Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralich's life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

Blaming Japhy Rider

Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who SurvivedBy Philip A. Bralich

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2012 Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4051-1

Contents

1 Our Second Anniversary: Peace Corps—Togo, 1978.............................................................................12 Going to Go to Togo to Teach—1978..........................................................................................173 The Accident —December 7, 1978.............................................................................................444 Japan—1982.................................................................................................................625 Home from Japan—September 1982.............................................................................................746 Buddhism à la Trungpa Rinpoche, et alii.....................................................................................997 Graduate School—Hawaii, 1986...............................................................................................1168 Nepal—1990.................................................................................................................1319 PhD Matriculation and Running a Business—1991..............................................................................13810 Ergo Linguistic Technologies—1995-2000....................................................................................14711 Barnes and Noble and More Freud—2003......................................................................................17312 Blaming Japhy Rider—2010..................................................................................................206Colophon...........................................................................................................................217Appendix 1: Charts.................................................................................................................219Appendix 2: E-mails from Buddhist Email Discussion Lists and Letter from Alan Ginzberg Commenting on My Poetry.....................221A fable, some poems, and other projects by the author..............................................................................243

Chapter One

Our Second Anniversary: Peace Corps—Togo, 1978

It was 1978, and nearing Deb's and my second anniversary. October 30 was the exact date; we were planning a big reunion/anniversary celebration for the event, and we just wanted to aim for near that date. I cannot remember the exact day of the party. Our close friends new it was our anniversary, but for us the best way to celebrate our anniversary was to throw a reunion. This reunion was to be celebrated in the Peace Corps in West Africa—Lama Kara, Togo, to be exact. We weren't sure it was going to work out, but, little by little, we organized a party as an excuse to bring together all the other Peace Corps volunteers we could find in the area, or even from around the country, if they could make it. It would be a reunion of the volunteers from our two-month training, and also an opportunity to meet and get to know other volunteers in the area. In those days a good party included a theme, food, and lots of alcohol, and what we were planning was no different: Western-style beer, local millet beer, and a barbecue of an entire cow. The cow was the highlight and the theme. The 1970s also included lots of drug-taking, but neither Deb nor I was into that—and, besides, drugs were virtually nonexistent among the other volunteers, given the harsh penalties in the country and the unavailability of drugs in West Africa. This to me was a relief, because I didn't want to have to deal with the embarrassment or risks as a result of someone else's drug use at our party.

Stewart, an English teacher like I was, had a houseboy who was the son of a butcher. His father agreed to butcher the cow for us in exchange for the skin, brains, guts, bones, hooves, and so forth—all the things we didn't know what to do with. My understanding was that this was a very good deal for the butcher. The animal-traction volunteers were able to donate the cow, our houseboy and the boy across the street were able to dig a barbecue pit, and the construction volunteers came up with the rebar so that we could properly build a barbecue pit in our yard—and then cook up that cow.

The boys laughed at me when I offered to help dig the pit, which I actually thought would be fun. Trying those half-size poles and digging the pit for the barbecue appealed to me. They laughed because it was inappropriate for me to do that sort of work when kids were around to do it for me, and they also thought I could not handle the handheld, half-size hand plows they used for the job for more than a couple of minutes. A couple of the construction volunteers agreed to search out the best local millet beer, and I set up a deal with the SGGG to keep a huge refrigerator he had full of beer, and any of us with motorcycles would run the beer back and forth throughout the day so that we could keep it cold. We only had a half-size refrigerator, and that wouldn't be sufficient to provide cold beer for the thirty or forty volunteers we were expecting. We were lucky, though, in that we actually had electricity and an electric refrigerator—ours was much better than the kerosene frigos that many volunteers had to make do with, but it was still too small for the party.

The monks and nuns of Chaminade and Adele, our bosses, took care of us rather well. We had a large, one-story, two-bedroom cement-block house with a light in every room, and even wall switches. The house, which belonged to the monks of College Chaminade, was for housing "civilian" teachers. Changing a lightbulb one time tossed me about six feet across the room; after that, I remembered to be sure the electricity was off whenever I changed one. In any case, as I said, our refrigerator was too small to hold the beer and drinks necessary for the thirty-plus volunteers we were expecting, so the deal for the refrigerator with the SGGG was quite useful.

The volunteers who went to search out the best millet beer disappeared for three days. They turned up at Maureen's hut stone—drunk, stumbling, disheveled, and bearded—announcing triumphantly that three days of drinking millet beer had been successful: they had found the best in the area.

From the start, being in Africa was an adventure. "The best job you'll ever love" is more than just a sales pitch for the Peace Corps. It is every bit as challenging, adventurous, and enjoyable as any bunch of idealistic twenty-somethings could dream up. Deb and I both were twenty-five when we joined, perhaps just slightly older than the average age. We were the only married couple.

* * *

Getting to Africa was an adventure in itself. We were in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when we decided to join. We both had finished college about a year before: Deb with a degree in French, and I with one in linguistics. I was working for the Playboy Club as a food-and-beverage management trainee; she as a cashier ... I forget where. I remember talking to her at the counter, but I don't remember where it was. We were both getting sick of the corporate mentality.

Although I liked the Playboy Club philosophy in general, like all the other hotels, it was pervaded by a growing problem of reward for politics, rather than reward for a good job. Long story short, I was beginning to see that the food-and-beverage trainee thing was falling apart. The jealousy generated by three guys being fast-tracked to management caused no end of problems from room managers and chefs who had been there for years, and who were interested in management themselves. It was an interesting job, though. I was picked mostly for my experience with fine wines, my knowledge of liquor, and my experience in restaurants and hotels, which I got while I working my way through college. I am not sure why the other two were picked, but there were three of us in all, and we were meant to spend a year doing all the different jobs in food-and-beverage service—from dishwasher to head steward, from line cook to chef, and so on—and then, at the end of that year, we could expect a management position in one of the clubs around the country.

In any case, the job seemed to be falling apart under the weight of the jealousy and politics, and Deb and I were looking for a real life, something with substance and meaning, and at least some longevity. We looked into the navy briefly, but there was not much they could do with married couples at the time. The Peace Corps was a well-known option in those days, so we gave them a call, which started the rather long application process: references, doctors and dentists appointments, interviews, and so forth. We finally got to the point when they sent us job descriptions from around the world. We had chosen West Africa and perhaps South America as our areas of interest, and English teachers—ESL teachers, that is—as our job of choice, but we were really motivated to go to French-speaking West Africa, as we both wanted to improve our French while serving in a Third World country.

As an interesting highlight to our relationship, even though we both were from Wisconsin—she from La Crosse, and I from Oshkosh—we first met in Paris. France, that is. It was about five years earlier. The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh offered several study-abroad programs. After failing to find the money for a year in Vienna (where my friend, John, was attending school at the time), I grabbed a summer-school, first-semester French class and then a first-term, second-semester French class Finally, I was able to get student loans to cover a one-semester trip to Reims, France, the champagne capital of the world and home of the cathedral in front of which Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

Deb, still unknown to me, was in La Crosse, Wisconsin, simultaneously going through a similar process; but she was a French major already taking lit classes when she signed up. She told me one time after we met that she noticed me at the orientation meeting in Oshkosh. She had remarked on the then-unpopular fashion of white socks and sandals I was wearing. I think she had sort of an "e-w-w-w" feeling about me because of my fashion, or lack thereof, and we didn't meet at that point. And, actually, come to think of it, I am not sure we even met before Reims. We were in Paris at the Sorbonne's École des Mines for the first month of the trip, but I do not recall meeting her there except perhaps briefly. The whole group was housed in a foyer called FIAP, and there was every reason to believe I had met her there, but we didn't really have the same group of friends.

It was not until we had our modest studios in Reims that we met on the stairway one day when the elevator was out. She was coming up the stairway, and I was in my room. She was a good-looking neighbor, and I wanted to ask her out. I was sitting at my desk, working on a giant crossword puzzle, and I left my door open. As she passed, I greeted her to see if I could engage her in a conversation. She took the bait, and we started talking about my crossword puzzle. Little by little, we began to talk about other things. She used the long stairway trip as an excuse to stop by so she could talk to me. Within a few days, we were dating. I still like to say we met in Paris. We were both quite romantic and, later, very much in love. Two years later at twenty-one, we got married.

Deb was a good-looking Midwestern girl, brunette, cheerful, bright, wholesome, and homey. She had a tendency to gain weight, which she constantly fought and which occasionally gave her wide-eyed, smiling face a pink roundishness. She wanted to have a busload of kids. She was very friendly and outgoing, always looking for fun people—people who would sing songs from musicals they had memorized, other French majors, literary types—but not the arrogant ones; she gravitated more toward readers than writers. She was fond of many authors and was not at all into the avant-garde type of foolishness that was so popular in the seventies, though she was on board with feminism and with antiwar, Peace Corps-type movements. She and I both were very on board with the movements toward hobbies like macramé, homemade beer and wine, and so forth. As I said, she was very wholesome and homey, even sewed a lot of her own clothes. Her future plans at that time were to get a master's in French, but later they would change to becoming an RN and then a midwife. Her interest in childbearing and so on was greater than most young women our age, but it never hit a weird or overdone point. It was something that interested her both personally and generally, and it was the Peace Corps experience that got her more interested in nursing and midwifery. In those days, too, a lot more women openly expressed an interest in motherhood, even feminists and hippies.

Deb and I were quite similar in many ways, except for the maternal part. In college in the seventies, I did my bit with long hair and a bit of drug experimentation—Deb had done virtually none—but I soon became disenchanted with the need to conform to nonconformity. I gave up the drugs, cut my hair, dressed as what I thought a beatnik would dress like, and continued to hang out with the nonconformists. I never bothered to ask about or research beatnik fashion; I just figured a jean jacket or polo-type coat with jeans and sneakers would suit the bill. The white socks and sandals had to do with the beatnik fashion statement as well, though I really had no idea what they thought of white socks and sandals.

I, too, liked the antiwar movement, the Peace Corps, feminism, and things of that nature; but I did not go into it too radically, either. I remember when the Vietnam protests were at their height before I met Deb, and the discussions often turned toward the consideration of the value of violence to shock the culture into a realization of the seriousness of the problem. They would talk of "trashing" stores, tearing up streets, burning cars, protesting, and more. The SDS was prevalent, and the realities of violence were in the news almost daily. However, there were also the hyper-peaceniks, the Gandhi wannabes, and I remember making a conscious and heartfelt decision to stay with that group no matter what transpired. That stance appealed to the idealist in me, and I really bought the Gandhi-type arguments that things could be accomplished both without war and without violence. Certainly, the Vietnam War had to go. As I mentioned, I was also into the hobbies of the time: fine wine, fine food, gourmet cooking, making beer and wine, and so forth. A friend bought one of those K-Tel bottle cutters, which I thought was a little déclassé, but in the long run it turned out to work for him and actually was entertaining.

Both Deb and I were from middle-class families. My father always worked in factories—first as a skilled laborer, then as a buyer, and then in sales. We were, in fact, lower middle class, but I always tended to associate myself more with the working class. At the time, I had thick, wavy, dark hair that the girls always liked, and my looks reflected my Croatian background—like all the people on TV during the war in Bosnia. I was a little ripped and flat-stomached, but not too much. I stopped working out in high school. I was only about 5'7". Deb was just a little shorter, or maybe just a little taller; we would often argue about that. I would off and on have a beard or a mustache. There were always girls who liked my look, but because of my problem with self- esteem, I didn't avail myself too much of the opportunities of the sexual revolution. Not that I missed it totally: In the course of my life, I guess I have had a total of twenty or thirty girlfriends, but only one wife. As it was popular to say in those days, I was a serial monogamist. I was always looking for a girlfriend for dates and hobbies, not one-night stands. Some of my joking at that time—a very sexualized time in American history—would seem otherwise, but I just preferred a relationship to a one-night stand.

I had a number of gay friends in college, but, after a swish or two (no sex), I decided that I knew from a very early age that I was straight. Gays were quite out at the time, a new thing for them, and it was a mark of a liberal to be tolerant and to have black friends, gay friends, and so on. I even had one grotesquely obese female friend who was a source of introductions to the poetry and arts world. She was a poet herself and knew a lot of the teachers and students in creative writing. I met one guy I didn't know was gay. Later, I found out he was, but that was after we had already become friends. I then noticed I was a welcome straight guy in a gay crowd—not my only crowd, but one that I was welcome in, and they were fun, and there were always plenty of good-looking straight women around them, their "fag hags." It was refreshing to have male (not necessarily masculine) friends with whom you felt no competition for the girls, and therefore no jealousy of. They seemed more like a source of, rather than an obstacle to, women. I worried a bit about whether people would think I was gay, but in those days there was not that much concern about that, and there were plenty of straights with gay friends.

A few years later, after returning from France and moving to Milwaukee, I decided to get my degree in linguistics: I liked learning foreign languages but was not that interested in literature, so I moved to Milwaukee and changed my major to theoretical linguistics. My friend, John (who happened to be gay), had returned from his trip to Vienna about a year before, and he'd moved to Milwaukee. So he was about the only person I knew when I arrived, and he helped me get set up, which also meant more gay friends and parties, but at college campuses at the time this was not at all rare. At a gay guy's party, I was caught kissing two women at the same time in a closet. It was the sort of thing that kept me at the parties and on board with the gay crowd. They just wanted to see if I was good at kissing or not, so we ducked into the walk-in closet for a demonstration. Both were quite good looking, one American Indian and one Jewish, a good argument for liberal attitudes as well. They did actually conclude that I was good at kissing.

(Continues...)

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