Barkley Bohner, Celebrity Philosopher

Chapter Five

In the real world – not the one you have deluded yourself into thinking is real – we are looking for true relationships, not mere linear proximity. This is why the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is as important to my life right now as something that happened just yesterday.

But when you think about it, how truly important is yesterday? Most of us could happily snip the last 24 hours right out of our lives. One day before, for instance, you could have been talking to Joe and Wendy from Belvedere. Snip-snip.

Maybe you are Joe and Wendy. I have a funny feeling I remind Wendy of Harvey Korman from the Carol Burnett show. No doubt, it will make her day when she eventually makes the connection. In the meantime, life would be infinitely more bearable if it came with a delete function.

My father once told me that our only purpose on this earth is to make God laugh. He took no credit for this penetrating insight, instead claiming that God had told him this personally while the two of them were sitting in the belly of an anaconda.

According to my father, God wears white socks and brown shoes with blue suits.

Lucky for my father he was an anthropologist. The academic community simply attributed his frequent off-the-wall remarks to rigorous fieldwork among the lost tribes of the Amazon. Indeed, his Life Among the Gourmet People is regarded as a classic, especially the chapter on home brewing. In no time, he became a tenured professor at Columbia University.

Thanks to my father, I enrolled in college courses at age 12. I was one of those nerdy kids who reads Wittgenstein for fun. But Columbia University also adjoins Harlem, and here I received a very different education.

I had inherited my mother's musical ability – in particular her unique phrasing and rhythm – and by age 13 I was doing steady gigs at clubs around Harlem. You name the instrument, I played it.

By age 15, I was acquiring a reputation for "laying down some good funk." James Brown came into town. I was filling in on bass guitar for another act. Next thing, I was instructing James Brown's bass player. A year later, the Godfather of Soul, himself, called, and suddenly – at the tender age of 17 – I was on the road with his band.

James Brown put me in his horn section on trombone, but my real role was as his funk underboss, with jurisdiction over the other musicians. It was James Brown who named me Funk Barkley. He let it be known that, "You mess with Funk Barkley, here, you mess with me."

"Young man of the world," my mother would cluck with approval, in reference to the experienced women I encountered on the road. All 17-year-olds need to learn from women twice their age.

As for James Brown, he was forever firing his musicians, including me, or they would quit on him (me, again), which gave me plenty of time to pursue a double PhD in philosophy and mathematics.

"Young man in love," my mother would chortle knowingly, in reference to the coeds I met in the library. With these women, she had nothing to worry about. If I were Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner  – with their parents I never got past the broccoli dip.

There was one very close call, though. "Save the World Sue," my mother called her. Her parents were blacklisted Communists and they embraced me like a long-lost son. Now my mother was genuinely alarmed. "Grandchildren who dance like white men," she wailed.

As it turned out, I wasn't black enough for Save the World Sue. Then along came Trudy. This was six years after I quit James Brown for the last time – 1978.

It was typical boy-meets-girl: Tough white city chick terrorizing a black gang in a bad part of Queens – them abusing a stray dog, me stumbling upon the scene, she about to get us both killed.