Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

Acknowledgments: “The author wishes to express his gratitude for the good graces of several people who have invaluable support and inspiration to the wiring of this book. … Ma Jaya and her tireless workers at Kashi Ranch, for the blessings they’ve brought to a suffering people.”

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Pg. 83 “As it happens, Winston and I do not require the blessing of the church – for any number of reasons, but mostly because we’re already married. Last April, Ma officiated.

“Ma is something else. A guru from Brooklyn who has never lost her stevedore’s swagger or street tough’s lip. She runs an ashram in Florida, with eighty or a hundred in permanent residence, and a constant flow of pilgrims. She would call herself a Hindu – I think – but her teachings cast a very wide net. Tattoos peek through her saris, and she has enough piercings and bangles to set off the alarms at LAX. A caste mark on her forehead, Revlon bright.

“But it was some months before I saw any of that. Stevie was in his last summer when the first calls came, messages left by one of Ma’s lieutenants asking me to come by and meet , her: “You mean a lot to her.” I balked. I’d struggled with the various denial systems purveyed by raft of New Age gurus, the ones who filled whole auditoriums in Hollywood, promising that if we loved ourselves enough we wouldn’t die. Tapes available at the door, $29.95, no checks please. Courses in miracles, follow the light, anger will kill you faster than AIDS. Et cetera.”

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Pp. 84-87) “I was not in the market for gurus, thanks. By the time Ma’s people called again, about three months later, Stevie had been dead a week and I was stiff as a corpse myself, staring at the ceiling. I was given to understand that Ma made regular visits to Los Angeles four times a year, taking over the house of one of her disciples and welcoming people in, especially those with HIV.

“But what does she do, exactly?” I asked in some confusion.

“I could hear the shrug through the phone, as if there were things that didn’t translate into words. ‘She teaches,’ came the reply at last. ‘Your book is very important to her.’

“A bungalow south of Melrose – tidy little front years all up and down the street till you got to Ma’s place, where the overflow of pilgrims spilled out and sprawled in the grass. The porch was a heap of shoes, because you were meant to walk unshod into the presence of the guru. Inside there were men curled up on the floor on straw mats, clearly in the very last stages. Others slumped in wheel chairs. But the prevailing mood was holiday bustle, as several long-haired types in harlequin dishabille bore platters to the groaning board of the vegetarian feast, for three days feeding round the clock. No evidence, as a Lourdes, that anyone had flung his crutches aside, healed by faith. Nothing, in fact, that smacked of religion.

“They led me in to see her, sitting in lotus on a wicker chair, more veils than Salome, though non to cover her beaming face. As soon as she saw me she shrieked in Brooklynese to the twenty or thirty disciples who jammed the little bedroom: ‘All right, now nobody mention God! He doesn’t want to hear that crap!’

“Then I was enfolded in her embrace as she brayed with excitement, calling in more and more people till we were like sardines in there. ‘This is the man who wrote my Bible,’ she announced with a gush of pride, then made me sit on a chair face to face with her while the others sat cross-legged on the floor. She told me how she visited the county homes in Florida, where the most wretched of those with AIDS were taken to die. Many of these had been abandoned by their families, denied the comforts of ‘traditional’ religions. And Ma crawled into bed with them and kissed their lesions. Her raucous guttersnipe’s laugh preceded her down the puke-green corridors as the dying perked up to greet her. She came to them completely unafraid of death, honored in fact to be in its presence, and gave them all a bluesy sort of comfort. Without the God crap.

“Ma worries that I paint too bleak a picture of the county homes – which aren’t so bd, Bina assures me, run by dedicated and compassionate staff. My own theory is that if it’s not so bleak, it’s because Ma’s presence has changed these places, given them life. Apparently she often reads aloud from Borrowed Time, especially the parts that tell about loving till the very end, the minor victories: a walk to the corner, a good foot rub. I don’t know if Ma understands that the book and I are not the same, or to put it another way, that I’m not remotely as wise as the book. Not that I’m being humble – a feeling my friends would never accuse me of – but rather that I have a sense of the book’s own journey, the dark places where it can go and I can’t.

“The bedside of a frightened man of color, for instance – hardly a bag of bones as he arched against the pain. He loved to hear Ma read about me and roger, almost a folk tale to him. ‘I wish I had one of my own,’ he sighed, meaning the book. ‘But you can’t read, can you?’ retorted Ma. Illiterate all his life, and almost blind besides, he shrugged, like Bina over the phone when I asked her what Ma did. She handed him her copy.

“It was his prize possession, apparently, from that day on. His only possession, Ma would be quick to tell you, there in the death camp of Palm Beach County. And just before he went a few weeks later, he summoned a nurse so he could dictate his will. She must’ve thought it was the dementia creeping up, but humored him by getting paper and pen. ‘I leave my book of Borrowed Time,’ he whispered, ‘to anyone who can read.’ Signed with and X and duly witnessed.

“Who is the priest here? Where is God exactly?” Don’t look at me. These deathbed wills are like those Christmas trees at Starcross – they’d throw you out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on your ear if you tried to pass it off as fiction. I admit to a certain amount of religion by association, but for healing purposes the touch and the teaching are all Ma. I am just a useful text. If people get restless during a group audience, chatting among themselves as they shift their aching knees, she is liable to bellow for silence. ‘I’m the holy mother around here,’ she squalls. ‘And there’s only room for one, so shut p and listen.’ The Auntie Mame of gurus.

“Winston took to coming with me when I made my seasonal visits, figuring this was the nearest he would see me in a spiritual mode (if you don’t count ripping up the Pontiff’s picture, which I do out of solidarity with Sinead). Ma embraced us both. We didn’t stay for darshan , her hour of public teaching in a rented tent in the back yard. I made my salutations and withdrew, more out of respect for her than for a faith I didn’t share. But when, one Sunday afternoon in spring, Ma happened to mention in passing that she’d married a lesbian couple the night before – well, it seemed the most natural thing to ask her to bless us too.

“Ma is emphatically not the sort of person you have to ask twice. Scarcely pausing for breath, she drew our hands together and held our eyes with hers – ‘Look at the dot’ – as she spun the ritual out of her heart. Seemingly impromptu, but then blessing is what Ma does. Word spread quickly among the assembled disciples and pilgrims, and they all hugged us joyfully and led us out to the driveway feast. Ma introduced Winnie and me and the lesbians at darshan -- we made an exception and stayed that night – and Arlo sang us a wedding song.”