the bolage story

Precious daughter sent me a link to a vampiric-looking guy who foreclosed on Wells Fargo. You may well have seen it. Her comment, however was that he reminded her of folks who used to stay at the house in the late '90s. Which reminded me of Bolage. But first, those vampiric folk who spent so much time in the house.

Actually, it was Vlad Tepes who'd come to stay. But I think I've already written about his visits. Ah, the good old days. But then the Hungarians started coming as well.

Gabor was the more outgoing one. The healer, the shape-shifter. Attila was the quiet introvert. The astrophysicist. He gave a marvelous paper for us at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness at UC Berkeley that year. I think it was 1997. His paper outlined the parameters of sentience, and by those markers demonstrated how the sun met the requirements for sentience. It made quite a splash. Don't know if he ever published the paper. He didn't publish it in our AOC journal.

What I didn't know, until Jello came over, was that he was also a well known punk singer/musician and that his father was the head of the shamanic church in Hungary. Thus he was also a shamanic practitioner and used shamanic entrainment in his music, which was quite literally out of this world.

But this story isn't about Attila. Or Jello. Or Gabor, really. It's about Bolage.

Gabor and I arranged for my student S to go apprentice with him in Budapest — after he graduated. Although Gabor was anxious to get the help right away. Graduation was only a two months away, so when summer came, off S went promising to return every few months to be sure he didn't get caught by any weirdness. We weren't sure what the weirdness might be, but see — see how careful we were?

About a year or so after this arrangement (which seemed to work out quite well), S sent me a birthday present. He was always such a good boy, knowing exactly what I wanted. Knowing exactly what I needed.

He sent me Bolage.

A carpenter.

For my birthday.

My house was a wreck. Fixer-upper. A carpenter was such a wonderful gift!

Apparently the idea was that Bolage would live in our house with free room and board, and do carpentry around the house. He spoke only one word of English when he arrived.

"Why?" he would say.

Gargoyle cornices in the doorways?

"Why?" he would reply, but he'd put them up for me.

Crown molding?

"WHY?"

He was the master of why. And with his limited English, I couldn't explain restoration to him. Restoration of a ruined Edwardian. Restoration of a house stripped of all its former yummy features.

Slowly, as he learned English, I discovered his motivation for coming to America. He was out to find himself a rich American woman, marry her and move to America. He also wanted to work on Porsches and race cars.

"Why?" I asked.

Eventually, he told me that he was already married and had two kids he left at home. He'd given his business partner the authority to give a subsistence amount to his wife and kids each month. He left his partner in charge of everything.

In San Francisco, he discovered Castro Street, gyms, and protein supplements. He spent a lot of time working out, and complaining about not finding the wife. Eventually, he asked me to find one for him — a nice Christian woman.

"I don't know any nice Christian women," I replied.

"Any woman is okay then," he said. "I make her a Christian."

Bolage began spending a lot of time in the basement. When the second month's phone bill came in I discovered he was on the phone to Hungary for hours at a time. And in those days, landlines, no cell phones. It was a bloody fortune.

My kids and I were impatiently waiting for Bolage to be on his way. He had stopped doing carpentry after about a week. He was still looking to make his fortune. He discovered that he really liked Castro Street, and the gyms. And he discovered too that he wasn't attracting that American wife. I had gotten him a job working on Porsches, but he managed to get fired after a week for demanding more pay than Mexicans because he was a European.

"Why?" his boss asked him. "They speak better English and do better work than you." Bolage didn't understand this at all.

There was something about America — especially San Francisco — that Bolage just didn't get. And when he finally figured out the Castro, he had a breakdown. His world was crumbling — aided by those phone calls from the basement apparently.

Back home, his wife had run off with his business partner and taken the kids with her.

"She's ruined!" he complained. "Dirty. Soiled!" He had learned a lot of English by then.

He cried a lot at that point. He felt terribly betrayed. How could she do this to him?

Suddenly Bolage had to get home, and fast. He bought up as many blue jeans and Goodwill clothes as he could to sell back home, and he flew off to salvage his old life. He confessed that he had failed in absolutely every aspiration he had had. And that he had discovered that America was filled with degenerates, Mexicans, Jews, and homosexuals — and no Christian women at all. His life was in ruins.

When the next phone bill came, it far outstripped my entire monthly salary. I borrowed some money to make sure our phone wouldn't be cut off. When S returned home again, he covered the entire enormous amount.

"How can you do that?" I asked, overwhelmed.

"When he got back, we put Bolage to work and garnered his wages," he said. "Until he earned enough to cover the bill."

I have no clue what happened to the buff little carpenter. But what I hope is that he went back to church.

"Why?" you ask?

I'm hoping that some good solid prayer and soul-searching made him rethink his world view, his bigotry and his sexuality. I'm hoping that he'll ask himself some really big whys?

I'm not sure any of this is my business at all — but it all played out in our little house, and I know, at least, what I learned from it.

My birthday's right around the corner.

Please, no carpenters.

two shape-shifters, one bed

You probably know shape-shifters of your own, or you're a shape-shifter yourself. T would say that of course you are. That you shape-shift every time you switch consciousness from say, your corporate self to your personal self. Your social self, to your lover self. Your talking to mom on the phone self. To ... you get the idea. This being Thanksgiving, you may well have been shape-shifting all day and well into the evening, into an exhausting something you're not terribly happy playing at. Yah, T equates shape-shifting with performance. With performativity. Not that you're putting it on, exactly. No.

But that you can show others a different persona, at will. The at will part is important.

But not all shape-shifters agree that that's what it's all about.

The beautiful C used to live with me from time to time when she needed to. She had a house of her own across town but for 'complicated' reasons was having trouble staying there at the time. So. She had a room at my house she called her own.

C was a shape-shifter of extraordinary power. And people saw in her an antique man of her own lineage, who once had ruled Romania, and terrified the countryside by appearing to manifest as undead. C and her ancestor were in fairly constant communication, and I got to know him quite well. Nice bloke. Interesting family. Came to rule just after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. He didn't take well to the Turks ...

The point is that C took responsibility when her audience saw this ancient ruler instead of her when she spoke. She took credit for his manifestation, as well as for the deeds that he might do and the things that he might say. When you spoke with C, you were in conversation with the lot of them. Especially him. (I later learned that this ancestor and others of his family manifested to many in Romania at the time, and that C's relationship with him was not at all uncommon).

But when he manifested for her, other people would see him! They could describe him! They saw his long black ringlets— and that thick handlebar moustache. They could describe his big eyes and the crownlike cap upon his head. The carmine jewel at his forehead. And on and on. They saw him. They did not see her.

I never saw this stuff, but I certainly was in the conversation.

So. C used to stay at my house when she needed to. Which means the whole bunch of her ancestors were there as well. She claimed her own room. And she claimed her own bed. Or maybe it was 'they' and not her at all.

But I had another friend of the shape-shifting persuasion.

And he too would stay in what by default was becoming the 'guest bedroom' — since calling it my 'study' didn't seem to be working out too well, with all the house guests at the time. His home was in Budapest, but he would visit every two to three months for two or three weeks at a time.

He called himself a scientist. And what he wanted was to build a computer that could do what he could do: read energy fields and heal folks by shifting their magnetic fields. Or something like that. That's what he purported to do. Whatever it was, his hands-on healing was powerful. And I never thought a machine could duplicate whatever it was that he did. I just thought of it as 'body work' — until I myself saw him shape shift.

Right before my eyes (and no drugs in sight) he transformed into an ancient mythical being documented from northern Europe. It's not a figure I'm familiar with, although just the other day I saw its image on an archaeological volume at the meetings in New Orleans. T recognized him. I still can't remember the name. He had two very large antlers. That I do remember.

The scientist from Budapest acknowledged the shape-shifting, but his explanation differed from that of C's. He said that what he did was 'normal' healing within a realm that would be able (at some point) not only to be explained by science but to be duplicated by it. He insisted that what people saw during his healing sessions were projections that they themselves manifested — and had nothing to do with him.

So. Two views of shape-shifting. His. And hers.

His: people see what they need or want to see.

Hers: people see what she purposefully projected for them to see.

I'm not here to say one of them is right or wrong.

I'm here to say that they were both periodic guests in my house. Staying in my 'guest room.' Which should have been my study. And it was bound to happen that at one point they would both be claiming that room — and that one bed — as their own.

Now, I know that I should have taken charge of the matter. So, in essence, this is all my fault. But my excuse is that I really don't like making decisions for other people. I didn't want to decide between them who got the room and bed, and who slept downstairs on the couch. I mean, these are after all, both powerful magical practitioners that I didn't really want to piss off. She, especially, had a vile temper — and she was also my best friend. But he would come all the way from Budapest, and surely could use a decent bed.

So. I did something you'll probably agree was pretty stupid. I left it up to them.

These are two intelligent, articulate, periodically rational adults, right? I figured they could decide which one of them would take the bed, and which one would take the downstairs couch. Or maybe they'd come up with alternating nights. Or weeks. Something reasonable and mutually acceptable.

I went to my own room, shut the door, picked up a good book, and went to sleep. Let them figure it out.

But no. They both claimed the territory to the end. They both headed for the room. Both planted their stuff in the room. Both washed up and brushed their teeth. Put on their night things. And both climbed into the bed, growling and snarling at each other in some inhuman-sounding form. It sounded like whatever creatures they were, were ripping the house apart. I felt dismay that all my books, fieldnotes, and computer were in the same room with them.

In the morning they both came down for breakfast, which I had made. They ate my grandpa's Macedonian Sephardi eggs still glaring at each other, and went off about their day.

They never overlapped again.

But now, when I think of it, I wonder: is there a kaddish for the undead? Did anyone ever in history say a kaddish for Vlad Tepes, Draculea himself, prince of Wallachia, who lived for a time at my own house?