The Modest Life
MANY PEOPLE WANT to live a modest life and some are able to achieve a kind of simplicity in the midst of this busy, cosmopolitan, getting and spending world. Even people like you, who either live surrounded by luxuriant rural verdure, have one or two potted plants to console you, or use bricks for a pillow -- even you struggle with the realities of accumulation.
Just the other evening, as I relaxed in a hot, scented bathtub following a long and satisfying day's work educating the eager young students of this quaint seaside village as to the intricacies of definite and indefinite English article usage, I was reminded yet again that searching after truth is a rutted road, full of twists and turns.
My wife, who is an astute and insightful observer of the human scene and has raised the question before, called my attention to the Dalai Lama, a presumably immaculate, devout individual who has been forced by circumstances to live a life of exile.
Do you think he lives a modest life? my wife asked me. Look at those glasses he wears, she suggested. Those must be Renoma frames. What kind of a modest man wears Renoma frames? What kind of a Buddhist does he think he is?"
This was not an easy question, not one I could dismiss with a glib, ironic answer. First of all, I would not recognize Renoma eyeglass frames even if I were wearing them myself, and I settled back into the steamy, fragrant water of my tub, my tightly knotted muscles relaxing uneasily, the stresses of the day slowly melting away, certain that my wife would herself soon straighten me out with answers of her own, if not, more questions which would illuminate the subject like a bank of kleig lights.
Was Fred Blassie a modest man? Blassie's major claim to his fame derives from the night he took the right to wear the world's pro-wrestling championship belt back from Rikidozan of Japan. Rikidozan had been yokozuna, the highest rank in sumo, the Japanese national sport, before becoming a professional wrestler and world champion. Before that night, Blassie was no more than a bad-guy blowhard with long bleached platinum blond hair who took the televised locker room interview from filler at the end of the evening's matches to a level of high art.
Defeating Rikidozan and winning the championship redeemed Fred Blassie, who grew up as Freddie Blassman and was known as a professional variously as "Classy" Freddie Blassie, Fred McDaniel, and, God knows why, Sailor Blassie.
It was Fred Blassie who was responsible for introducing the expression "pencil-necked geek" into the popular lexicon.
Fred Blassie was a showman, who often took a metal file to his front teeth to make them sharper and more menacing to his many worthy and colorful opponents such as the Super Swedish Angel Tor Johnson or Szandor Szabo, or Mr. Moto, or the pretty-boy Frenchman, Georges Carpentier, or that masked guy, The Destroyer.
One balmy Southern California evening, in the locker room at the venerable Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles, Fred Blassie dangled the pencil-necked geek ringside announcer Dick Lane by his ankles out an upper-story window. Live. On the air. Dick Lane, professional that he always was, did not drop his microphone and continued broadcasting his interview with Blassie, though in an understandably somewhat more excited tone.
It was Dick Lane who used the ringside expression, "Whoa, Nellie!" to lend color to particularly exciting pro-wrestling moves. Dick Lane did not cry "Whoa, Nellie!" while being dangled by his ankles in the strong but tenuous grip of Fred "Sailor" Blassie out the window of the locker room of the venerable Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles that balmy Southern California evening. He had other things on his mind that evening. Dick Lane had his entire life flashing before his eyes that evening, and survival had suddenly become much more important to him than shouting "Whoa, Nellie!"
That night, the line between art and life was blurred considerably, and for Dick Lane, the more important line between death and life yawned before him like a chasm. He held on tightly to that microphone like a lifeline.
Dick Lane was the model of the modest man. His suits were not expensive and his glasses were not mounted in designer frames. He was just a skinny little guy with dentures and thinning hair who smelled funny -- which is not to say his body emanated odors so powerful that driving through the streets of Los Angeles, home from work each night, packs of dogs, their glistening snouts high in the desert air, and coyotes drawn down from the hills, swollen tongues lolling and dripping, would chase, howling, after his black, round-topped Ford coupe and mill around all night outside the brick apartment building where he rented a cheesy efficiency, making it a nightly peril for Dick Lane, who kicked around Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s and played a few bit parts in pictures while worthier talents were fighting the fascist menace abroad before he landed the TV announcing job he held all those years at KTLA, Channel 5, to negotiate the walk from his parking spot in front of the building to the elevator inside the first floor lobby. Dick Lane was not a Buddhist, but then he didn't wear a Rolex watch, either, if you know what I mean.
After finishing up his job that night, long ago, the night Fred Blassie dangled him high above the downtown Los Angeles urban pavement, finding himself still alive, Dick Lane went back to his skanky Hollywood apartment where he lived a contented bachelor life during the years after his wife, fed up, for reasons of her own, walked out on him.
Dick Lane fixed himself a cup of hot cocoa that he liked to drink with those little mini-marshmallows floating in it, put the cat out on the fire escape, relaxed in front of the tube for awhile until after midnight when the test pattern with the picture of a war-bonneted Indian chief came on, then he opened up the couch and hit the sack.
What Dick Lane dreamed about as he slept that night is his own damned private business.
Kagoshima, March 1999