1 Copyright © Willie Watson, 2015 Published in 2015 Prague, Czech Republic also by Willie Watson: 155 Sonnets Pink Snow Rheets 2014 Rheets 2013 Twoems What Do Children Like to Do? (with Lenka Brožová) Uncle Willie´s Very Silly Animal Poems The This of the That Tarot Poems (with Marie Brožová) The Alchemist´s Notebook Four Syllables on Water The Guru Kalehuru and Other Poems Poems from Prague 2 Some Notes on the Writing of this Book One day in 2013 a friend gave me a call out of the blue and suggested we meet for lunch. We met at my favorite Chinese restaurant, the place on Slezska Street right across from the back of the big, pink shopping center, where they have the biggest spring rolls I’ve ever seen. I was surprised for a moment when he ordered in Chinese, but then I remembered he’d been to China. After lunch we went for a walk in Riegerovy Sady, one of the most beautiful places on this green Earth (in the city park category). Most of it is on the long side of a fairly steep hill, well wooded but with a magnificent sweep of lawn running down the center and, as you walk along the footpath at the top, you look out and over the town and across the river and there, on the crest of the opposite hill, is Prague Castle, lit up and magical at night but equally impressive and magical kingdom, fairy tale-ish in the daytime. We stopped and sat on a ledge and he said “I read on your blog that you want to write a book,” and I thought “Ah hah, so that’s what this is about.” “I’m not a writer,” he said. “Actually, I’ve tried but it never all comes together but I’ve got a lot of great stories about China, Amsterdam, my farm in America, you name it, I’ve met some crazy people and I’ve done some crazy shit and I think it would make a great book, I’ve got it all written down in my diaries, I’ll get it to you.” And so he did. I was skeptical at first, everybody thinks they’ve got a book in them and most of them are just bullshitting, but I figured I should at least glance at the diaries before I refused. There were two things he was definitely not bullshitting about - first, not being a writer. He is a fantastic talker, a raconteur, he is James Joyce in a pub, he is Sam Clemens in a saloon in old Calaveras County, but his spelling is shit. Not only are lots of words misspelled, but he often didn’t spell them the same way twice. He wrote about importing turquoise from China and I didn’t know if he was talking about Thanksgiving poultry or some automobile part. He must have spelled it 7 or 8 different ways and all of them wrong. Grammar mistakes, redundancies up the wazoo, cliché metaphors, pretty much every writing faux pas you could make, he made it. Second, he really did have a lot of great stories. So, here they are. 3 I’ve decided to change the names of almost everybody in the story, and in a few cases physical descriptions. He wasn’t happy about that at all, but there are reasons. To the reader, I don’t think it will make a great deal of difference. But, as much as I am sure that every word he wrote down and every story he told me is true, I also know that truth is a subjective thing and other people might not see things the same way, so I’m trying to avoid lawsuits. Also, a fair amount of the stories in this book involve activities that are illegal in varying degrees and, as much as I don’t want to get into trouble, I don’t want to drop anybody else in the shit, either. The only names I haven’t changed are a few names of famous people. They’re public figures; they just have to deal with the fact that people’s perceptions of them are part of the public conversation. Don’t have the fame if you can’t take the blame, that’s what I say. Also, I’ve changed the names of a few places, or just left them out, because some of the action takes place in small towns and rural areas where everybody knows everybody and, just by giving the name of the town, I’d be giving away the name of the person. Obviously, places like Prague and Shanghai I’ve left the same. Willie Watson A special thank you to my lovely wife Helena, without whom this book would never have been completed, and to Steve Giglio and Bill Karneges for their comments and corrections. 4 Introduction I haven’t seen any gods yet but I pray to them all just in case. – Guru Sharab I am a lucky guy. Disasters turn to gold for me. My fuckups are monumental, epic, world class fuckups but somehow I always come out in a better place than I was in at the start. I lost everything in the States; my farm, my house, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, boy, don’t ever let anybody tell you that divorce is not a war because it is. My wife got full custody, I left America in shame and disgrace, but that was merely the beginning of my journey and this is the story of my life and my travels in Holland and the Czech Republic and China and a few other places and the wonderful people I’ve met and the lessons I’ve learned along the path to enlightenment, or at least enough enlightenment for a crazy old Hippie like me. I am crazy Jack, the Shit Guru and this is the story of my search for truth, this is the evolution of the dragon. 5 Chapter 1 If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family. – Baba Ram Dass I’m just a typical American, working class, Catholic boy from a typical American town, right smack dab in the heart of the Midwest. I’ve got five brothers and I am the second oldest. My big brother Dom is a serious prick and always was. He bullied me terribly as a kid. Not his fault, I suppose, kids learn by what they see and hear and he saw how verbally abusive our Dad, Dom Senior, was to our Mom, calling her a dumb Pollack all the time. Dom emulated Dad as faithfully as a bear cub mimics its mother’s hunting techniques, carrying on the cycle down through the generations, but for Dom I was in the subservient role. He called me Chink; I guess because I am short and have squinty eyes. We were a second generation Italian family and one thing about my Mom is that she assimilated to that Italian-American-ness, learning cooking from Grandma Pazzo, who was actually from Italy. Grandma Pazzo was the head of our family which, with her two sons and two daughters and all of their spouses and offspring, consisted of almost 30 individuals. We spent all holidays together and relished her spaghetti, calamari and her ‘secret recipe’ cannoli, with a snow of powdered sugar on top. I was lucky to be part of this Italian culture. It wasn’t until I arrived in the Czech Republic that I realized, as in the awakening of a long repressed memory that my mother was actually from this part of the planet, that I am as Slavic as I am Italian. The last time I was back in the States, Dom was bitching about how he’d lost half of his money, he was down to his last million and I said “Hey, try losing it all.” He’s totally lost sight of where we came from, it’s like he doesn’t remember our childhood at all. After me there’s Louie. Dom is just sort of overbearing and obnoxious, but Louie is the one who’s truly a psychopath, no concern for anybody else in the world. My mother called him the terrorist. One day he brought his pit bull over for her to dogsit and of course she agreed, she never said no to any request from us kids, not even after we were all grown up. Like any normal person, though, who lives in society and is aware of things like 6 neighborhood children, mailmen, and liability laws, she put him on a chain in the back yard, so he wouldn’t kill anybody. When Louie got back and saw this he was furious. He went nuts, somehow he wound up on the roof jumping up and down and screaming at the universe and Mom in particular, and that’s how the police found him, because she’d called them. Blood is blood, but there’s something to be said for self- preservation as well. Then came Carlo. Carlo was the sweet one, the nice one, the one who was really the enlightened mystic I am still striving to become, the one who was always the best to our mother. He was also the gay one and he died of AIDS while I was in jail in the Czech Republic. Actually it was suicide, because he was also manic-depressive and taking drugs for everything while he was wasting away and it was all too much so he decided to end it all and Mom actually helped, she gave him the fatal pill.