He has been lurking outside my bedroom window for twenty three years. In his hand a gun, an army issue Colt .45. A gun with a bullet big enough to blow a fist sized hole right through my head or right through my heart.
For twenty three years he has been tormenting me with silent sounds of his presence, making me wary, making me tense in this already too tense world. For twenty three years he has been stalking me, haunting me, unnerving me, driving me.
I have wracked my brains trying to figure out how to deal with him. I gave him a name to make him more personal, more human. I call him the nut.
I have stumbled out in the dead of night, flashlight in hand to confront him. Carefully making noise, waving my flashlight, thrashing around in my cautiously desperate search. Hoping that by seeing him, by confronting him that he would go away, that he would leave me alone to lead a nice normal meaningless life of purposeful comfort in the socially acceptable pursuit of creature comforts. But I never saw him, much less caught him. But I know he was there, is there, watching and waiting.
We live in frightened times, stressful times, in this modern, advanced and civilized world of ours. We are constantly barraged by lurid accounts of mass murders, senseless violence, and pointless tragedies. It is a kind of glue for our social bonding process. All of the insanity presented to us every day provides excuses or justification for our stress and our fear. But what we see is not the cause of our fears but the result. If it were the cause, I suppose we could find peace by not reading newspapers or watching TV. But our fears are inherent in our lifestyle, they spring from our relentless consumption and selfish preoccupation which we cling to and are stuck with in the absence of anything better.
So I suppose I could chalk the nut up to my own personal paranoid delusion that is part and parcel of living in this great country of ours. However no amount of justification ever made him go away to bother some other sensitive soul and leave me alone. Night after night I would hear him cleaning his gun, snapping the clip in and out and silently shifting his position outside my window.
Night after night, year in and year out I waited, sometimes patiently, sometimes in earnest for my presumed fatal fate. A fate that would erupt from his gun at some unknown predetermined hour. Sometimes I have lain in bed completely paralyzed in terror expecting immanent death. Other times for hours on end I would stand tensed in my closet waiting for his bullet to come crashing through the window right through the pillow where my head would have been. All the time my mind would race, analyzing the endless possibilities. Then I would jump back into bed fearing that he would deliberately shoot into the closet just to scare me, thinking I was laying in bed. It would indeed be ironic if I was killed by outthinking him. It would be his mistake of course.
Nonetheless I would be unintentionally dead. And I would never know whether it was an accident or fate or in some greater sense perhaps both. The entire situation was impossible. There was no way out for me. I just couldn’t win.
Other nights I strived to ignore the nut’s immanence, his permanence outside my window. I would write poems and stories to exorcize him. I would read. I searched books for clues, to see if anyone else had faced this kind of hell and lived to tell about it. For twenty three years spurred on by his lurking, driving presence, I searched for a way to save my life. But I could only find curious parallels between the religious, mystical and occult literatures. Clues and truths I couldn’t use. I ran across many tantalizing parables and metaphors that spoke indirectly of the proper course of action, but they proved elusive and inconclusive in the myriad facets of their interpretations. And so many of my mental wanderings proved to be just idle diversions, pleasant though meaningless to the resolution of my immediate problem.
I finally had to conclude that I would never find some secret recipe or rite that I could run through and be done with him, that there were no magical incantations or runes to dispel his ominous threat, and that there were no obscure herbs, spices or potions that would make me brave, powerful and indestructible.
Yet even realizing the futility of my search, I continued on, partly due to habit, partly due to momentum but mostly due to the lack of any better alternative.
Eventually it became obvious that there was no easy way out for me. I would have to face the nut alone without any resources except those within myself, meager as they seem. Most likely I would be killed and that would be the end of it. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to get on with my life or death or whatever must be. It was that simple. And so I hesitated.
And as if he read my mind that night he came into my room.

He just appeared. I don’t know how long he’d been there before I finally felt his presence, felt him standing there, felt him looking at me. Finally in person, the nut. There he stood at the foot of my bed just watching me.

I felt a curious calm knowing that it would be over soon, knowing that dead men feel no pain.
Then as he stood watching me an overwhelming feeling engulfed me. In my mind I saw that feeling as a bullet. The bullet from the gun of the nut. The bullet with my name on it. The bullet of bullets, the bullets from out of my dreams from out of my nightmares.
In my mind I watched that bullet crash through the window. I watched the curtain jerk as the bullet pushed into the room I watched the fabric rip. The curtain burst open, releasing a crystal waterfall of shattered glass. There is great beauty in such moments.
I watched in slow motion fascination as the bullet, spinning counterclockwise, moving with lethal intention, crossed the measured void of my room directly towards me.
Then I felt the force of that bullet as it passed through me, crushing me while not really touching me. Its energy came from the sum total of all the real and imagined bullets that had lodged my being night after night for the last twenty three years.
That tidal wave of pain crashed down upon me with such incredible intensity that if I had been able to be aware of anything else I would have wished I were dead.

But I was not alone, the nut just stood there and watched.

It was an explosion born of the fusion of all my past hurts long repressed in some intense, dark singularity in my soul. Of a pressure being suddenly released. A solar prominence bursting to the surface of the sun.

Twenty three years of daily pain. And the nut: twenty three years of nightly reminders. In one eternal moment, one excruciating moment of mind, of time, my entire unresolved past dislodged itself and exploded throughout my mind, my being and disintegrated in the present.

Then it was over. The pain was gone, released somehow, to be just a memory.

The nut just stood there, watching. The gun now in his hand. The 45 I had never seen but I knew was his weapon of choice.

Then for some strange reason, I was reminded of the movie “Scarface”. In one scene Al Pacino as Scarface is in a very ritzy restaurant, dressed in a tux, with his wife and his best friend. His life is disintegrating around him and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. So he does the only thing he can do in that situation. He goes with the flow. The evening meal degenerates into a destructive catharsis that parallels both his current situation and portends the future. An argument. Anger. Blame. Frustration. Violence. The dinner is ruined. Everyone in the restaurant is staring at the spectacle. After his wife leaves, Scarface wipes the champagne off his face and leans back in his chair dismissing the incident.
After a moment he gets up: “What are you looking at?” he says with contempt. “You are all a bunch of fucking assholes. You don’t have the guts to be what you want to be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say that’s the bad guy. So what does that make you. Good. You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy. It’s the last time before you gonna see a bad guy like this again.” A priceless moment.
Then into my mind came the last scene in the movie. Scarface is in his office tending to his dead sister. He’s just killed his best friend. His life is disintegrating. Fifty or more gunmen have blasted into his compound and killed all of his men, only Scarface is left. The place reeks of death and destruction. A haze of bullets and spent cartridges obscures everything but the staccato sound of automatic weapons. Outside of his office are twenty or thirty mercenaries intent on killing him. He is surrounded. They are closing in on him. Finally Scarface focuses on his situation. He picks up a monster fucking machine gun with built in grenade launcher, the ultimate weapon of the security conscious paranoid cocaine dealer. Having long ago lost his physical desires to the debilitating influence of his all consuming obsession, the weapon becomes his metallic cock capable of spewing his deadly leaden sperm in whatever direction he points. Scarface gathers himself together and turns to take on the army of killers single handedly.
“Want to fuck with me.” he screams, “You’re fucking with the best. You fuck with me. OK. Say hello to my little friend.” He then blasts open the front door of his office, annihilating 6 or 7 of the intruders who were trying to shoot their way in. “Want to play rough. Want more.” He yells as he comes through the splintered smoldering door. Using his little friend, he casually blasts the twitching bodies that survived his initial assault. In the foyer ten mercenaries stand paralyzed as he rakes the room with lead, cutting them down in their disbelief.
Scarface moves out on the balcony and taunts the remaining henchmen. “You think you can take me. I’ll take you all to fucking hell. You fuck with me, you’re fucking with the best.” And they open fire on him. Inconceivable violence. And he continues to stand there as their bullets rip through his body. Taunting them. Telling them they are not man enough to kill him. For Scarface it is a supreme performance.
Finally, the ultimate bad guy, wearing dark glasses in the middle of the night, the assassin who doesn’t need a sub machine gun, who only needs one shell from his double barreled shotgun, slowly, deliberately walks up behind Scarface and blows him away.
Why these two scenes crossing my mind at this moment? Why?

While the nut just stood there watching.

I tried to make sense of it. Feelings often precede knowing. In the dinner scene, Scarface had just been ravaged by his wife, in the way that only women can savagely reveal and force you to confront your innermost fears, the denied weaknesses that when exposed strip you down to nothing, so you are totally defenseless. He had seen that everything he had wanted to be he was, while at the same time what he was didn’t give him what he really wanted. He might not have known all that, but he felt it. And yet he could still pull himself together and take all that feeling and make it into something real and blast it right back to the rest of the universe.
I had respect for the man. He wasn’t just talking, he had the guts to be what he really wanted to be. Even if now it wasn’t leading where he wanted it to go.

God knows it’s not easy to be what you really want to be. Because the art of living is the life you create within reality. Where we all face forces and relationships that are trying to help us, that are attracting us, that are challenging us and testing us. And all the while the universe is constantly maintaining its delicate dynamic balance. Of course that is if you really know what you want to be. Frankly I’ve found it incredibly difficult just finding out what I really want to be.

And in that final scene, that incredible bloodbath, Scarface conveys the feeling I’d like to have available when I face death, when I do my last dance. Scarface knows he is going to die. He feels that when he dies the real meaning of his life dies with him. And that all of his life that survives will be meaningless to him after he is dead. He knows he is going to lose. He is going to die.
So why bother? What is the point of fighting, of doing anything at this point. For Scarface there is no question. He is determined that he is going to die like a man, like he wants to die.
I see in him feelings of respect and contempt as he faces his terminal situation. Respect in the sense that he knows it is his final drama and as such it is a moment, like every moment, of special importance to him. For some it is different, the last drama is an act to be performed whereby one’s life can be justified by equaling the moment. But Scarface had never felt a need to justify himself. In that respect, Scarface was just being consistent with what he had always been, what he had always wanted to be.
And then there is his feeling of contempt. Scarface had a deep abiding respect for his contempt of others. For Scarface, contempt is central to what it means to be the best. Everyone else is below him. He even holds death in contempt. His was a contempt that demanded respect by eliminating everything from the stage that would detract from what he wanted to do, that was not part of what he wanted to be.
Some say it isn’t how well you live that really matters but how well you die. Scarface was never aware of the distinction. He was doing both every moment.

And still the nut just stood there watching.

I couldn’t see his face. But I thought I could see his eyes. Cold ruthless eyes. Patient eyes that had been watching me for twenty three years.
“Who are you?” I asked.”What do you want?”
Silence.
Then he raised the gun, released the safety and pointed it at me. “What would you be willing to die for?” he asked.
I took a quick inventory. I said nothing. There was nothing to say.
He pulled back on the hammer. I still wasn’t sure if he was serious. I wasn’t sure if I was serious. It all seemed so unreal.
“Can you say you are really satisfied with who you are, with what you’re doing?” He was matter of fact, almost conciliatory.
I had to admit I wasn’t.
He asked again: “What do you really want to be?” Then without hesitation and without any doubt, he shot me.
I knew the bullet went through my side, but I didn’t actually feel any pain. That would come later. Now he had my attention. I became serious. Everything became immediate.
“If there is nothing you really want to do, I’ll put you out of your misery right now.”
So it was down to this.
He shot me again..
“Shit!” I growled. Blood was dripping both down my side and down my neck from a crease over my ear. “God damn it.” I was beyond thinking.
So I jumped. It was a good effort. I hit the wall where he had been. And he shot me again. “Damn” I screamed. “What the fuck do you want?”
” I want to know what do you want to do with your life? Make up your mind. You have no more time. You’ve been farting around far too long.” he said impatiently.
“What do you want me to say?” I said. “I want to be an astronaut, a farmer, a surfer. I want to be alive. I want you to leave me alone. There, get out of here, go away”
He shot me again.
I felt the bullet singe my thigh. I was stunned into an eerie clarity.
The nut resumed. “I don’t want you to say just anything. I want you to say what you really feel, what you really want. I want you to know why you are alive. That is my purpose. What is yours? That is why I am alive. I don’t really care what you want to do, only that you know.”
He paused. I pondered.
I had nothing to say.
“Well. Time to die.” he said.
And he shot me. Again. I guess for good measure. I felt something hit my chest as I was knocked backwards. As I fell, I thought I saw his face. It was the face of my father, my mother, Jesus, Scarface, God, it was the face of everyone I had ever seen. It was my face.

I fell right through the floor.

I was falling down an immensely long tube, spinning as I was carried along by some unknown flow. The tube was undulating, it was like being inside some gigantic wriggling cosmic earthworm. I plunged past opening into other tubes that extended off into infinity. There were colors and sounds and feelings and thoughts.
In the background I could hear the echoing voice of the nut. “What do you really want to do? What do you really want to be? What .do…. , ….you…, …do…be…,…do…be…..,…..do…..be….. , ….. …. do … .. .”

And then I blacked out.

When I came to the nut was gone. The room was a mess. My wounds had stopped bleeding and I hurt like hell.

I was alive.

I don’t know if a man is really aware when a change comes over him. A real change, not something superficial like changing clothes or a second hand moving on a clock, but something deep, a kind of change that is an inconceivable jump into a new state of being, a new point of view, a different kind of awareness.

Such changes occur in the intervals between moments in time. From beyond time. From out of the mystery.

I had changed. Not that I knew any more than I had before. I just felt different. It was an intuition, an inkling. I wanted to know more. It was an elusive feeling, shy, mysterious. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I could feel its pull, attracting me, calling me.

And on my bed was a sheet of white paper. And on that blank sheet lay a single solitary almond.

I moved closer. I looked down at it.

Then I picked it up and popped it into my mouth.