The Flying Turk - Part 1
Ulak lives six miles north west of me, in a nondescript tract home in an invisible neighborhood, all boxy stucco and red tile roofs, all short palm token grass rock pile yards. He lives with his old world mother and father and older brother. They eat health foods and refuse to wear anti-perspirants. His mom doesn't like me. She points a gnarled index finger at me when I visit her youngest son, and scolds me in the ancient language. Ulak tells me about his business, about the difficulties caring for his mother, about his playboy brother, about the time his dad lost his shirt in Turkey and broke down, refused to leave bed for three years, a cool washcloth always present on his bald olive head, pimento tongue darting between long teeth.
We met five years past when I was down and out, all tears and sandpaper dreams, and we drove through the backbrush of San Diego county every Saturday. Windows rolled down, we discussed children, God, computers, coffee, life, death, while brown palm-lined roads flew by, sand spraying underneath my car. Ulak's personal philosophy took a big picture approach. He made sense of all kinds of behaviors and social patterns in an elegant way, using rational thought and logical deduction. This method of painting a picture of the world was new to me. No leaps of faith were required; if the evidence didn't exist, the hypothesis was null. Ulak called himself an atheist, and the first time I heard him use the word, I flinched. Though I viewed the dogma of my ex-Catholicism with suspicion, church, with its incense and kneelers and post Vatican II hymns, still drove hot nails through my mental wrists.
Ulak left books out for me to read on Aristotelian philosophy, objectivism, and historic reconstructions of Jesus' life. Reconciling the differences between the church of my parents and Ulak's reading list and common sense arguments was impossible for me. Theological discussion, historical debates, all mixed up with lazy yuppy beach towns on summer Saturday afternoons describe my weekend life these past five years.
Ulak agreed to meet my mystery hand cream lady at the train station, at four-ten on a lazy Thursday afternoon, agreed to buy a ticket from the grumpy rail clerk, agreed to exchange hand cream for cold cash and barrel north in a silver streak, take notes, give me a story. In exchange, I agreed to take his mother to the hair salon. He got the better deal.
So now I have Ulak's story, taken from him in a diner by the sea, over eggs and bad coffee, me pulling Turkish teeth, pulling adjectives and colors and feelings from a rational friend, my own Rosetta Avon Stone. You have to know Ulak to know this story. I'm forced to break it down into its essential sensory and conceptual bits of data. Hopefully the resulting description paints a fair picture.
Pretend that you had a dream of driving a pickup truck through the barren plains of New Mexico. Now pretend that it's the year 1133, and you have lived your entire life in a small village near Rome. How would you tell this dream to your friends? You could only reduce it to the colors and shapes and textures and sounds and smells and movements and emotions within your dream. You wouldn't be able to know where your dream took place. You wouldn't be able to name the strange vehicle of your dreams. Your description would have to be careful enough, and detailed enough for anyone of your village to get a glimpse of that other world. And since you were driving the pickup truck, you couldn't even draw it for your friends! You could only guess what the overall shape might have been. You know that your recountal would not give the dream justice. You wouldn't understand the purpose of the truck, though you may guess. You might not even guess something so basic such as the truck sits on wheels. And even though this dream would be unsettling, and seem like a place and a time so far away and maybe even not of this dimension, it's still Earth. It's still within a mere thousand years! This is my task. Describe a rational Turkish national flying train afternoon, let me be a conduit between Ulak and you, let you breath the sand and salt, touch the velvet hand of a hand cream goddess, discover her secret.
To be continued!!!!
5:01:14 PM 
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