Neither Carlos nor anyone else has asked why I’m calling the group “The New College of Complexes.” They think it’s because these days everything is new. New Mind. New Men. New Women. New Life abounding... But there was an old College of Complexes.
More than ten years ago it disbanded when its meeting place was demolished by bulldozers. And each of its members mysteriously surrendered to whatever individual fate he or she had been valiantly staving off.
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Either that or they bribed the manager at the McDonald’s across the street to tell me so, so as to get rid of me.
Not that I’d been hanging around the first C-of-C all that much. In two years I attended six of their meetings, and only then in response to their bold-faced motto: Everybody Welcome.
The group impressed me as genuine seeker-martyrs, a type I respected then—and now—more than anything.
In those days, before leaving my apartment, I bathed, shaved, and followed a rigorous series of self-designed mental exercises to rid myself of odiousness. When that didn’t work, I’d pretended that Colin had not died—he was never even in danger and the whole incident was a nightmare my subconscious had unrolled to protect me from the shame when he left me for the bass player across the hall: A stretch, on many levels, the most significant that Colin and I were mates for life. We believed that and professed our commitment a lot. Anyway, whenever I attended an old C of C meeting, I sat strictly in the back and watched.
So why would I wonder if they bribed the counterman at McDonald’s? Well, for one thing, motto or no motto, the old group was very big on spiritual quid pro quo: you were only as holy as you were poor; enlightenment demanded destitution. With no exceptions for anyone owning a profitable coffee and pastry shop (which my parents “invested in” as soon as I dropped out of Northwestern, after Colin’s death.)
I tried to explain myself to the old C. of C-ers. Owning a shop, I said, was not venal in and of itself. I nourished people. For free if need be. And of course they were welcome anytime, gratis.
“At a cappuccino place in the suburbs?” asked Hugo, a true seeker-martyr.
“Yes,” I said, “but not a far suburb.”
Hugo shook his head. “I just don’t think so.”
For a second there I suspected him of bias against suburbanites: that is, a soulless, careless class desperately grasping for whatever’s most conventional. And if anything, with our driveways and vinyl siding, we deliberately set out to quash transcendence. But then I realized the problem was wholly my own. If the old C. of C-ers sweetened their lives with small fictions, so do we all. Really, my problem was how ardently I wanted to be one of them; how desperately I admired them; and that I failed to become intimate with them.
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