never heard about him, nor would they go out of there way to see him. Most of them were there for the coffee or the drink or the meeting that happened to be convienient to the location. These people were downright iritated by his presence.
As I nudged my way through this first ring I heard things like "why the hell do they let this jerk in here..this is really getting annoying..ya know, if you are going to be homeless, do it where I don’t live all right...hey waiter, can you get us another table where their aren’t any ingnorant assholes to spoil the evening" I determined that this was not the friendly section of the audience.
One of the things I had learned at Second City workshops was that people usually pay to get in to see you, so you have to give them their money’s worth, but this guy wasn’t being paid. He was one of the crazies from BugHouse Square. It isn’t there anymore, but it used to be at the corner of Rush and Oak, I think. Well anyway, it was down in the center of where all the nightclubs were located in the city. Usually down and out alcoholics and escape mental patients would get up on their boxes and blow off steam until they collected enough for their next drink, or in some cases their next fix.
This guy was different. For one thing he didn’t look like he lived on the street, yet he wasn’t dressed for the Sabre Room either. He never had a drink in his hand, much less a paper bag with a wine bottle neatly wrapped inside. The police would always come by before the crowd of loons would get out of hand and narrow it down a bit.
This guy was very different. He just looked like he was a paying customer who had started a conversation with a whole group of people.
I made it to the next layer and found an interesting phenomenon. Nearly three to four people deep, they had no concept that he was even in the same state with them. The were totally oblivious to him. They neither listened or watched any of his performance. At one point he had drawn a line that bisected the street and began to address one side and ignore the other. It was amazing how this layer of what I affectionately refered to as deaf, numb and blind, never noticed the reaction of the crowd.
The next layer was a bit more friendly, they formed the inner layer that surrounded the small group that had been following him as he moved around the crowd. It appeared that he made a lot of sense to a small group of people and much more to an even smaller group. The problem was that he made no sense at all to almost everyone else. The closer you were to him, the more you could understand.
From this vantage point I had a close up view of his performance. It was from here that I was to see the master at his best. I knew that because there were people laughing to my left and crying to my right.
Occasionally a waiter would walk across one of his chalk illustrations and the crowd would softly send out a repremand. Yet he never seemed to notice. It was as though he was drawing just to emphasize something that he meant for me to understand and once I saw the drawing it didn’t matter if it was scrubbed away.
He stood up occasionally and took questions from the crowd. They all seemed eager to send him on a transition to a deeper subject, yet I still didn’t get it by this time and I figured if I didn’t get it by the time he pulls the curtain and leaves the stage, I’d never get it.
The inner circle was the most interesting of the bunch. They were being served by the waiters, who had been hanging around to hear some of the more softly spoken words. They seemed to look like everyone else on the street that night. I couldn’t draw a demographic from this crowd. It seemed to be comprised of young, old, modern, techno’s, theater types, tourists from out of town, businessmen and women. It was a very mixed group, yet they all seemed to hang on his every word.
I still couldn‘t make out what he was saying, but then I began walking along the line which he had drawn in the street and up the sidewalk and into the bar. There were illustrations on either side of the line. Some seemed to be graphs and others looked like cartoons, but I don’t think he was there to show off his artistic talents.
I found a loose chair near the middle of the forum and began to listen and watch as he spoke.
It struck me almost like a bolt of lightening. One minute I was trying to figure out one of his scribbles and the next...it was all so perfectly clear.
I had wandered to a spot in the street where people were taking photographs of one of his illustrations. I had entered from what I thought was the top, but people seemed to be taking pictures from every angle.
Some of them were rubbing the illustration and making it bigger. As I glanced over to see his expression, he seemed to enjoy that. Any other starving artist would cringe if someone destroyed one of his better props. Some of the out-of-towners were placing cloth down on the illustrations and rubbing a transfer onto it. I thought..."this is crazy. Who is this guy?".
Then I looked down at the illustration just as he began to focus his attention to it’s design. As I listened, I could imagine what the people in the first level were thinking of this. Was it going over the heads of the people in the second level? My concentration was really off. I was distracted by almost everyone in the crowd until that lightening bolt hit me.
My head was hanging down and resting on my chin. I had felt like I had been taken by the hand and walked into a bright light. I had had a slight headache that seemed to go away. He was looking at me and today I can only remember his grin.
He looked like the guy who had discovered a sunken treasure worth billions of dollars and he had taken you to help him haul it away and he was prepared to let you keep anything you can carry out of the hold. The grin is because you didn’t believe him and he just opened the door and let you look inside where all the gold and jewels were. That’s the grin I remember! And that’s why I have come back six years in a row. So much for my first encounter!
A couple waiters had signaled me that he had arrived. I liked to get to his performances early. His entrance was something to behold. Well, also I didn’t want to miss a single word. His Chicago visit, although it was his home town, was a once a year performance. I had followed him for nearly six years. To Acapulco, where I thought he taught me to make time stand still. In fact I learned that time has always been standing still and we just pass through it. I followed him to Jamaica, where I watched and learned that people who have nothing actually have everything and people who think they have everything have very little. I had followed him to places and cities where people were craving to hear someone speak about things that most people only wonder about.
Today was a special day. Tonight will be a very special night. Tonight he will perform a sermon. He may not turn the heads of the outer level of the crowd, but he’s going to pack them in. I couldn’t wait!
The sermon was awesome. Nearly everyone who came to hear was in a good position to do so. Almost everyone who came to see went away with an image that will last forever. I certainly did.
He was just touching up some of his sidwalk illustrations, when the soldiers came in. They marched in a single file toward the center of his forum at first, then they broke out into groups of ten and began to push the crowd further and further back away from him. I was speechless. Everyone just stood there as they dragged him into the street.
They kicked him. They spat on him and called him vile and degrading names. Then they stripped him of his clothes and placed a barbed wire crown upon his aging head. They brought in a great metal cross and leaned it against him and took pictures of themselves stepping on him as he knelt beneath it.
The crowd was saddened but they remained quiet, as I did....as he had instructed.
They wired and taped his hands and feet to the cross and stood it up high over the crowd.
I was about ten feet from where the cross was wedged into a sewer hole in the street and I could see him clearly. He was grinning that grin that I will never forget. He looked directly at me as he tossed the piece of chalk that was tightly gripped in his hand.
I knelt down in the street below him and calmly wrote the words that I first saw him scribble on the street not to far from where he was now hanging. "Never worry. The more one knows, the less one has to believe".
The next thing I knew I had been hit with my second ligtening bolt and he had disappeared. The wires and tape were still there, but he was gone. The crowd stood in awe.
A very warm feeling of responsibility overcame me as I gripped the dusty chalk. At once I recalled everything that he had every taught me and everything I had ever learned on my own. It was an emotional overload. But it was real. Thoughts were flying into my head at such rapid speed that I could not contain myself.
I stood up and turned to face the crowd and they did something that I had not expected. They began to applaud. I wasn’t sure if they were applauding his final performance or my first solo performance.
The sound of the crownd turned into a cheer. I was feeling lighter than air. The cheer turned to a screech..then from a screech to a buzz. The buzz was constant and it seemed like it would never stop. I opened my eyes and reached for the snooze button. It was my alarm. I had been dreaming all the time. It was September 1973. I was twenty five years old.
I rolled out of bed and went directly to the keyboard and started typing. It was one of the most vivid, colorful dreams I had ever had. Full sound, touch-and-feel, smells, light, faces...it had it all. This was one of many, but it was the first that I would record.
Nothing particular seems to triggers these dreams. But each one seems so original. It is like recanting a movie that I had seen before going to bed, except there was no movie. I really don't dwell on any thoughts that may bring on a particular dream...it just happens and it happened last night, just like I wrote it.
September,19 1973.
I began keeping a journal almost immediately after the first dream. Ever since then, many of my dreams seem like a "remembering" or a re-enactment of a movie. I can’t say that what I’m remembering has ever really happened to me, but the images and the thoughts and concepts are often times so clear, I had to wonder where they come from..but then, now I know where they come from. I hope to share that with you in some of these pages.
I hope you enjoy my collection of dreams, inspirations and whatever else has come into my head. For so many years I thought they were coming "out" of my head...but that simply isn't so!
"NEVER JUDGE A BOOK BY IT'S COVER"
Did you ever wonder who actually coined that phrase? Before starting this introduction, I spent nearly six hours in a library trying to find the author of this simple piece of advice. I covered nearly a dozen literary indexes including the quotes of Shakespeare, Buddha and Jesus Christ but I didn't have much luck. I was planning to at least acknowledge the author before spending a few paragraphs commenting on his wisdom.
"It's probably a line from a poem, or a single phrase from a much longer piece of work", said the head of the reference department, as he headed for another row of books. "It's funny how you take someones quote for granted, never really knowing who owns it".
I'll probably go back again and try to find the author, but for now I'd like to just surmise what he was trying to teach in this simple phrase. I've always been sure that a book was the furthest thing from the authors mind when he first thought of the term.
Much of what you will read here are very private thoughts. Some that I have shared with others and many that I have only put in print and never into words. Much of this book refers to things that I have wondered about or thought about since childhood. It contains many questions that I have never had answered and a few that I found after careful search and consideration.
I sincerely enjoyed writing all that you hold in your hands. It was in a way, a joyous trip in time. A reminiscence of my youth. A log of adventures and the notes and questions recorded along the way.
If I have learned anything it is that an unquestioned life is not worth living. The following pages contain many of my questions.
The answers are not intended to teach as much as they are intented to reveal the many options we have as human beings.
There is no plot to follow here; no semblance from one chapter to another. If you find yourself bored with a particular section, try jumping to another chapter. I'm sure you'll find something that will amuse you. After all, you should not judge a book by one of it's chapters either.
So...before you judge me by my cover.......If You Read My Book, I'll Read Yours.
To begin, go to Chapter One