I used to have a big issue with cowardice. I wasn't brave, but I didn't want to be a coward. There lay the problem. To be brave, one must be really crazy and cocksure of oneself, I think. I wasn't really crazy although I had tried to be, and I lacked self-confidence. So the problem simmered and stayed on.
In my early and middle adolescence, I had my share of fistfights with neighborhood kids and classmates. I lost more than I won. The reason for that ignominious record was that I was skinny and not strong because I was underfed. Food was not plentiful in my large household. Dad was an only breadwinner. His salary was meager, barely enough to get his eight children, him and Mom sheltered, clothed and fed. I was always hungry. In my sleep, I dreamed of feasts in which I ate meat and delectable fruits to my heart's content. Now, I can afford fine dining and sumptuous meals, but I rarely indulge in them. Ironically, food is now not a big thing. I eat simply and heartily as I used to do in my distant past, in a land tens of thousands of miles away.
Something happened in the summer of 1967, a few months before my turning eighteen. I was falling in love with a beautiful , French-speaking girl named Agnes with long flowing hair. Or so I thought. But I was a diffident, confidence-deprived coward. I was unsure of myself. Besides, I was concerned that my feelings for her would interfere with my university schooling. So I stayed from her while my heart was aching, throbbing, pining for her night and day, like a coward that I was. At the end of my first year in college, a bright, sexy, but homely-looking classmate named Laura helped me put Agnes out of my mind. I went out with Laura for three years. They could be the best years of my life as far as Love was concerned. I loved Laura. I could die for her. And I thought Laura loved me. But I was wrong, dreadfully and almost fatally wrong.
After Laura, I went through a turbulent but fruitful period during which I lost my idealism. I was no longer a coward. I was no longer a bashful, shy, diffident dude. I acquired an in-your-face aggressiveness. I read a lot of philosophy, psychology, literature, and anthropology. I exercised. I studied languages. I discovered a truism: To be loved I must make myself lovable. To me, Love was simply an amalgamation of affection and admiration. Women started flocking to me. Agnes and Laura became distant memories. Death was not an issue to be avoided. I confronted it head-on.
Now I must say I've courage. I am not afraid to die or kill. I am not fearful of solitude, prison, or ostracism. I don't believe in God. And I look at the world through a prism constructed of cynicism and an awareness that Life is an accident and Man is an animal driven mostly by biological imperatives, power and recognition, and very faintly by Love. Meanwhile I went through wives, girlfriends, and concubines with abandon.
When I close my eyes for good and heave my last breath, I'll be comforted by a thought that in looking back on my life, there were two, maybe three, women who really loved me; one of them was a Vietnamese, one was a Filipina, and one was an American Jewish woman scholar, 6'1" tall.
May 27, 2016
Wissai
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