Brushes with Death: & Brushes with Fame

By Nowick Gray

Life's adventure can be a field of dreams, or a hopscotch of near disasters. A reckless but lucky serial survivor, Nowick Gray relates 66 personal tales of averted death, rewarded by 11 episodes of shaking hands with fame--chance encounters with cultural icons like Allen Ginsberg, Dizzy Gillespie, J. D. Salinger, Colin James.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nowick Gray
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990129070

Book preview

Brushes with Death

by

Nowick Gray

Cougar WebWorks

copyright © 2021 by Nowick Gray

Portions of this book appeared first in previous publications:

Preface: Youth, 1974 – Wattpad Editor’s Selection for Memoir Month, June 2014

The episodes through Blueborn Baby – included in (or outtakes from) My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom

Rendezvous at Jumbo Pass – Rendezvous at Jumbo Pass

Climbing Mount Cooper, Deep Summer – My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness

Crossing the Great Water – The Last Tourist: Traveling Light]

The episodes about Dizzy Gillespie, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Broadbent, Dave Barrett, Earle Birney, and Harold Snepts – My Generation: A Memoir of the Baby Boom

Thanks go to Sivalla Lin for final proofreading and front cover photo.

ISBN 9781990129070

Author website: NowickGray.com

Published by Cougar WebWorks, Salt Spring Island, BC, www.CougarWebWorks.com

Death is the only wise advisor we have. Whenever you feel like everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you are wrong; that nothing matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, I haven’t touched you yet. – Carlos Castaneda, quoted by Gary Z. McGee

Introduction

Brushes with death come in many shades. From full-fledged out-of-body experiences, to near misses and close calls, to highway mishaps, dodging bullets, edgy adventures, stupid risks, fights and wars; sometimes just witnessing disaster, or knowing others not so fortunate to escape it.

There but for the grace of God go I—mother’s mantra.

My many brushes with death and few brushes with fame have shown me how to take to heart the grace of humility and serenity. I may be at times a reckless and lucky survivor of accidents and mishaps; at other times, a Forrest Gump nobody walking beside greatness. Either way, somehow untouched, enduring the middle path of continuity, witness in motion. Neither snared by deadly fate, nor lured to the pedestals of the elite; neither cursed nor especially favored.

Maybe I’m selling myself short, I sometimes ponder. Now there’s my chance, my cue, my contact or connection to the big stage! But it’s a passing dream, a glimpse of what might have been... and if then, for what?

While my eyes gaze upon immortality, I lose my footing or focus, and hover momentarily at the edge of the void.

Not that, not now, not yet!

I come back to who I am. My charmed destiny in the middle, it seems, just might be... to keep living. No more, nor less.

In this incremental success of survival, my near-fatal mistakes are self-forgiven, and aspirations of status-seeking cut down to size. From the middle world, life on earth, I am granted a guarded view of the shadowland of death, or a passing glimpse of the wonderland of stardom, and come back home again.

Prologue: Youth, 1974

All things are possible to the brash youth in his first foray into the world, once he gets his feet wet. Now he knows the ropes, and feels comfortable hobnobbing with the great and powerful, or with the lowly and streetwise. He walks with angels and demons, matching them stride for stride.

With psychic powers turned up high, he converses by night with Nixon, Hitler, Lucifer himself. Accosted by Steppenwolf in the guise of a Frisco wharf rat, he maintains his innocent smile. Drives Nate Thurman’s Rolls, barely managing to reach the pedals; sleeps with the boss’s daughter. Buys a hot little sportscar convertible, spins out on a mountain road between cliff and cliff, dances in the streets of Hollywood. An avant-garde artiste of the new theatre, he appears on cable TV and wows the old ladies of the Mt. Davidson Easter Sunrise Society. He takes a breather in the Nevada desert, the Yosemite snow-swept wilds, the Tahoe ski-hills.

Oil embargo!—Step right up, he’ll fill your quota of gas today. Hearst kidnapped!—he’ll read it hot from the Berkeley newsstand. Watergate!—he’ll check out the testimony live from his air freight office, between pages of Jung and The Last Temptation of Christ.

He can apply to sell ingots for the Kaiser Steel empire, and then volunteer in the dusty courtyard of the free school to teach children arts. He can paint your bathroom or exterior siding, service your airplane or send your car through the speed-wash. When he loses his new job he can go back to his old one, find free housing with old friends.

He can spend a chill night on a wilderness ridge among cougars and wolves; take the part of the police lieutenant in Arsenic and Old Lace. Truly, all things are possible...

This footloose felix is you; you are he; so to you I say, explore, young man, while you’re in the West! Glory in the expansiveness of your condition, your culture and stage of life, the era in which you live. Write your poems and have a class of dancers perform them to your taste; direct the gifted generation-to-come, in ritual dramas of your selection. Dream of Allen Ginsberg, and the next day walk beside him to his poetry reading in your neighborhood. Accept the gift of stolen drugs, pop a few shamelessly, and watch as nothing happens.

Fall asleep while driving the Bay Bridge in the middle of the night—see if God cares. He does, it turns out. Why? You don’t know. You spin the roulette wheel, calling 4. Four comes up. Delighted, you try 5. Five arrives. Pushing your luck, you call 6—why not? And by now more delighted than shocked with the ease of it all, you watch the ball wobble and bounce, and land—in 6. Appalled with the possibilities, you go to Reno where your buddy works, and try the wheel. The cards. The dice. Nothing’s going your way. Down to your last nickel, you drop it in the slot, pull the long greasy handle. It chinks through its gears, clunks home; the little pictures whirr: and you see fifteen bucks worth of change come tumbling out at your feet. Okay, a new stake. Back to the crap table, and with three throws you walk away eighty dollars richer, in a mood to use the last of those free drink tickets.

You’ve come from Baltimore to Oakland: and so does the American league baseball crown. You go to watch them meet in the playoffs, predict correctly the game-winning hitter and pitcher, then in the parking lot after the game, stand in mad passionate rapture with your date, while the crowd walks past in another world.

It’s all very nice with her for a while, but not going anywhere because you’ve already made plans to move on. Thing is, the traffic’s got to be a bit too much. You’re tired of pumping gas, of teaching kids for the love of art. You’ve had your days of revelation on the foggy cliffs beside the Golden Gate. You’ve trod the distant mountains now, and their call is under your skin...

And so he retreats to the still pellucid grove of academe, where his jarred senses and world-honed ego can be soothed once more in the dreamy tones of poesy, the abstract ruminations of finer-tuned souls. Here he can escape the rat race of the city, the traffic jams, the singles bars, the hucksters and mad-eyed preachers of the streets, the jive and the hustle and the double-cross.

He can find his mushrooms wild here, in the tangled Canadian bush: no matter that he still doesn’t have positive identification; they pass through him without effect. Again, he is lucky; no further ahead, but neither behind. Another day passes, another year, another phase of his life. When he meets somebody this time, he begins to think it may be time to get serious. Not that she’s Miss Perfect, but maybe she’ll do—maybe she’s good enough. Maybe good enough is good enough. Who knows, unless you try?

Brushes with Death

Velvet-soft enclave of release, death in which I do not die, receive me.

Assist my surrender, that I may enter innocent into the sacred garden.

– The Mayan Oracle: Cimi, the Discoverer

Birth Pangs

I was so anxious to leave the womb, my first refuge.

Eight months of preparation, I felt, was sufficient. I’d been promised to my sister for her seventh birthday, three weeks hence. But I had no intention of fulfilling someone’s doll fantasy. And I was sick of nicotine and alcohol streaming through my veins.

I can imagine a small silent voice intoning: Out there is jazz; in here is smoke, a crowded theatre. To stay is to suffer the slow boil, froggy me.

So I kicked and squirmed, broke the waters and slithered out.

It seemed so easy, a droplet riding a wave. Propelled toward a glistening shore...

Not like I had a choice; but I failed to anticipate the world I plunged into, a bigger version of the body I came out of—the source of its toxic smoke, chaos of sounds, felt tension.

Blinding light, cold air, rough hands pulling... Snip!

For a moment there was shock, fear... even, might I say, indignant anger, as the cord was cut from the center of my being.

Then—Wham!—came the doctor’s hand on my little red bottom. Whack! Slap!

I screamed, as my mother would say, like the dickens. They calmed me down with a little suckie, my first and only.

Next, the stinging silver drops in the eyes... No pain, no gain, get it?

More injuries followed these insults. The coup de grâce, a hot slash to slice off the end of my lightning rod—snubbed in the bud, like a chick beak for the poultry farm, the slaughterhouse. A parting jab from a needle, to seal the deal.

Yell all I want, thrash with my buttery limbs, it would get me nowhere. At age six they would have to call in reinforcements to hold me down.

Say bye to Mommy, was the message I heard with each assault. We’ve got you now.

Breathe... breathe again... it hurts.

At least I knew my rights to complain, and exercised them to the hilt. But I was not to expect that spongy breast again: it was just a taste, one I would have to do my best to forget. It was off to the incubator for me, the repurposed fish tank for rude little brats who had to learn how to wait their turn.

I’m on my own, now. The circle of love broken, I will learn the principles of autonomous throughput: manufactured nourishment, the anal sphincter, my own thoughts to kill.

Cry a little, they won’t hear. And these other crybabies around me, such entitlement. I will refrain.

If this is the way of the world, I will have to make my own way in it: to find my own home; to peel back the layers of the self; to find out who I am.

What else is life for? They say there are dragons of death just beyond the gates; winds of fate to blow your gains away; a trail of broken hearts, your own included. And just when you think it’s all peachy, watch out.

Looking out for number one, I’ll follow the sun.

I’ll get used to moving on. I’ll change hats, coonskin to fireman to soldier, emulating those I look up to. In the meantime, I won’t despair...

Breathing, still breathing, after all my hoarse cries, I take comfort in the intuition that I will continue.

As with every waystation on the road, I’ll blow this pop stand soon enough.

My mother awaits, in the pea-green visitor’s room; her aching breasts still bound, drying up. I’m in my glass box behind antiseptic walls, squirming my legs, sensing her proximity. She barely registers the magazine on her lap, the Atlantic of July, 1950. Its stories convey either retrospectives of the last big war (The Torpedoes that Failed) or anxieties of the one to come (H-Bomb: Too Damn Close).

Mid-month, mid-year, mid-century: the watershed where I begin; the divide between a past that isn’t mine, and an onrushing present history. This wave will carry me beyond the heavy seas of my parents’ generation, over the boiling reefs of Bikini Atoll—with the great god H-Bomb casting its long and awful shadow across the waters—on a quest for some more tranquil, provisionally safer harbor. And while Mom and Dad will always seem to be looking over their shoulders, haunted by what lies behind, I will find the freedom to move faster, go farther.

War Stories

A leggy young woman, my mother had once ridden, standing up, a pair of horses for the circus; or so the story went. When her first husband contracted a disabling case of polio early on in their marriage, she filed for divorce. She had better things to do, she explained years later to an inquisitive son, than tend a cripple.

Harsh as that sounds, I learned long after her death that it was a cover story for the real reason she left him. She took her two small children with her.

She upgraded, she thought, to my father. Someone with whom to share the required addictions on roughly equal footing. A smoker from age sixteen, my mother would carry her carton of Salems defiantly to her deathbed, still watching her favorite shows on TV.

My father didn’t care to talk much about the war. My mother offered that at sixteen he had quit military school and joined the Air Force.

Why not the Army? I asked him.

Because I knew that while those poor slobs would be sitting in the mud with K rations, we’d be in the officers’ mess eating pork chops.

He ended up piloting B-26s from England to bomb Germany. Whether military targets, or cities, I didn’t think to inquire. I was glad just to hear the harrowing tale of his parachuting to safety—behind enemy lines, was it?—when his bomber was downed by flak over France.

With the fascination of the still-innocent, I studied Lieutenant Gray’s collection of grisly black-and-white photos: aerial shots of pockmarked landscapes and, closer in, portraits of the black, bloated dead—soldiers and horses. With reverence I fingered his parachute, his knapsack and duffel sack, the more benign tools of his trade. In a couple of years I would outfit myself proudly, in officer’s cap and medals, for war games with my friends.

Once my father showed me a long scar on his calf.

Ooh, how did you get that? I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

That’s where the Japs got me, he said with a wink.

Wow, a bayonet?

My mother scoffed, Oh, come on. He flew in Europe, not the Pacific.

My father did run an officers’ club in Japan for a brief stint during the Korean War, so maybe there lay an alternate explanation. Instead he regaled us with another tale about eating monkey brains served up fresh at the table.

Such is the mind of a boy to be enamored with a man like that. Forgiving his absence during the Korean War; acquiescent as he carted us along from city to city. In my first four years we moved four times: from Baltimore to Boston, then Syracuse, Buffalo, and back to Baltimore again, places where my father ran officers’ clubs. Rewarded for his traumatic service with the cushy job of overseeing the collective ritual of forgetfulness, he became immured in the military–corporate culture of drinking, the curse that never forgets.

In 1954, when he turned thirty-three, my father said goodbye to the service and got into the oil business. His rise through the corporate ranks, from retail buyer to executive sales manager, would lead us in five more years to that promised land, Suburbia. Along the way he insisted I call him sir. Yes sir. No sir. The answer didn’t matter—just who was boss.

Oh, your dad must be in the military, I’d always hear when arriving new in town.

No, oil, I’d say.

Life is War

At the age of four I suffered a bout of pneumonia and was hospitalized at Baltimore Memorial—the same institution where I was born and traumatized, and where my little brother Robert St. John had died of a collapsed lung at birth. For him, just two days of hospital half-life, under the glaring light; one lung stuck shut and the other feebly flapping. Back into darkness he flew, like a stork on one wing in the night. My little sister Randall survived, the following year—an even smaller premie, at two and a half pounds. From my brief taste of it so far, I was tempted to the conclusion, Life is war.

The previous week at home, I lay immersed, with my clogged chest, in the sweetly acrid smell of vaporizer steam; hacking rough, ragged coughs; spitting wet green gobs into tissue. In fever I watched the oil painting on the wall come alive: Indians on horseback walking gently into a brick-red desert sunset. In other visions the whole room was a solid,