Tommy Angelo

I remember decades ago hearing about Van Halen’s singer David Lee Roth and his outrageously persnickety demand that there be M&Ms waiting for him backstage at all of his concerts, with all the brown ones removed!

I recall thinking, what a dick. This is rockstardom gone too far. How terrible it must be to have to work with or for this creep. Or really to have anything to do with him at all. The thing is, I always liked Van Halen’s music. I was never a huge fan the way I am with some of the other rock bands. But I always listened to their songs when they came on the radio. Even though their lead singer was a prima donna asshole.

Up until yesterday, if you had brought up Van Halen to me, the first thoughts that would have popped into my head were: Great rock band. Spectacular and innovative guitar player. Great drum and bass grooves, and great drum and bass sound. Great singer too, as a singer, but personally, I can’t stand the guy. That final opinion, the one about the singer David Lee Roth, had grown in my mind over the years, without me even realizing it, because of the M&M thing.

Everything changed yesterday in the span of a few sentences. Kay showed me an article by Dan and Chip Heath that was in the March issue of Fast Company. The writers referenced David Lee Roth and the M&M story for their purpose, which was to make a point about businesses. I will reference the M&M story for my purpose, which is to make a point about assumptions. Here is the pertinent part of the Fast Company article:

Consider Van Halen. In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself — and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Today, wanting to verify all of this, and also curious as to why Roth would let the M&M story live and thrive since it painted him ugly, I searched the web, and I found everything I was hoping to find in one paragraph at Wikipedia:

In 1997, Roth wrote a well-received memoir, entitled Crazy From the Heat. The 359-page book was whittled down from over 1,200 pages of monologues, which were recorded and transcribed by a Princeton University graduate who followed Roth around for almost a year. Among the book’s revelations, aside from stories about backyard parties, Van Halen, and catching malaria in Third world jungles, was the infamous “Brown M&Ms” clause written into Van Halen’s early contract riders. The clause was included in contracts not because of ego, but rather to make sure that structural stage specifications in the contract were read thoroughly and were adequately provided. Roth writes of a time when he found brown M&Ms in a bowl and subsequently had a fit. In the press, he was accused of causing US$85,000 worth of damage to the arena. Most of the monetary damages were due to Van Halen’s staging sinking through the floor. Roth writes, “they didn’t bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty-thousand dollars worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced. It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&Ms and did $85,000 worth of damage to the backstage area. Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?”

If I had a nickle for every time I have made a wrong assumption about someone that caused me or them suffering, I’d have an incalculable sum, because most of the wrong assumptions I make remain wrong forever because I never find out they are wrong. Or at least that’s what I assume.

Here’s what was particularly wrong about my wrong assumption about David Lee Roth and his M&Ms. One of the traits I most admire in a person, and especially in an artist, is someone who, in the words of the Heath brothers, is an “operations expert.” A detail freak. A geek in expressionist clothing. A minutia man. A preparer. Not surprisingly, I admire these qualities because that’s how I want to be. So for 25 years, I have been scolding Roth in my mind, when actually, I should have been praising him for his admirable priorities, and his clever tactic, but I couldn’t, because one wrong assumption has been in the way.

Bottom line: I heretofore commit to continually recommitting to trying to like hell to not make assumptions about people and their priorities and just take things as they are when they are without adding on my usual heaps of judgments and assumptions and other pain-causing crap.

My first year as an altar boy, the masses were in Latin. It took me a long time to learn all the words. I was very proud to have done it and thereby earned the right to be an altar boy. And I was definitely going to be a priest when I grew up.

My second year as an altar boy, they changed everything to English. I was really pissed off at God for making me learn the Latin mass and then changing his mind.

Soon after that, when I was 10, I had my first doubt about my religion. It sprang directly from one specific bit of logic. I already knew that Jesus was the Son of God. He was divine. At age 10 I learned that the Jews thought that Jesus was merely a prophet. He was special, yes, but he wasn’t divine, according to them. And they were absolutely sure they were right. But my side was sure we were right too. This meant that there was a large group of people – either us or them – that was absolutely sure they were right, but must be absolutely wrong, since both sides could not be right. How could I really know for sure which side was right? Wasn’t it at least possible that my side was wrong? I determined yes, it was possible. In that case, it was simply up to me to pick a side. Yet I really had nothing tangible to go on.

And thus was born on the earth another agnostic.

Over the next ten years I morphed gradually until one day I decided to call myself an atheist based on the grounds that I really, really, really didn’t think there was an interactive all-knowing omni-present universe-creating being.

20+ years after that, I started meditating, which is basically a type of concentration exercise. Because of my mental workouts every morning, I am now able to beam myself back in time and do things like feel the rack of bells in my hand that I used to ring during mass when the priest drank from the chalice and ring again when he ate the Eucharist. I can feel my knees on the hard wood of the first of three stairs that lead up to the altar. From side stage, I look up at the priest. I can see him move ever so slowly. I can hear little bits of throat-clearing and clothes rustling from the cavernous reverberating chamber where people are sitting in silence.

I can see the priest lift the chalice to drink. With two hands. Father always used two hands.

From my books on meditation and mindfulness, I have learned how to pay attention to what I am doing. When I first get up in the morning, I walk slowly to the kitchen sink, I turn the water on, I hear it, I see it, I put a glass under the water and I watch and listen as the glass fills. I turn the water off. I stand straight. I put my feet together and make sure again that I am standing straight. I raise the water to my mouth. With two hands. Always two hands. It is impossible to be unmindful with two hands on the chalice.

Saturday night at 8 p.m., I was home alone when my phone rang. It was Kay. “Listen to this!” she screamed. I strained my ears and mind to discern whatever patterns I could. I couldn’t make it out. But I did recognize the sounds of loudness.

Kay was calling from the Oakland Coliseum. She was at the Elton John and Billy Joel concert. Her friend Betsy’s company had bought a box that holds 12, but the day before the show, they only had 11 bodies. Kay got the call. I was way more excited for her than she was. Until I got the call. She was happily hysterical…

“I really really REALLY wish you could be here!” she shouted. “You should see these guys on their pianos! Wow! It’s amazing! They are having the time of their lives! It’s like they are little boys!”

And then there was Daltrey and especially Townshend at the Super Bowl. Pete Townshend, the definition of unleashed chaos otherwise known as rock and roll. His command of the force is no more or less than it ever was. And then there’s the Neil Young concert I went to not that long ago. A man who has never been pretty, but has always been beautiful to me. And there’s the Tom Petty concert a few years before that. I was so inspired I came home and wrote a book. And The Rolling Stones – Yes Mick, I do know that you know it’s only rock and roll, and yes, you’ve convinced me, you really do like it. And I love you for the reminder.

Much of what is me – my philosophy, my outlook, my artistic flow – came directly from the words and music of rock and rollers. When I was young, they were young, and they taught me how to be young. Now that I’m older, they are older too, so now they are teaching me how to grow old, by continuing to teach me how to be young. And that’s the lesson that never grows old.

Dear blog readers:

This is a true story that I wrote up back when it happened. I just found it in a folder called “really old non-poker stories.” Enjoy!

Battle of the Bands

This was late 1980’s. I was playing in a very good band that was regionally famous. We’d been together for a long time. All five of us were full-time musicians, making enough to buy houses and raise families and such. We were what one might call: for real.

We played about half the time locally, in major bars that booked us 5 nights per week, and the rest of the time we went on the road, playing the same type of week-long engagements. We had a truck, a van, and CB radios. One day we were traveling from one gig to another, out in the middle of nowhere, and we passed a huge dance hall that had a giant marquee that said, “Battle of the Bands — Today at 1:00 PM — Entry fee: $25.”

It was 11:30 a.m., and it was a full day off for us. We did not have to set up and play that night. The other band members wanted to turn around, go back to the dance hall, and enter the competition. I reminded them that we had taken a solemn vow years ago to never again enter a Battle of the Bands. But the setting was apparently too sweet to resist. We mulled it over, and like an alcoholic falling off the wagon, we turned around and pulled into the dance hall parking lot.

We went inside and met Delbert, the owner. He told us that the dance hall is only open on Saturday nights, except for one Sunday per year, today. He said that the local talent prepares all year for this day.

There were nine entrants. Each act was to do three songs. We were scheduled last. First prize was $500. Second prize was $200. Third prize was an antique accordion.

(I secretly imagined that I could throw the competition so precisely as to land us third prize, since I was the only one in the band who knew his way around a piano keyboard, and I’d often thought about getting an accordion just to have one.)

We enjoyed the show from backstage. My favorite performer was Ginger, a delightful, confident nine-year-old girl who sang Patsy Cline songs. She was good, by any standard. The most amusing performer was Rodney. Rodney was a giant man who played a miniature harmonica. Everyone loved him. Another crowd favorite was a band called “The Boys up the Creek.” They had not been boys for 50 years.

As it became clear what the situation was, I had an attack of conscience. I called for a band huddle, just before we went on stage. I asked the band if anyone else was feeling funky about swooping down like hawks and snatching these people’s $500 and then flying away. They mumbled and nodded and shifted their feet. But we all knew it was too late to back out.

We hit the stage as usual, full throttle. The music, the lights, the crowd, it always infused us with a cohesive energy that was 10 times bigger than the sum of our parts, all in the time it takes to count to four.

By our third song, the dance floor was hopping, for the first time all day. At the end of the song, we were supposed to be done with our set. Delbert got on the house PA and yelled, “You can’t stop now boys!” (Translation: “People are buying drinks now.”) So we played for another half hour.

Backstage again, a wrinkled, gray man approached us. “You guys are the best band that’s played here in 40 years.” He was one of the judges. We were a lock for first prize.

Delbert took the stage. He announced third place. My accordion fantasy was shattered. Then he announced second place. It was Ginger. She radiated pure bliss as she accepted the $200. Then Delbert put on his biggest voice while we anticipated the inevitable, “And first place goes to…”

“Rodney Jones!”

Huh? We were dismayed, yet relieved. Shocked, yet comforted. After we packed up our instruments and loaded them into the truck, we went out into the hall and we found Delbert mingling at the judge’s table. “Great job, boys. Let’s talk some business. I want to hire you guys and work you into my rotation for Saturday nights.”

The person in our band who is our front man, and energy source, and who usually does all the speaking in these situations, is my cousin, A.J. Angelo. A.J. said, “Thanks Delbert. Yeah, we’ll talk. But about today’s contest, I mean, not that we expected to win or anything, but still, we couldn’t help but wonder why we didn’t even get third place.” He was stammering, somewhat embarrassed, but gnawingly curious, as we all were, as to just what the heck happened here.

One of the judges looked up quickly, with concern, and said to us, “Are you saying that you guys were in the competition? Delbert came up to us half way through your first song and told me and the other judges that he had hired you guys to finish off the show with a bang. Delbert? What’s going on here?”

“S’okay,” Delbert said. “These are good boys. They didn’t want to run off with Rodney’s money anyways, did ya boys?”

Delbert had read us perfectly. How did he know? It didn’t matter now. All was right in the world, except for one thing. “Hey Delbert,” A.J. said with a grin. “Do you think we could get our twenty five bucks back?”

Below is a post I just posted at DeucesCracked.com, where my video series The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment recently won three awards.

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One of my favorite academy award acceptance speeches was from last year, when the Coen brothers won best picture for No Country for Old Men. One of them said something like, “Thank you, academy, for letting us play in our own little corner of your sandbox.”

That’s how I feel right now.

Another thing that was great about their speech is that it was very short. They are probably good at that from having won lots of awards. Well, this is my first time at this. So I’m going to take my time. :-)

Around 2003, in the middle of the poker explosion, when poker websites were sprouting up all over the place, and players and writers who had a name were aligning themselves with websites, I had a conversation with my wife during which I made two predictions:

1) I said that a few years from now, there would be lots of players who had become good at betting since the explosion, and some of them would realize that in order to continue to significantly increase their earn, they would need to move some of their improvement energy away from betting strategy, and divert it to discipline problems they have in areas like tilt, quitting, bankroll, and health, both mental and physical. I decided to become a poker coach, and I based my coaching program in part on that prediction.

2) I said that someday I would probably align myself with a website. I told her I had no idea what type of site it would be, or why it would happen. The main prediction I made to her was that I would only do it once.

A few years later, my good friend Joe Tall called me up to tell me about DeucesCracked. I already knew Chris and Rob from the 2+2 forums and I was a big fan of their writing and thinking and attitude. From my happy little home I watched with great enthusiasm as their company and union grew. And then a while later Joe called me up to tell me about the plans to merge with Jay and Chuck of 3bet.net. I was in on a couple group phone calls where the topic was me. Some brainstorming happened about how I might be involved in some way. Nothing came of it, in terms of action. All I remember was feeling very, very excited about the whole thing. Their vision and maturity and business savvy blew me away. I knew that DC was going to be something very special.

In January of 2008 I met Jay and Chuck in San Francisco and we tooled around for a couple days. Right after that, I talked it over with my wife, and we made one of the easiest big decisions I’ve ever made. There’s only one website for me from here on out. We had no idea in what professional capacity I might be involved with DC, or if I would do anything other than read and write posts. What I knew was that I had a home.

And then along came Wayne, and the idea of the Eightfold Path series, and the many conversations Wayne and I had laying out the outline, and then we did the first recordings, and then I started recording piano bits and inserted them in between our conversations, and then I went to Seattle a couple times to work with Rob and we built the first few episodes, and then more recording with Wayne, and more piano playing, and more audio engineering by me, and Rob and I designed a way to build episodes remotely, and by the summer of 2009, when the last few episodes were coming together, I was in the same kind of groove I was in during the late stages of working on Elements of Poker, which is basically as happy as it is possible for me to be, consumed with and by a project in which I had the support and wisdom of excellent persons to draw on, while I enjoyed the freedom and thrill of making thousands of final decisions.

So that’s one part of the joy of EPTPE and me. The other thing, the bigger thing, is about the message of the series, which is, in my opinion, in a word: peace. Somehow by being battered about by poker, I found myself on a path toward peace. And I wanted to share that journey for the benefit of others. It is a great honor for me, and Wayne, and Rob, to have EPTPE receive three awards. Winning the “Away from the Table” award is awesome. Winning “Best Overall Video” is very awesome. But the one that I’m really excited about is the “Best Episode in a Series” award, for episode 8. There was a couple months between when Wayne and I finished recording the conversations in episode 7, and started recording episode 8. Much extra planning and effort went into E8. My vision was to have it be a stand alone work. Kind of like, “If you are only going to watch one episode of this series, watch this one.” And my primary hope, really my only hope, was that E8 would land on the viewer like a sledgehammer, and like a feather, at the same time, and say hey, wake up, and soften up. I am going to allow myself to believe that because E8 was recognized by this award, my hope came true.

With heaps of gratitude,

Tommy

Have you ever walked out of a concert with an odd sensation in your face and then realized that what you are feeling is muscle strain? Yesterday, Kay and I saw a show in San Francisco that exhausted my face.

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/

Garrison Keillor is one of the most intelligent, funny, and charming performers I have ever seen. His band is stellar. His piano player plays how I play when I have fantasy dreams of me on the piano bench being able to play exactly what is in my head.

Here’s a link from the page above about the band:

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/about/cast/shoe_band.shtml

What you see at a Garrison Keillor concert is a live radio show being produced. The show airs on PBS on Saturdays at 6:00 p.m and is replayed on Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m.

I’ve heard the radio show many times. Watching it happen is something else altogether, especially the hysterical segments where he tells a story while three people stand alongside him doing sound effects, and acting out characters, like old-time radio. The pace is so fast and they are so tight you’d think they’d rehearsed it for months. Except it’s a weekly show, with one actual performance, and that’s it. Never done again. It’s one of the most indescribable things I haven’t tried to describe.

Garrison is a genius writer.

And a graceful performer.

With a heart of gold, and a message of love.

And the music…

In the show we saw, one of his guests was an opera singer, which seemed fitting since we were at the magnificent War Memorial Opera House San Francisco. I’m not a fan of opera. It’s not that I don’t like it. I’ve simply never been to one. Two of the three songs that Raul Melo sang were comical. One was to the tune of some famous opera song, with the words changed. He sang about being a tenor in the opera. One of the repeated lines was “I love to die.”

Melo sang one straight-up opera song, no comedy added. He even brought out his own piano player. I closed my eyes the whole time and listened. I heard the person next to me move, I heard the person behind me clear his throat. I never knew how to temporarily clear my mind out and just listen until I started meditating. I listened to the singing. For the first time I got a glimpse of why some people really like opera.

When Garrison comes to your town, a great deal of the show is about your town. The material he did pertaining to San Francisco had me and the other 3000 people in the sold out show in a state of hilarity that was enough to, well, like I said, make my face ache.

My goal for 2010 is to not set any goals. So far so good. I’ve been up for two hours, and I have not set a single goal yet. Except … Damn! … about 5 minutes ago, I set a goal of writing a blog post this morning. Wow, this living-in-the-moment thing is a bitch! No wonder almost everyone almost never does it. It’s very tricky. I’ll try to demonstrate the basic problem…

I want to live in the moment more often, as in, be right here, right now, wherever and whenever here and now happens to be. I want to be aware of my mind’s activity, aware of my body’s arrangement, aware of my breathing, and aware of my surroundings. But the mere act of thinking those very thoughts takes me away from full awareness. See what I mean? And the act of typing blows any hopes of total awareness out of the water. After six years of meditating every morning and doing many mindfulness practices throughout my days, I am still unable to be aware of my typing fingers and be outside of the thoughts I’m typing about at the same time. The same barrier shows up at the piano. I think if I were ever to remain entirely conscious of my body, mind, and breathing while improvising music, I’d probably just wisp away in a cloud of quarks.

Okay, let’s start again…

My goal for 2010 is to consistently and gradually increase the frequency of goalless moments that I experience. My goal is more goallessness. My challenge is to see nothing as a challenge. Where did that come from? That’s another goal altogether. Let’s see, that would mean I want to see the challenge of goallessness as not being a challenge. Hmmm. Okay, how about this one: My desire is desirelessness. Alright, this is getting ridiculous. 20 minutes ago I set out with one simple goal for 2010, and I’ve blown it already. Stop… breathe… restart… reset. Okay. I am observing. I am observing that my stomach is empty. My goal is to put food into it. Finally! A goal I can sink my teeth into! Bye!

I’ve had many years when this time of year was the worst time of the year for me. Especially from 1990 to 1997. Those were the first seven years of my poker-playing career. I went broke in December every year. Around 1993, I noticed the pattern, vowing to be careful when the trees went bare. But it didn’t matter. Winter would come, and I’d run bad for a day or two, and that would make me play bad for a week or two, and ugh, I’d get despondent, desensitized, depressed. I’d keep playing, and I’d keep losing, and I’d beat myself up for playing bad, and I’d fall into a funk that made no sense and had no hope.

Just when it couldn’t get any worse, it did. On came the pressure. The pressure to buy presents for my family. I was supposed to be generous. And I really wanted to. But I had no money. I was supposed to have on a happy face. But I was fucking miserable. Can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to play that game now. Please, not now. Don’t march me through that paltry patronizing parade of pomp and presents again. And don’t even tell me I should be grateful. Not again. That was the worst of all. Listening to little speeches about how great it is just to be alive. Go fuck yourself.

Looking back at those woeful holiday seasons from a dozen years later, I think I can see what was really going on. The problem – as it so often is – was the assumptions that ruled my life, my thinking, and my actions. I assumed that Christmas pressure was real. I assumed that my obligations to shop were so important that it was right and proper that my happiness should depend on my ability and willingness to… to what… buy my dad a tie? I assumed that if I bought stuff and wrapped it up, I deserved to be happy. And if I couldn’t, or didn’t, or if I did and I didn’t feel good about it, then that meant I was a pathetic failure and I deserved to be unhappy.

I assumed that my actual worth was somehow related to my financial worth and the subsequent purchasing power it gave me.

I assumed that in order to give, I had to give a thing.

It never occurred to me to question all these bogus assumptions. That’s because I didn’t even know they were there. Do you ever stop and think, “I assume that if I stand in the rain I will get wet?” Of course not. Some assumptions are so imbedded in us that we don’t even think about them. That’s how it was with my assumptions about giving at Christmas. No awareness of them whatsoever. Total blindness. The result was that by putting so much attention on giving things, I was unable to give myself. But of course I couldn’t see that. Like I said, I was blind.

Since then, my vision has improved. The way I see it now is that the most important present I can give is my presence. Whether I’m talking on the phone with someone, or emailing, or in the same room, I just need to show up, completely – as in not be somewhere else, mentally.

This applies to the moment of physical gifting too. When my mother-in-law opens the gift I bought for her, I shouldn’t be worrying about if she’ll like it. When my brother opens the book I chose for him, I shouldn’t be wondering if he’ll read it. When my wife reads out loud the poem I wrote for her, I shouldn’t be spinning around in my head, thinking that she might think it’s stupid, thinking that she might be disappointed when she realizes I didn’t buy her anything, thinking, thinking, thinking. No. I should just relax, and hear the sound of her voice. I should just settle myself, and listen to the meaning she puts into the words. (And be ready to hand her a hanky.)

As it happens, the best gift I can give – full attention – is the least expensive of all.

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Last night, this little band of blowhards led a procession of 100 adults through the nighttime streets of Palo Alto on a “pub crawl.”

The pipers and people came together in this way for the 13th consecutive year to celebrate the birthday of Smokey Charles. Smokey is known about town for his wisdom and generosity.

The party started at Smokey’s house, which is where the picture was taken. It was soon dark, and the other pictures I took of the parade-in-action didn’t come out. We visited seven bars. At each bar, the band went inside, found a corner, and went at it. There were two drummers, not pictured here.

To get from bar to bar, the band led us along the sidewalks in the heart of town while playing, and the adults, pretending to be children, frolicked behind.

My favorite part was when they tuned up. The blowers would line up in front of the band leader (also not pictured here), and one at a time, they would approach him, and as they blew, he would tune their pipes by twisting them and adjusting the length. They did this several times throughout the evening. It reminded me of any tender grooming ritual that any other species might do for one another.

And then, there’s the sound. The droning, ceaseless root note upon which all is built. The high notes that are grasped at but never quite reach full throatedness. The heritage, the culture, the pride that says, “Okay, so it ain’t the prettiest sound ever made, but it’s ours. And if you don’t like it, drink more.”

It was great fun to watch the people watch the parade. There’s nothing quite like a marching column of skirted wheezebags to bring a smile to a face.

Wilbur King lived in Middletown, Ohio. He raised five spectacular daughters. The fifth one, Shannon, was the first love of my life. It was 1980. We were 22. Wilbur scared the shit out of me.

Before I met him on my first trip to the King homestead, all I knew about Wilbur was that he worked in a steel mill, and that he had a bass boat on which he went bass fishing. When we met, I learned two more things. I learned that Wilbur had powerful, constrictor hands. And I learned that he scared the shit out of me. But not because he had rearranged my phalanges. It was nothing more than the way he looked at me, a steely stare. I didn’t understand it until years later, when I realized that to him I was just one more luster wanting to do a daughter.

Shannon’s mom had a really stupid idea. She said to Wilbur, “Why don’t you take Tommy out fishing with you in the morning?”

Fast forward to 6 a.m. the next day. I was awake. This was deeply wrong.

I climbed into Wilbur’s truck and off we went to the lake, just a couple of guys who would each much rather be alone right now. The first thing that happened was that I didn’t say anything, and by doing so, I had set the tone for the morning. Wilbur followed my lead. For the next two hours, he either didn’t have any urges to speak, or he resisted them all.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. When we got to the boat, some sounds did come from Wilbur’s face. “Get on the boat,” I heard him say.

I jumped into the conversation. “Okay,” I said.

Another thing he said was, “Untie that rope.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound hearty despite the trembling.

Soon we were in the quietest place I’d ever been, adrift on a sheet of liquid glass. Wilbur was fishing. I was just sitting. I’d probably been in places this quiet before. It’s just that I made too much noise to notice. Not today. I was frozen in terror by the tension of the human silence. If I had spoken then, in Wilbur’s temple, during the heart of his ceremony, I believe the sheer force of the will of Wilbur would have struck me dead.

After a while, he packed up his equipment and he steered the boat to shore. When we were up against the dock, I knew it was time to get off the boat and I did so without even having to be told.

“Here,” Wilbur said, as he tossed me a rope which I then tied to the boat-holding rope-wrap thingie.

“Got it,” I replied, with just a touch of sailor vigor.

When we were back at the house, we went in the side door, which leads you through the kitchen. Mrs. King was standing at the sink. I was right behind Wilbur, so I was able to hear it when he walked by his wife, touched her on the shoulder, leaned into her ear, and said, “I like this one.”