An Open Letter to My Anonymous Commentator

Dear Anonymous,

Why do you continue to send comments to me? I admit this blog is futile. I will not defend it or myself. Believe me, "pathetic" is often how I feel, not only about this site but about my life in general. I too often wonder if Wantu is real or a sign of some deeper disturbance within me; and if my experience of Wantu is simply some sort of illusion or psychological break, then how sad that would be, for Wantu is truly a pathetic figure and his bird, even more so. My experience of Wantu was, and continues to be, sadness upon sadness upon sadness. And the pigeon, well he just left me cold. If you have any advice, Anonymous, for how I might attract some other figures to interact with in my life, I would like to hear it. I do continue to attend AA. I do not do drugs. Wantu is as real as any experience I've every encountered (I realize this may not be saying much). The changes in me can only be traced to him. Please don't be angry with me Anonymous, it just makes me envious, envious for a kind of ignorance I can no longer enjoy.

Wantu's First AA Meeting

What I remember from that first meeting is the bird. The bird standing, unaccompanied, in the Christian education wing of First Presbyterian Church. It was a young woman in a baby blue windbreaker who drew our attention. Arriving a good half hour after the meeting had started she gave a series of "Whoos!" in the hallway. Startled, we stood and pushed our way out of the classroom and saw the woman pressed against the nursery room door with the pigeon silhouetted against the green exit light. An old drunk named Wolfgang elbowed forward to get a better look, then stepped back onto my boots at the sight of the two-legged creature. The facilitator, a security guard and recovering crackhead, took charge. After directing a flat-topped woman to crack the basement door, he encouraged us all to make clapping sounds. It was in the midst of this applause that Wantu stepped out from the men's room. Our hands slowed as the little man looked up and down the hallway, strode over to the pigeon, bent down, cupped the bird in both hands, and dropped it down the front of his shirt. The bird sank beneath Wantu's buttoned plaid, then rebounded, his profile emerging at Wantu's nape, the left claw visible above the third button.

The room went still. We stared, releasing a disturbed silence. Like stumbling across a missionary in the bush, we natives of the First Presbyterian AA meeting weren't sure if we should filet the odd stranger or welcome him.

It's not unusual to see a human being with a bird--a pedestrian shouldering a golden Macaw or a colorful neighbor with an African grey parrot, but to hold against one's breast a bird that is commonly seen scrounging in dumpsters, shitting in parking lots, pecking at dried french fries; to have this bird, with a single red-ringed eye staring, as Wolfgang later remarked, "was like finding a man in an alley with his fly down and his one-eyed monster gaping at you." It was Scott, the facilitator, who ended the stand-off. Familiar to the range of human perversities he called to us, "Circle up."

I can't say why Wantu attended the Wednesday night meeting at First Presbyterian Reno; maybe he just needed a restroom. The more time I spent with Wantu, the more I realized his decision making process was unconscious--although that may be overstated. It might be more accurate to say that his thinking wasn't conscious. Wantu seemed to think in instincts: He needed a bathroom so he walked into the nearest building. A man said, "Circle up," and having no other appointments, he joined the circle.

The meeting began with the reading of the creed: a description of human weakness, an invitation to transparency, a dream of restoration. Wantu sat, his feet eighteen inches from the floor, the bird's face pressed against his hairless chest--the red eye watching without expression, just like his companion.

As custom, we began to open and release the carnal desires--wild turkey, Kentucky bourbons, forty ounce malts. We talked until we all smelled of death and tears. When it came Wantu's turn you could taste the curiousity on our lips, voyeurs every one. Wantu began to speak. What he shared at this first meeting and subsequent gatherings was so strikingly plain and domestic that we couldn't help but weight his words with our own burdens. What did Wantu say? I can't quote him directly. Most of it was entirely forgettable. He'd say something like:

"The pond filters in the park turn on at five a.m. The ducks do not mind. A man with a green jacket lays seed at the water's edge. That is how the ducks get food."

We'd nod at one another thinking: He got wasted on Cold Duck and woke up in the park.

Women and Wantu

Women found him endearing--the soft mustache, the fuzzed sideburns--like a boy dressed up in his father's clothes, adorable. It was difficult for a woman not to reach out and pet his black hair, or stroke his tea cup hand, or pinch his rounded shoulder. Wantu permitted it all.

It was the pigeon who gave women pause. Every woman knew this was a bird of the streets, a tramp, a garbage picker. All associations with pigeons were unclean, causing even the maternal to shudder and suspect something tawdry, even sinister, about a small man befriending such a vagrant bird.

Why Wantu and The Pigeon Were Together

To be understood. This was the basis of their relationship. Is there any greater pleasure? Like two dancers who no longer follow the mechanics, who simply intuit--turn and glide as one. This is what the bird and the hafling lived. Complete and constant transparency. Is it any wonder that many of us felt a mixture of awe and envy?

Something Wantu Once Said to Me

We were on the patio drinking Cokes. The neighbor's cat was perched on the fence, following the pigeon, preparing to pounce. "Eye of the Tiger" was playing on the kitchen radio, although it had no significance nor nostalgia for either of us. Wantu was watching the cat, and then, as if he talked like this all the time, he said: "To a predator there is only what is in front. Look, see? Everything is food to him. The pigeon looks in opposite directions, and in his mind they are the same. That is why the pigeon is free."

The Pigeon's Sermon According to Wantu's Friend Roy

I spoke with Roy at the ascension, after most of the others had long gone home. Here's what he said, "If there was one sermon the Pigeon could preach it would be this:

There is no meaning to any of this. And yet, God has a plan."

The Limitations of Shame Theory in Regard to Wantu

How could he be ashamed?
Shame was unrecognizable to Wantu. Like telling a man to feel his womb; it could only be imagined. There was no self-hatred in Wantu, no inner-critic. As far as the voice of self-hatred, Wantu was an interior mute.And how could you call him humble? Humility was not a virtue for Wantu--it was the only possible existence. Without shame there could be no off-setting grandiosity, no self-inflation. There was only Wantu. Wantu and his pigeon. Or, more accurately, pigeon and his Wantu.

How They Met

[This description is based on a conversation I had with Wantu in the Washoe County Jail, in May of 2000]

Wantu waited in his Chrysler Lebaron with the canvass top down. He scanned the square from his parking spot, looking over the driver door (thanks to the Graco booster seat). He was there because the dream had told him to be there. He did not question, nor analyze dreams. For Wantu there was no “meaning” in dreams. They were as literal as any waking experience. Dreams happened, like day happened, like nodding to the mailman, or eating scrambled eggs; you flew with fairy wings, you wrestled a mule in your kitchen, or made love to your grandmother--these nocturnal experiences were as they appeared. Didn’t his feelings verify this? So when a hunter in camouflage, rose from a goose blind one night and told him to go to Jack London square he listened. Upon waking, he dressed and drove the Lebaron into downtown Oakland, to the waterfront, to the appointed square, and waited.

As he waited the radio played. Wantu liked radios. It was rare to be in a car or visit Wantu at his home and not hear the radio playing. Not that there was any station loyalty. The car dial was set to an oldies station, the radioshack in the workshop chatted with conservative news-talk, other electronic speakers caught the signals of a variety of country, pop, and public programming. It seemed as if Wantu simply turned them on and then stopped the dial on the first signal to catch.

At this moment, the moment they met, the radio was playing that Gloria Gaynor song, the one about survival, though this has no relevance, nor symbolic meaning.

The only life within the square that morning was a grey-coated congregation of pigeons, pecking at a Taco Bell wrapper. The wrapper was goldenrod. There was a slight breeze off the bay that morning and from time to time the paper would glide a few feet across the paved bricks and the pigeons would adjust, fluttering their wings and re-position themselves in relation to the bits of damp tortilla. While the mob moved round and round the golden raft, one pigeon stood transfixed above the churning flock. This pigeon stood in the morning light, his neck an oily rainbow. He stood upon the hunched shoulders of a wolf whose shadow stretched and darkened his hungry brethren. This pigeon showed no interest in tortilla. This piegon appeared disconnected to the creatures whose shape and coloring he reflected. This pigeon was still and focused, focused on a point beyond the square. That point was Wantu’s face.

Wantu turned and met the pigeons good eye. The pigeon released an anointment of pure white that ran along the cast iron fur of the Jack London wolf. Wantu took this as a sign.

The dream answered, Wantu stood, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. The pigeon, though quite capable of flight, stepped purposely across the square, circled the backside of the car, and hopped up into the passenger seat. Wantu got behind the wheel, slid the belt into the plastic slots of the booster seat, peered over the wheel and drove on. The pigeon, unbelted, gently placed his beak into the creases of the Lebaron’s leather seats and picked up tiny crumbs of cornbread which he consumed one-by-one, his feathered ass shuddering in the wind, pointing toward the open road.