An introduction to Jack's cab driving novel written in the early 70's and undergoing revision.

Prologue-One Driving Cab


“The totality of consciousness must be still and only then, can that which has no beginning and no end come into being.” Krishnamurti




I find today’s newspaper in the garbage can. It is August the first, somewhere In the Seventies. I know that time doesn’t matter, that time isn’t matter, or is it? I’m not sure. At any rate, Christianity is near the two thousandth year of its death. Jesus is alive and well deep within each one of us. The phone rings. I get up to answer it. “Who is this?” a voice asks.

Who is this? I ask myself. A very good question. In fact, an excellent one. For to know oneself is no easy occupation. Not something you can accomplish in one short lifetime.

There was a time when I felt differently. I thought I had an identity. I thought I had found my place. I thought I could look ahead and carve out the very path I wanted. After all, didn’t I have my Master’s degree? Didn’t I have teaching credentials? Didn’t I have a family, good friends, an honest reputation? Wasn’t my time at hand, my future secure? All I had to do was put in a sincere effort….

So much bullshit! Dostoveski had a much more dramatic stay of execution than I, but the path I traveled back then; that structured goal oriented ego expanding road leads to just as certain a death as a hail of bullets brings. Even trapped in a ten gallon tank a fish can be a fish. Trapped in our times, a man cannot be a man. His genius is gobbled up by the monster of materialism. Reality is hidden behind a neon plastic curtain. Man is crucified from the day of his birth. To break free… to step down from the cross and look around …to be a man is a life and death struggle. Dostoveski’s struggle was not with political forces. It was not in Siberia that he met his most arduous foe. His battle was inside himself as is all true revolution.

Dostoveski’s time is our time. He foretold, in truth, that we would relegate the eternal struggle to a walled off corner of the body politic. Today, as he foretold, we dissolve the question of spirit in the mass of our ego. The struggle is no longer for our soul, but for our daily bread.

When I graduated from college, I had a foothold on success. I had become a part of the supportive circle. In accomplishing this, I lost touch with reality. I began to live by the values of our time. In our world, as I’ve already said, this means certain death, death of the Spirit. Somewhere we got off the track. For the past two thousand years we have been moving in the wrong direction.

In Ancient Greece we came near to the truth. There man came close to fulfilling his true function. There the soul of man was constantly expanding. Outer and inner worlds were indivisible. God and man walked the earth together. Maurice Nicoll says, “The emotional center was once awake in man. He then walk and talked with God. He named everything created. That is he knew what every object represented.” Somewhere before the Golden
Age of Greece, when poets were commonplace, were common men in fact, we got off the path. No more a whole people who communicate with God. Now, we have to go through channels. And the channels connect to words that have no relationship to the unknown, mere words in place of real contact. It is only the isolated men of wisdom that still have direct contact.

To be a man in our times one must break with all ties, established values, and traditions. You must rid yourself of all the psychological pabulum that you have been nurtured with. You must listen to the words of Rimbaud; Everything they tell you is a lie. Everything!

How narrow our definition of man in these times. Man, the ultimate consumer, whose sole function is to consume… consume so that others may produce, and produce so that each may be more consumptive. Man, somewhere above and separate from the other animals in evolutionary splendor. Man, creator of civilizations, the poet of concrete freeways, tall buildings high speed autos, electronic media, institutionalized knowledge, the nation state, super sonic bombers, weapons of mass destruction. Man, one who passes on his knowledge to future generations though the printing press and computer banks in veneration of the word. Man, a worm who digs his hole so that others might follow. Man, a thinking and fucking machine.

Is it any wonder that a few years ago I had ceased wanting to be a man? I wanted to be a college professor, not a man. My goals had all been externalized. My measurement was in terms of prestige and economic advancement. My total self had been reduced to a brain that could soak in knowledge. It takes years to see the error of one’s way, but seeing begins in the instant. Now, it is evident that we must learn to live like the ancients, and the wise men among us. We must live a life that will lead to full manhood. We must live out our miraculous existence on this earth to make our very own definition of man. We are every one of us poets of man. Each of us advances human awareness by going beyond the known into the realm of the mysterious. The world of matter must be supportive to man’s necessary role of self-expansion.

I, so very much a product of our times, learned very quickly where reality lies for modern man. From the very second that Dr. Halprin pulled me from my mother’s womb in our three room Philadelphia apartment, I knew that I must strive for success. I must work to be number one, the most loved, the center of attention, the very best…. “Be a good little boy, Jackie,” they told me. And, I sucked it in with mother’s milk. “Smile for mommy, don’t cry. Mommy and Daddy love you. Jus’ do what they say. You can do it….”

I am bombarded from every direction, from old maid Sunday school teachers, from my school teachers and classmates, from the ragman, the iceman, the druggist’s daughter across the street, from radio serials, from comic strips. They all say the same thing. “Work hard, be somebody, get ahead, save your money, accumulate!”

“It’s not what you earn, Jackie, it’s what you put in the bank.”

“It’s God’s will that we work hard in life.”

“Do good in school, make good grades, you gotta have an education.”

And, didn’t I try? Didn’t I want to be a good little boy? Didn’t I want to be loved by all around me? I eek out my little successes. Potty trained and castrated I become Mommy’s little boy and Daddy’s only joy. I learn that I can have anything I want if I just work hard enough. ”If first you don’t succeed….” they tell me. So I work hard to be the little man they want of me. I obey their every command. I’m everyone’s favorite.

In school success comes a little harder for me. I don’t understand the double standard. I think that the teachers really know what they’re saying. I think the teacher’s are in charge. I never realize that it’s my classmates that I must go to for approval. I’m quiet and obedient. My classmates disapprove. They tell me all the dos while I listen to the teacher’s don’ts. It’s mind over body, reason over emotion my teachers tell me. I learn to read and write and withdraw from my moving and emotional centers. I never learn to catch or hit or throw a ball. I never learn to hide my fear. My classmates take advantage of me. I become more and more self-conscious and withdrawn.

Outside of school on the streets of North Philadelphia, I learn that some people are not as good as others. My parents are poor. I’m part of the lower class. I have to earn my way into the respectable ranks of society. I begin my life and death struggle as soon as I’m old enough to walk. Getting the Four Star Final for John, the shoemaker, running errands, taking orders at the ice shed, hauling groceries in my Red Flyer wagon, selling White Cloverine Salve, selling carnations on Mother’s Day. Any kind of work is good….

On my foster parent’s farm in Buck’s County, there are plenty of chores to do. I don’t have to search for work anymore. I feed and water the chickens, help with the milking, chop firewood, shell corn. There are fence posts to replace, wire to splice, cow shit to shovel. There’s hay to bail, poking and tying bail hay wire, lifting the bails to the truck, stacking them away in the barn, There is hoeing to do, starting at one end of the field and singing the top twenty as you make your way to the other, pulling the weeds close to the plant by hand. There is combining wheat, sorting out the bags that you sewed during winter, tying a knot that will hold, hoisting the heavy bags on to the truck, choking on itchy chaff and dust. There are beans, tomatoes and corn to pick, horse corn to harvest, firewood to cut….

But, the family farm is obsolete in Buck’s County. Big business agriculture, and suburbia move in. My foster father is driven off the farm with tears in his eyes. We move to town. I learn to caddy, two bucks for eighteen holes twice a day if you’re lucky. In a year or two, I get a job on a rich man’s farm. Seventy-five cents an hour, I’m beginning to grow into manhood.

I graduate from high school and move from one job to another, working two jobs whenever I can. Factory worker, hand press operator, automatic machine operator, cashier, bus boy, parking lot attendant, sheet metal worker, flight line attendant, apprentice aircraft mechanic, encyclopedia salesman, auto worker, Fuller Brush Man, rubber worker, cannery worker, lift truck driver. It is all the same to me. The job is my life. My life is the job. All that I am can be fed by the loaf of bread. The bread that Dostoveski says man gladly accepts in place of spiritual freedom.

Happily, it is my good fortune; I fail at every single job I take. The job never becomes a part of me. I am always in the wrong place. I never reach that point of perfection that permanence requires. I work hard. I always do my very best. But, somehow, things never click. I advance by din of sheer effort. I’m never at ease. I never enjoy what I’m doing. I drag myself in morning, afternoon, or midnight, hating the very thought of what I have to do. But, I am persistent, I stick it out. I never quit a job. I stay until I’m fired, or laid off, or eased out the door some way. What else is there to do?

And as I struggle from one job to another, I remember the other adage that they gave me. Education! Education is the key to success. Go back to school. Improve your chances for a good paying job. I should have known better. Didn’t I go through twelve years of public education? Weren’t my dear old school days the worst days of my life? I’m not out of high school for a full year before I turn my self back in. Working and going to school at night is the thing to do. In the good old American tradition, I enroll at Trenton Adult High School for the same shit that I got at Children’s High. From there it’s Trenton Junior College. I pursue an aeronautical engineering course of study. With an engineering background I can become a jet fighter pilot, I tell myself.

School is just like work to me at T.J.C. except for Gardiner’s class where I get turned on to reading, and Pritchett’s class that I take with Vance it’s the same as high school. I’m in the wrong place. I hate math, chemistry, and physics. I can’t stand engineers. I’m not really there to learn, just make good grades, and get ahead, reach out for success. With a sigh of relief, and a whimper of anguish, I drop my night school classes after I crash through Barrett’s liquor store window, back out of the broken glass, and get hung up on the railroad tracks a half mile down the road.

No, more night school for me. But my love for reading and my friendship with Vance continues to grow. I get a different taste of reality as soon as I’m out of the grasp of our educators. I begin to ask the right questions. “What’s it all about, man? Why are we here on this earth? What is the meaning of life? Why was I born?” I take faltering steps towards a wider reality. The comic satire of Jean Shepard out of W.O.R. New York, the writing of Hemingway, Philip Wylie, James Michner, D.H. Lawrence, Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, Dostoevski, Freud, Jung, and Henry Miller, the all night conversations over a gallon of cheap red wine gave me the words that could set me free if words could do it.

For a short time, as co-owner of the Trivia Coffee House, as bankrupt ex-coffee house owner, as would be soldier of fortune setting off for South America, I make exploratory steps away from the death grip of our time. I begin to reach for experience instead of success. But, just as I’m breaking free, success grabs me. Deep down inside, I still believe the words they fed me.

Just as I begin to find myself, I’m flooded with successful experience. I set off to seek my fortune. I meet the right girl. Get married. And, end up back is school again, this time in California. I find a good paying job. Earn more money than I ever earned before in my life I work nights and go to school during the day. I make excellent grades. I win the respect of my friends and family. Intellectually I move more and more outside the folds of society. While in action I become more and more ensnarled in its web. The real learning that begins while I’m traveling across the country with Vance and Anne is all but extinguished by the book learning that I receive at State College. As I advance from undergraduate to graduate courses, from lower to middle class, from observer to thinker, all real learning ceases. When I enter the teaching profession and find that not only can I keep up with my fellow professionals but that I surpass them in almost every respect I am totally ensnarled. All the time thinking I am growing more and more liberated, I sink deeper and deeper into the mire. In an effort to make more rapid professional advancement I resign from my first teaching job. It is at this point when by miraculous good fortune I am unable to find another teaching position that I pick up the search again.