The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education

by Peter Coyote

Overview

"The rainman gave me two cures
And he said, 'Just jump right in.'
The one was Texas Medicine
And the other was railroad gin.
And like a fool I mixed them
And they strangled up my mind
Now people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time."
––Bob Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"

The guiding metaphor in Peter Coyote's new spiritual biography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song. For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status–seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman's Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.

Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960's counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be–bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game–warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham's company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high–stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.

What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life–long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission–––acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power's correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman's Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619026353
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	553 KB

About the Author

An ordained practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a politically engaged actor, Peter Coyote began his work in street theater and political organizing in San Francisco. In addition to acting in over 140 films, and working with directors such as Martin Ritt, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski, Coyote has won an Emmy for narrating the award–winning documentary "Pacific Century." He has also narrated "The West, " "The Dust Bowl," "Prohibition," and "The Roosevelts" for Ken Burns. In 1993 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize for "Carla's Story," published in Zyzzyva. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRST TWO CURES

The Rohatsu (the Great Cold) sesshin — a week of intensive Zen meditation — takes place in early December ending on the 8th, the day commemorating Buddha's enlightenment. At Green Gulch Zen Center, near my home on the fog-shrouded slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Northern California's Marin County, meditation begins at 5:00 AM and lasts until 9:30 PM each day punctuated by service, meals, walking meditation, and several short rest periods. Talking, except for essential communication, is discouraged, as is eye contact and any behavior that might distract others from their concentration. It takes enormous collective effort to organize a sesshin, with volunteers cooking, serving, and maintaining the Temple on behalf of those sitting. Consequently, great care is taken not to waste the opportunity or the gift of their service. I knew none of this when I signed up for my first sesshin after only a year of meditating, sitting, at most, two 40-minute periods a day at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Nor did I know that in sesshin meals would be eaten in place at one's sitting cushion, in the same painful cross-legged position one had been meditating in. They are served in a highly efficient manner, done precisely this way for hundreds of years. Each monk's eating utensils — chopsticks, a wooden spoon, a cleaning apparatus called a setsu (resembling a doctor's tongue depressor with a cloth pad sewed on the tip) — are laid across three nesting bowls called oryoki (meaning "just enough") — covered by a napkin and cleaning cloth, the whole wrapped in a bandanna-sized cloth that, when unwrapped, is efficiently used as a place mat.

Because Zen Buddhism is not precisely a religion like the Abrahamic trio — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, (Buddha was a normal man — neither supernatural nor a prophet) — behaviors that appear to the uninitiated as worship of a Deity are actually expressions of gratitude for the Buddha's compassionate teachings. By the end of the first highly ritualized meal, I was convinced entirely too much gratitude was being displayed and began wishing harm on the officiant whose chants and offerings had to end before I would be allowed to leave my seat and mercifully straighten my paralyzed legs.

There were chants of thanks when food was offered, chants after it was served, and more when the first bowl was raised. Before the servers entered bearing the food, the wooden bar in front of the sitters' places had to be cleaned. A damp towel was introduced and then either passed from hand to hand down the length of the room, or if one was graced with an elevated seat, propelled by a runner racing down the aisle between sitters scrubbing the "table" (the edge of the raised platform) as he went.

The servers moved quickly, but no matter how efficient they were, I wanted to scream with frustration, impatience, and pain, because until the meal is over and one's bowls washed and put away and the last chanted syllable uttered, you cannot rise from your seat. Furthermore, it is an arduous and delicate maneuver to change the position of crossed, cramped insensate legs without sending the delicate bowls in front of you skittering into the lap of the person sitting opposite you. The frustration was akin to being trapped behind a comatose driver at a stoplight that changes once an hour for twenty seconds and the moron in front of you misses it while texting. Imagine this occurring repeatedly, while you are on fire, and you'll have a clear idea of my state of mind.

Every task proceeded at its own agonizing pace. You cannot simply eat, wash your bowl, and leave to go fart and pick your teeth. At the signal of clacking wooden sticks we wait while the food is brought in to the zendo (meditation hall), served into each outstretched bowl (the serving bracketed by stately bows) and then, before it can be touched, a complex grace is offered reminding us where the Buddha was born, taught, and died, and what virtues each portion in our bowls is dedicated to. Then (still on fire), we are asked to consider "whether our virtue and practice deserve this offering" of food. I was deranged with frustration at the slowness, the waiting, the ritualized cleaning of the bowls and the collection of the last scraps of food for "the hungry ghosts." ("Fucking ants!! They're feeding ants while I'm dying here!") All of these ritual steps were inserted between my wretched self and the post-meal relief I desperately needed. I was furious. Every cell in my body was intent on inhaling my food as quickly as possible so that I could flee the zendo and straighten my legs. This was day one. By 7:00 AM I had forgotten that I had chosen to be there because I was desperate for help.

It's quite normal in sesshin for one's knees to be in pain, and muscles in the upper back and shoulders to be burning with tension or in spasm. It matters not. The pace of meals and services is glacial, and from my perspective that day, pitiless. The older monks sat quietly erect and maddeningly patient with no evidence of discomfort. By the second period of zazen, compounding my discomfort with embarrassment, my body began shaking violently, twitching and jerking as if I were experiencing a grand mal seizure. The shaking enervated my muscles, made me gasp for breath, and it was distracting, exhausting, and embarrassing. The monks on either side of me were still as oil paintings while I writhed and flapped like a landed fish between them. Restarting my recently abandoned use of heroin began to appear tantalizingly preferable to another sixty seconds of Zen.

In such a situation one is forced face-to-face with one's body and mind and their discomforts. There are no distractions and no places to hide. There is no way to pretend that your suffering is not occurring nor is there any way to philosophize it away. The sesshin demands everything you have and then takes a big gulp of more. An old Zen adage states, "Pain in the legs is the taste of zazen."

Even after a year of regular zazen, I was completely unprepared for the rigor and determination required by a sesshin. By lunch of the second day, my body was trembling and shaking and tears were spilling over the edges of my eyes. "I can't do this," I thought. "I have to get out of here." Internal narratives chronicling previous failures and self-betrayals were flashing like neon signs in my psyche and I began rehearsing excuses that might offer me the cover to flee; anything that would afford me the opportunity to rise from this odious, smug, self-satisfied cushion, and move spontaneously again.

Unfortunately for my craven and indulgent self, I was pinioned firmly in place by pride. There were a number of Zen students in the sesshin whom I had previously dismissed as fools, certain that my spiritual development exceeded theirs by a comfortable margin. I would never be able to maintain this imagined sense of superiority if I crawled out of the zendo on the second day. My ego dictated that I stay put.

Miraculously, near the end of the third day, my physical pains began to diminish. Though still shaking, I could investigate the pain in my knees more attentively, and noticed how investigation actually changed the quality of the pain. I continued my St. Vitus dance, but a certain amount of the emotional charge my shaking carried diminished as well. It was simply shaking.

On the very last day's break period, walking up the dusty road in a high, chilled wind, I had the distinct feeling that the entire center of my body had disappeared or become transparent. I could feel the wind whistling through it. I felt feather-light and momentarily problem-free; as if the back of my head had disappeared and the space behind my eyes opened out onto the universe. Before me, the world was extraordinarily vivid and alive, shimmering intensely. I had not taken a drug and yet I was truly "high." I thought, "This is nice! I'm gonna check Zen out a little further." Forty years later I'm still checking.

* * *

I AM STANDING in a crib. I cannot see myself, but in the corner of my vision a small, plump hand grips the white plastic railing, and I "know" it as my own. The upright bars of the crib have rounded edges and the paint is enamel-smooth and glossy. The crib rests opposite a large window through which I can see a broad expanse of dun-colored, rippled water and a far shore, flanked by cliffs that are topped by trees. I am not conscious of any sound.

Between my crib and the window, on a low daybed, I see two human heads, some shoulders and arms, writhing on a rumpled white sheet. A man is lying on top of a woman, covering her with a back so broad it might be the shell of giant turtle. The woman is my young mother. She could be floating, or sleeping. Perhaps I made a sound of recognition. The man lifts his head and locks eyes with mine. His face is contorted into a mask of rictus; lips compressed and grim; his eyes unsettling in their intensity. I have no words for what I am observing, but it frightens me.

I learned years later that until I was eight months old, my parents lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Their apartment window would have offered a clear view of the dramatic vertical cliffs, the Palisades, on the far shore in New Jersey.

My father, in this memory, if that is what it is, is the age he would have been when I was crib-bound, his hair black and un-silvered. The woman's face is turned aside and obscured by coils of rosy-gold hair, my mother's color when I was young. Her eyes are closed and the long lovely lashes are those I remember from later in life. Her body is barely visible beneath his. My father's strained expression might have been due to exertion during sex. Equally plausibly, it might have been a warning — his silent command not to disturb him. I would become familiar with this visual insistence later in life, always transmitted from his eyes with the force of a slap. It is my earliest image of my father, and it saddens me to acknowledge that this first impression was not love, but fear.

MY FATHER, MORRIS Cohon, was only five feet nine inches (a giant to a child) but his nineteen-inch neck and fifty-four-inch chest gave him a formidable solidity. He was handsome, with a virile, charismatic manner, a witty man capable of immense charm and extravagant generosity. However, a stratum of something molten lay just below his surface, leaking most visibly from his eyes.

Normally animated by a cool, appraising steadiness, those eyes were so dark the irises often appeared as black as his pupils. His gaze communicated a restless, barely sublimated irritation, as if its subject had already claimed more of his attention than it deserved. When he was angry, his regard could sting like a paper cut. His eyes moved in small calculating arcs like a blade, expressing an unmistakable intention to dominate what they measured. He was not incapable of love and sometimes-lugubrious Victorian sentimentality, but his more tender feelings were not easily expressed and only rarely in a form I could comprehend.

Even as a child, Morris possessed extraordinary physical strength, which he developed as a boxer, Greco-Roman wrestler, and black belt in judo. In a sepia-toned snapshot from his college days, he is lifting the front end of a Stutz Bearcat car off the ground for the amusement of his friends.

Morris made his first money anticipating the Depression and selling short for a boss who made a killing and rewarded him. He possessed an unusual facility with numbers, a skill that gained him entrance to MIT at fifteen and later served him in establishing his own stockbroker's firm and several other business concerns, all of which thrived for a long time. By the time I was able to follow his conversations, it became apparent that he possessed encyclopedic knowledge about a broad array of subjects, claiming that such breadth was required of him to be good at his various occupations.

His activities were indeed varied. He owned his own investment firm, Morris Cohon and Company, on Wall Street. Family friends credited him with "inventing" the over-the-counter stock market — the market for smaller companies not yet trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and he made a fortune bringing a number of them public. He became an expert in museum-quality American and English Colonial antiques and silver and bankrolled a famous antique dealer in Manhattan, a half-Cherokee Indian named John Walton, whose clients included DuPonts and Rockefellers.

Morris and his partner in the cattle business, Harl Thomas from Raymondsville, Texas, introduced French Charolais cattle to the United States, evading the legal ban on the breed initiated by Angus and Holstein breeders, by painting black spots on the magnificent white animals they had imported into Mexico and running them across the Rio Grande as Holsteins. Other business interests included the Phoenix-Campbell Oil Company and the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad and he served as president of both institutions. He was not Warren Buffett–rich perhaps, but he was rich enough to do damn near anything he wanted ... except relax.

Morris's will was obdurately focused on winning — in the gym, in business, and in life. He wanted all the toys, privileges, and accoutrements that winners accrue. He set his sights on surrounding himself with "the best" — imitating English baronial traditions in his bespoke Dunhill suits and Prince of Norfolk jackets, dressing as if he were as tall, slender, and elegant as Lord Mountbatten, and not the swarthy half-Kazakh half-Spaniard he was. He took his possessions seriously, and felt comfortable only if he had assured himself that there were none finer; as if a lapse of taste might indicate some tainted strain of mediocrity within him. Consequently, Morris's furniture and silver were museum quality and featured in the magazine Antiques; his floors beautified with 18th-century silk Persian rugs. He hunted raccoons on his farms with hounds bought in Mississippi and Alabama, some for thousands of dollars. He was my earliest model of power; and for a young boy who sought a niche in his father's life and required his recognition and attention like a parched plant requires water, his focus rarely seemed to fall on me in any way I hoped it might.

MY MOTHER RUTH Fidler's family was a drop in the tidal wave of Russian and Eastern European Jews that crested and broke on the shores of America in the earliest days of the twentieth century. Fleeing lethal anti-Semitism abroad, many of these immigrants expressed their understanding of Old Testament justice as Socialists or Communists — a number of my relatives among them. They packed these ideas, along with their few clothes, hand-wrought copper teakettles and sooty pots, samovars, books, and culture and brought them to New York, eager for new beginnings My mother's parents, Nat and Rose, and their relatives, the Fidlers and Adlers, had been raised in the cloistered ghettos of Eastern Europe. The elders spoke primarily Yiddish, kept Orthodox kosher homes and lived with the closeted reserve and suspicion of outsiders common to shtetl people. In the nutrient-rich broth of their closed community and culture, they tended to be warm-hearted, gregarious, and social, unlike Morris's people — who were wary, solitary, and high-status.

Morris's family — Cohons (K'han in Kazakhstan), DaSilvas (Silvers), Bartolomeos, and Mendeses — were immigrants like my mother's people, but wealthier, more secular, and cosmopolitan. One cousin, Pierre Mendes France, was the prime minister of France during whose term the French withdrew their forces from Vietnam. Morris's mother, Rae, came from a long line of Sephardic Jews who had thrived in capital cities in Morocco and Spain (until they were expelled in 1492 after the Reconquest of the Moors). Migrating to France and England, they made their living as skilled artisans, and chefs. Her people were proud and clannish, convinced of their superiority over all others, and especially the Eastern European Jews known as Ashkenazim — my mother's people.

Ruth's father, Nat, ran a little four-seat soda fountain/candy store in the Bronx, where he sold notions, penny candies, and magazines. Ruth had her eyes fixed on grander vistas. Tall and slender, naturally refined, with high cheekbones and warm, empathetic eyes, as soon as she was able to she migrated from the Bronx, working as a model in Manhattan, an aspiring jazz singer, and later as a secretary for Walter Winchell, the notorious gossip columnist at the New York Daily Mirror. Before and after matriculating from Hunter College, she absorbed social information and cues from glossy weeklies and films, assiduously polishing the Yiddish, the rough accents, and nasal Bronx resonance from her speech until she spoke as if she were performing in her own film noir. (My mother confessed to me once that she had named me "Peter" because she had heard Bette Davis utter the name in a movie. "It was impossibly elegant dear, and I knew in that moment that if I had a son, I would name him Peter.") This genetic heritage may also explain the exaggerated role imagination came to assume in my life, as well as my predilection for sometimes allowing fantasy to alter unpleasant facts.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Rainman's Third Cure"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Peter Coyote.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
FOREWORD,
THE FIRST TWO CURES,
THE RAINMAN'S THIRD CURE,
NOTES,

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Rainman's Third Cure:

"Remarkably forthright and insightful, this memoir may inspire others to add a bit of Zen to their lives."—Library Journal Starred Review

"Coyote has emerged, over the past few decades, as the unofficial yet authentic voice of America. His own personal voice echoes across every page of his memoir...As a memoir of one man's adventures, it's appealing because it shows what happened to a generation caught up in sex, drugs and political protest, and who dreamed the dream of the utopian '60s...The archival photos of Coyote's parents, father figures, mentors and friends bring them to life, enhance the prose and help make this memoir unforgettable."—San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] descriptively brilliant biographical odyssey....Presented with so many well–defined faces, there's guaranteed to be at least one Coyote, and probably more, that readers enjoy meeting." —Kirkus

"Peter's Coyote's new memoir is just plain wonderful––richly textured, beautifully written, sad, sweet, sometimes funny, always wise. It is about childhood losses and joy, growing up, mentors, loyalty, the search for Truth, survival, the sixties, the seventies, transcendence, healing, disasters. It is told by a writer of deep wisdom, self–knowledge and charm, yet I gobbled it up, like a novel." —Anne Lamott

"As he showed in Sleeping Where I Fell, Peter has lived a life most of us could only dream of. In this insightful and beautifully expressed follow–up, we get a deeper view not only of his own path, but of the currents underlying so much of our own shared histories. Viewed through this prism of three transformational relationships, his story is as moving as it is fascinating. A remarkable book." —Bonnie Raitt

Praise for Sleeping Where I Fall

"Sleeping Where I Fall Chronicles with uncommon honesty a chaotic social movement that aimed to radically reform American society . . . the tales that make the final cut in Coyotes memoir are skillfully rendered, mixing hilarity and tragedy." –The Los Angeles Times

"Coyote reflects with maturity on the mistakes he and his peers made, but he affirms that the dream was worth having." –Washington Post

"Coyote not only survived the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies but emerged from years of journeying through the counterculture to achieve success as an actor. Considering the numerous casualties among radicals, who, like Coyote, were heroin junkies living on the edge of society, this is a rare feat. In this frank yet sensitive memoir of those years, Coyote contradicts romantic notions of communes by recalling the discord and petty disagreements typical in his own communal living experiences . . Coyote's thoughtful, articulate writing displays a compassionate wisdom that puts this chronicle in a class above the typical actor's autobiography. Highly recommended for relevent subject collections in academic as well as public libraries." –Library Journal

"Coyote's evolution from callow thespian to revolutionary communard to seasoned philosopher is fascinating, as much a social and political history as it is a reminiscence. The stories unravel like tender after–dinner tales in prose that captures the rasp and tickle of Coyote's corduroy voice. In the end, Sleeping Where I Fall reveals a man as complex and unpredictable as the totem animal from which he takes his name." ––L.A. Smith

From the Publisher

2015-01-21
An imperious and flawed father figure looms large in Coyote's artfully rendered chronicle of his intriguing journey from confused, privileged youth to enlightened Zen practitioner.Not long ago, Coyote, international screen star and veteran countercultural revolutionary, had a transcendental experience that he had arguably been searching for his entire life. But while the author's Buddhist practice is a vital component of his often descriptively brilliant biographical odyssey, it is by no means the only one. Coyote's story, the follow-up to Sleeping Where I Fall (1998), is as much about a boy's initial introduction to the great wide world as it is about one complex human being's lifelong hunger for inner meaning. Coyote presents a fascinatingly intricate portrait of what it was like being the peculiar scion of wealth and power. As a child, the young Peter Cohon found himself languishing in neglect, floating in the staid world of his conflicted parents, Morris and Ruth. Soon, however, he was propelled headlong into a parallel existence where he met lively figures hired to run the family's Turkey Hill farm and Englewood, New Jersey, abode. "For the next ten years [caretaker] Susie Howard was the North Star around which my heavens revolved." The impressionable young boy eventually encountered jazz legends, intellectual radicals and rough-hewn outdoorsmen. In addition to an imposing gangster uncle, each of these individuals managed to shape the boy who would later become not only a central figure in America's nascent youth movement, but also a dusty pioneer in communal living, a left-wing rabble-rouser working inside the political system, and a struggling father trying to support a family with a heroin monkey on his back. Astonishingly, well into middle age, the author accomplished another remarkable turn, evolving into the well-respected film actor many know him as today. Presented with so many well-defined faces, there's guaranteed to be at least one Coyote, and probably more, that readers enjoy meeting.

Kirkus Review