Journey to the West (New York)

In the summer of 1977 I took care of Tågarp school where I had been living with Don Cherry and his family. I had decided to go back to Nepal, and when Don insisted that I see New York I thought I could just as well go that way since Nepal was pretty much on the opposite side of the globe.
I had never liked America and all the Americans that I met had left their country in disgust and confirmed and reinforced my dislike. I was turned off by the foreign policy, the lack of social conscience and, above all, the racism. But Don’s insistence and a natural curiosity overcame my reluctance and early in November I flew to New York with Don.

The sheer size of everything was overwhelming and I loved it right away. Don had a friend, Sherab, a white guy who was a monk in the Tibetan tradition. He had a five-story house downtown Manhattan. Each story was one big room stretching from the front to the back with eight supporting metal rods from ceiling to floor.
Here I was installed, on the second floor in a closet-like room under the stairs; it was like camping out, and when, after Christmas, Sherab got a bunch of unsold Christmas trees and tied them to the rods, I was camping in a forest.

Many things were going on in the house. The first floor was rented to flea market sellers on a weekly basis and I became the rent collector. There was often problems with the heating system and when I went on my round to collect, I was met with: “No heat, no rent!” and had to let Sherab continue the negotiations. I was not held personally responsible for the lack of heat and became immediately friendly with some of the sellers who were real characters.
The second floor, where Sherab and I resided, was dedicated to the Samaya Foundation and used for avant-garde concerts and poetry readings and here I met a variety of New York artists and also two young black guys who worked for Sherab. I was shocked by the distance between blacks and whites in America and how easily the ugly specter of racism stuck out its head. One of the boys was suspected of theft and took it for granted that I also suspected him and I had to tell him how I came from a different place and grew up without racism.
On the upper floors construction was going on and here I met and befriended some of the workers and learned a few things that came in handy at a later time when I build my own cabin in California.