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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Twenty-one years ago, David Pearlman decided that he should have a new name, and began calling himself by the first one that came to him: Poppa Neutrino. A neutrino is an itinerant particle so small that it can hardly be detected. Pearlman, who was fifty, incorrectly believed that its existence was theoretical. The name appealed to him because, being suppositional, the particle represented the elements of the hidden life that exert their influence discreetly. Also because of the particle's capacity for unremitting movement. Mr. Neutrino is nomadic. I once unfolded a map of the country and asked him to trace the routes he had travelled, and he hadn't completed the first twenty years of his life before the pen had worn through the paper.
A year ago, Neutrino and his dog, a female Boston terrier, left Key West for California in a van he had been given by some friends. Attached to the van was a trailer on which sat a crudely made raft that Neutrino had built from plywood. Some of the plywood he had bought and some he had found thrown away at construction sites. The raft was twelve feet long and four feet wide, and it had a small cabin. People who saw it did not usually conclude that it was a raft. It looked like a tree house, or possibly a shed for poultry. It did not look like anything that would float. Neutrino planned to sail across the Pacific by himself, something that had been accomplished on a raft only once, by William Willis, in 1964, when Willis was seventy-one years old. Thor Heyerdahl, the first modern man to sail some ways across the Pacific on a raft, sailed, in 1947, with five companions aboard the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia. Neutrino regarded Heyerdahl and Willis as heroes.
Neutrino drove to Los Angeles and left the raft at a friend's house. While he was in Los Angeles, his wife, Betsy Terrell, who had been visiting her family in Maine, called his cell phone and said that she wanted to drive out West and see him before he left. They met in Phoenix, then Neutrino drove back to Los Angeles and retrieved the raft, and he and Terrell drove to Flagstaff to escape the desert heat. After Terrell had left, Neutrino parked the raft on its trailer in a storage lot in Buckeye, Arizona, off Interstate 10, near Phoenix, and drove to Los Angeles again. He now thought that if he could make it across the Pacific he could continue around the world and return to Key West. No one has ever sailed around the world on a raft.
Neutrino is about five feet nine, with broad, sloping shoulders. His forearms and hands are so thick that they look like tools. He has a square face, widely set eyes, and a flawless nose. From each of its wings a curved line descends to enclose his lips, like parentheses. His eyes are a chalky blue, like a glaze on pottery. His regard is direct and measuring. He is extremely vigilant. He has a short white beard and short white hair, which he cuts by gathering strands of it between his second and third fingers and clipping the parts that stick out. He began losing teeth years ago, and he has only two of them left, one in each jaw.
The first teeth Neutrino lost were the front ones, in a fight when he was fifteen. He found the teeth on the ground. It was a very cold night, and he pressed them back into place and pinched the gums, and, perhaps because of the cold, when he took his hands away they stayed where they were, and they were fine for fifteen years. He looked funny, though, because he had reversed them. In the center of his forehead is a scar he received one night as a young man when he came out of a bar in San Francisco playing a trumpet. A kid on the sidewalk asked to see the trumpet, and when Neutrino gave it to him he hit Neutrino with the bell of it right between the eyes.
Neutrino is implacably restless. He has never occupied a house or an apartment for more than a year. He finds possessions oppressive and, being an idealist, has tirelessly pursued an existence in which he would be free of all burdens. On the few occasions when he has worked for money, he has performed mostly day labor. When I first met him, through a friend, he was in Los Angeles, singing on the street. He had found a place that he liked on Venice Beach, among people who sold incense and beads and fragrant oils and T-shirts with sayings such as "If I'm Not Here, I'm Out Looking for Myself." The next day, when I called him on his cell phone, it sounded as if he was in a car that was moving and had the window open. I asked where he was, and he said about twenty miles outside San Diego. "I needed to get some motion under me," he said. He has three grown children, a son and two daughters. (A third daughter died from an illness in her thirties.) In addition, he has a stepdaughter and has raised two other children. When I asked Ingrid, the older of the daughters, why she thought that her father moved so often, she said, "I don't think he can help himself." I asked him once, "What keeps you moving?," and he said, "I wish I knew that." He thought for a moment. "What it comes down to is I don't want to ride the same horse in the same race tomorrow," he said. "I want to ride a different horse, or be in a different race." The solitary apprehension he has been unable to shed, and which has only deepened with the years, is that something significant might have happened for him somewhere if only he had stayed a little longer.
Like many people who behave capriciously, Neutrino believes that he acts only after much reflection. His idea of existence requires constant refreshment and renewal. If he has ever become so absorbed by a pursuit that he hasn't been willing to discard it for another that seems more appealing, I don't know what it is. I told him once that I thought his behavior was inconsistent. He shrugged. "A series of incidents have created your present reality," he said. "Because of the forces involved in anyone's life, better situations are going to come along than the one you're engaged in. If you can break the alignment without hurting somebody, why not break the alignment? Death is going to break your alignment eventually anyway."
Neutrino is as profane a figure as I have ever encountered, but there is also something sanctified about him, something sweet and undefended and raw and noble--his insistence on remaining uncorrupted by material ambitions, his almost desperate responsiveness to joy, to being footloose and feverish, to moving forward with his arms opened wide and his eyes on the horizon. There must have been more like him in earlier times--chasers after stakes and claims, odds players, followers of the reckless and wild hope--especially among the citizens of the Western territories, where his ancestors are from.
Neutrino was born in San Francisco in 1933. His bloodlines are motley. His father, Louis Pearlman, was in the Navy. He left on a ship shortly after Neutrino was conceived and never appeared again. His mother, Vilma McDaniel, married a man named James Maloney, who Neutrino believed was his father. He was raised as David Maloney. In 1966, Neutrino went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for a small newspaper in San Francisco. His second wife--he has had four--was the paper's editor. The security clearance he was required to obtain turned up his real name.
Vilma McDaniel was an incorrigible gambler. She liked dice games and lowball poker. Vilma was descended from a family named Farlow, from Lander, Wyoming. According to the Pioneer Museum in Lander, Neutrino's cousin Albert Farlow, who had short legs as a child and was called Stubby, is the cowboy riding the bucking bronco on the Wyoming license plate.
Neutrino spent his childhood in cheap hotels. Maloney worked as a fish-and-poultry man in a market in San Francisco, and on Monday mornings he drew money from his boss and paid a week's rent on a room. What was left over he gave Vilma to gamble with. Vilma would spend much of the day in bed, "reading and concocting schemes," Neutrino says. If she went out during daylight, it was usually to someone's house to play pinochle or gin rummy.
Neutrino's attendance at school was sporadic. Vilma would sometimes appear in his classroom and say, "David, come on, we're going," and Maloney would be waiting in a car at the curb to take them to Reno. He thinks that by the time he was fifteen he had gone to forty or fifty schools. "I was always being shifted around," he says. "And for some reason I loved this. If I ever wanted a more stable life as a child, I've repressed it." Now and then, in the stream of conversation that passed above his head, Neutrino heard the adults deploring the vagrant life he was subject to, and he would wonder what they could possibly mean. "It may have been a strange childhood," he says. "I suppose it was a strange childhood, but it was the best one for me."
Neutrino says he joined the Army at fifteen, having said he was eighteen. He was discharged at sixteen, and for the next several years he moved mainly along the track of Route 66, living the species of exalted life that Jack Kerouac later described in "On the Road." In Texas, he enrolled in a seminary and became a preacher. In Nevada, he gambled. When he was twenty-one, he arrived in San Francisco and met a group of bohemians that included Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Neal Cassady, the man on whom Kerouac based the character Dean Moriarty. With his third wife, he walked for months through the Mexican desert. In New Mexico, he tried selling life insurance. In New York, he built a canoe in the basement of an apartment building. He planned to launch the canoe in the East River and sail to Cuba and shake Castro's hand, but the canoe turned out to be too large to fit through the basement door. He started a church called the First Church of Fulfillment, the first church in history that didn't claim to know the way, and it thrived for several months. In California, he formed a group of roughly a dozen people who travelled around the country painting signs and called it the Salvation Navy. So as not to pay rent, the Navy lived on rafts, mainly on the Mississippi River. "Mind you, nobody's interested...
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