Simple Simon

by William Poe

  At the graduation ceremony, decked out in a red satin robe with yellow tassels, I waited for the moment of my approach to the stage. I placed the pinhead of acid on my finger and touched it to my tongue. “Pomp and Circumstance” gained in volume as I seemed to elevate to the stage. I don’t remember actually receiving my diploma. I’ve seen Polaroids that Vivian took, which prove that I received it into my hand. As the ceremonies ended, I vaguely recall telling Vivian that I would be home late and Lenny giving me a stern look.

  Jake’s tribe of hippies eagerly awaited me at Dot’s. They wanted to see what would happen when “the guy who did those weird paintings” dropped acid for the first time.

  The driver’s seat of my Chevy became a cockpit of indecipherable instruments. Flying saucers zoomed in front of the car, racing me along the staccato line running down the center of the road. The bug-eyed monsters I once drew along the margins of the church program became real creatures watching me from just outside the passenger-side window. Miraculously, I made it to Jake’s in one piece. As I passed beneath it, the back gate became an arch of blue flame.

  Grand Funk Railroad blasted from stereo speakers in Jake’s den, which now seemed as looming as a mountain cave. Alternating flashes of blinding light, then terrifying darkness, soaked the walls as strobe lights arrested time. Colored blobs undulated in lava lamps, collapsing, only to rise again. Ultraviolet bulbs shone on black-light posters tacked to the wall. My eyes fixed on Demons and Wizards by Uriah Heep.

  Kaleidoscopic images cascaded before me as Jake led me to the couch. I laughed uncontrollably when the people gathered around me became vibrating eggs of light like the ones described in Castaneda’s visions. Then the mood changed. Each person became two beings—one a shimmering star, bright as a welder’s torch, the other an apelike apparition. A booming voice sounded: The spirit is trapped in a cage of flesh. Terrified, I ran to Jake’s room and crouched beside the bed. Geometric patterns formed, disappeared, and then redrew themselves on the walls.

  Eventually, everyone migrated outdoors and piled into Jake’s Volkswagen van, a graduation present from Dot. All had taken a hallucinogenic drug of one sort or another and found the confines of the house too limited for their expanding minds. Jake came into the bedroom and urged me to join them. At that point, I was studying maplike patterns on the backs of my hands.

  Veteran to the effects of acid, Jake managed to navigate the country roads and drive us to a body of water called Chicot Lake. People began to dance as the music of Jimi Hendrix blared from the van’s speakers. I wandered to the edge of the water and grasped a tree limb, feeling that I might float away if I didn’t make a tangible connection with the earth.

  While the others partied, I listened to a chorus of bullfrogs, sure that I understood their croaking voices. The bright moon illuminated the prior autumn’s leaves, causing them to glow yellow-white against the dark soil. Faces took shape. Muscle-bound arms sprang from the edges of the leaves and began to grow hands. Gaping mouths opened and then snapped shut. The leaf-frogs crawled in my direction, jumping onto my jeans and gnawing the fabric with toothless gums.

  “Get them off!” I screamed.

  Mojo, who had sold me the Rainbow Acid, came to my rescue. He placed an arm over my shoulder and asked in a calm voice, “Hey, man, what do you see?”

  Though barely able to form words, I described the scene.

  “You’re in control,” Mojo insisted. “Laugh at ’em, man. Laugh at ’em.”

  The leaf-frogs rolled over and pressed their amphibian hands into leafy stomachs, croaking and laughing. Mojo gave me a pat on the back. “See, man? You’re in control.”

  Back at the water’s edge, I resumed my dialogue with the frogs. At dawn, a sunbeam pierced Chicot Lake’s cypress canopy. The solar brilliance flared to became a comet, swooping above the surface of the water and generating a great thunderclap.

  A sense of understanding washed over me. Every moment of my life meant something. The pieces fit. I was heir to Aunt Opal’s quest. She had laid upon me the mantle of mystic knowledge, conveyed through the lucky quarter and the mysteries of the cornhusk doll. I was destined for something special.

  After experiencing Rainbow Acid, I wasn’t the same person as before. The feeling that I was special, the sense of destiny, stayed with me.

  Receiving something like a message from the Great Unknown, I retrieved the lucky quarter, symbol of the great wealth acquired by my ancestors through the toil of slaves, and slipped it into the breast of the folk art doll. I took this union of vanished riches and lost humanity to the crawl space where Ernie and I had made the discovery, and set the doll in the old cigar box atop the perfumed oils that remained in the straw-filled crate. Replacing the plank that would again conceal the talisman’s location, I said a few words of remembrance for the suffering wrought by my ancestors.

  Perhaps Sally’s death had set Aunt Opal on a quest for understanding the complexities of the human mind and heart. She was JT’s granddaughter and knew that the marauders had killed him for helping a Union soldier, someone fighting to free the slaves. There was so much history that I only knew through vague tales. I wished I had pressed Mandy for details.

  When I told Mojo—a Creole steeped in voodoo traditions—what I had done, he said with confidence, “You’re a warlock, man. I knew that when I saw your paintings.”

  I felt a strange sense of pride.

  “Your power comes from the earth, man,” Mojo told me, then, less coherently, “It ignites when you touch the sky.”

  Mojo had definitely heard too much Jimi Hendrix.

  “The time is coming,” he said. “People like us are chosen.”

  “Chosen for what?” I asked.

  Mojo looked at me as though he didn’t know what I meant. He always did have a short attention span.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dot had one hard-and-fast rule: when her sons turned eighteen, they were to leave home and make their own way in the world. Jake was the first to test her resolve in the matter, because he wanted to stay.

  I wondered if Dot would have been less adamant if Jake had done better in school. While sitting for Dot with Dotted Eye, she never mentioned Jake’s drug use, but several times, she commented on his poor academic record. “I wish your tutoring had helped,” she told me. “But I suppose a person has to want to learn.” Dot cared as much about intellectual achievement as she did refinement in the arts. The idiosyncrasies of daily life—such as drug abuse—hardly mattered.

  Dot often confided in me while sitting for her portrait. As I had promised, I modeled the work on the mannered style of Modigliani. Whereas he would have crosshatched one eye, I overlaid a benday pattern, suggesting the influence of Roy Lichtenstein. Dot beamed with pride at the result. She was so enamored, in fact, that she offered Jake’s room as a studio after he’d moved out. I used the opportunity to suggest she give Jake another chance. And anyway, his next oldest brother would have killed me if he didn’t get the room.

  “You could attend college with your inheritance,” Dot proposed on the last day Jake was at home, referring to money from his grandfather’s estate. The inheritance had bypassed Jake’s father when he divorced Dot and disappeared into the Yukon, allegedly joining a logging camp. The inheritance was enough to get Jake through college, or allow him to purchase a house. When Jake didn’t respond, Dot lowered her expectations. “Perhaps a two-year degree at first—to get your grades up.”

  Jake paid no attention. He didn’t say it, but I knew he was thinking that if simply being Dot’s son wasn’t enough reason to call the place he had grown up home, then he didn’t want any part of it.

  After a week of helping Jake search, we found a large but dilapidated house off Rebsamen Park Road, a couple of blocks from the Arkansas River. Jake wanted the house to be more of a communal living space than a crash pad, the way his mother’s house had been. He encouraged friends to move in with him. Mojo arrived on the first day. Jake allotted me a small bedroom, which h
ad room for a twin bed and an easel.

  I enrolled at the university in Little Rock, wondering if Tony had taken advantage of his scholarship, or if the Jesus People had robbed him of his desire to learn along with his ability to love. It pained me to imagine Tony’s life. As hard as I wanted to forget him, he was never far from my thoughts.

  The only time I went to Sibley was when I needed to crash for a few days, usually to recover from an acid high—that first experience at Chicot Lake had been wondrously mysterious, and I wanted more. Vivian and Lenny had no idea about the change in my lifestyle, focused as they were on Lenny’s health, which continued to decline. He remained on a waiting list for the experimental bypass surgery in Houston.

  Just as I had thought it would, the newfound fascination with hallucinogens changed my art. My newest works sparkled with vividness of expression. Creatures emerged, redolent of the Hindu gods, Vishnu and Ganesh, multiple arms and human hybrids abounding among verdant foliage inspired by the jungle paintings of Le Douanier Rousseau.

  Though I had been disappointed about the choice of schools thrust upon me, I found the art classes educational and the instructors helpful in developing my style. Quite a few students from Sibley High attended, but we hardly spoke. Only one person on campus caught my eye—a fellow art student named Stanley Moore.

  Stanley was an aloof character, but something in his manner intrigued me. Perhaps, initially, it was Stanley’s intense green eyes, heavy dose of freckles, and the bright-red hair that reached halfway down his back that attracted me. He was a cross between Tom Sawyer and Siddhartha. I often found Stanley sitting in the lotus position on a rocky outcrop by a stream that ran through campus, eating nuts and berries from a paper sack. His orange beard provided stark contrast against the white cotton shirt he liked to wear.

  At first, Stanley treated me as a shallow annoyance, but I finally commanded his attention by mentioning Edgar Cayce. Stanley knew Cayce’s prediction that a hall of records from Atlantis lay hidden between the paws of the Sphinx and fully expected a discovery that would prove it. Cayce’s trancelike readings convinced Stanley that people met in the present because they had known each other during past lives. Eventually, he accepted me as a test of his patience, if not a cosmic friend, and invited me to his small apartment, a block from the university.

  Stanley owned few possessions, especially when it came to modern conveniences. A hot plate provided his only means of cooking. He slept on a pallet and sat on Hindu pillows. An altar, created by resting a plank across two cinder blocks, stood against the eastern wall. Various crystals and other semiprecious gems that Stanley had collected on journeys to Magnet Cove, and other mineral-rich spots around Arkansas, sat evenly spaced among votive candles.

  “These are guideposts,” Stanley said, pointing to a row of rose quartz and amethyst. “LSD is a window that lets you see the path. Crystals are the engines of power.” Stanley shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he spoke. Morning sunlight passed through prisms hanging in his window and cast myriad rainbows around the room.

  “Have you seen the goal?” Stanley asked.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, not the actual goal,” Stanley continued, ignoring my silence, “but a path to the goal.” He lit a candle on the altar and announced, “Something is about to happen to the world, I’ve been told.”

  “Told?”

  “The guides. You’ll see them if you come along.”

  “Holy Madame Blavatsky, Batman, of course I’ll come along!”

  The expression on Stanley’s face told me that he didn’t catch my poor attempt at humor—it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had never watched television. “I’ve met Blavatsky’s ascended masters,” Stanley said, utterly deadpan. “But what’s a holy bat man?”

  I never again referenced popular culture when I was around him.

  Stanley took a lacquered box from behind the cloth that draped his altar and placed two tabs of LSD between a pair of large crystals, saying, “We have to prepare, or the guides won’t come.”

  For an hour, we sat in lotus position, chanting Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō, before we put tabs of windowpane acid to our tongues. It seemed that we immediately rose to our feet, walking in ever-expanding circles. Each step moved us closer to a distant flare. We saw it glowing, beckoning. Alongside the path, a crimson stream flowed—the blood of martyrs. Children cried from shadowy enclaves. They pleaded, “Libera me,” harmonizing in a kind of requiem chant. We marched toward a glaring sun, its rays illuminating the crystals and causing us to cover our faces against its brilliance.

  Hours later, Stanley and I collapsed on the floor. My body felt like a hollow shell. Following a high such as that, a person could spend hours listening to his heartbeat, seeking assurance that he had survived the trip. When our basic senses returned, Stanley took blankets from a pile and we both slept. Our professors would mark us absent yet again, but the day’s classes would have to proceed without us.

  During Christmas holidays, Jake and Mojo partied every night, tripping on acid, popping reds, or speeding on black mollies. I paid little attention and rarely joined them, withdrawing particularly when heroin entered the scene. I justified my drug use as a quest for enlightenment, not merely as a way to get high. That may have been self-delusion, but it kept me from putting a needle into my arm.

  One afternoon, I walked in the front door to find Mojo strapping a rubber hose around his upper arm. He thumped a vein with his forefinger, waited for it to swell, then picked up a syringe and drove in the needle. He must have stabbed his arm too deeply because a dark bruise formed at the crook of his elbow. Jake, who sat next to him, took the rubber hose and secured it around his own arm. He ripped open a syringe package with his teeth and drew a fix from the spoonful of cooked drugs sitting on the table in front of them.

  A third fellow heated water in his own spoon using a disposable lighter. It was John Carson, older brother of a high school classmate. John had just returned home from Vietnam, bringing with him an addiction to heroin. He sold the drug at Rebsamen Park, hanging out there in the evenings.

  Wanting to get away from the scene, I went to Sibley and stayed in my old room for the remainder of the holiday season, comforted by the familiar creaky floorboards and the aroma of pastureland that penetrated the winter air.

  Consumed by melancholy, I walked the paths once traversed by young Ernie and Simon, intrepid explorers. The lowlands where the swamp formed had expanded since Ernie and I were children. Landfills that made new housing developments possible had redirected the sources of water, and more flowed onto our property. The crawdad towers along the creek resembled Crock-Pots. They were much taller than other years, proving the local belief that the higher the towers rose in the fall, the worse the winter would be. It had been at least ten degrees colder than usual that December. Adding to the dreariness, desiccated vines of kudzu wound around the utility pole near the barn.

  That year Derek went far into the countryside and chopped down a fir tree for Christmas. For many years, Vivian had set up an aluminum tree. I was surprised that the old lights still worked and that the ornaments weren’t broken. The last time I had seen the boxes containing them, they were stacked haphazardly in the basement.

  “I can never go back to that artificial tree,” Vivian said, admiring the decorations and taking in the fresh evergreen smell. Vivian and I sat on the couch, side by side, the way we used to do after putting ornaments on the tree when I was a boy.

  “This seems like a real Christmas,” I said. “The fresh tree makes all the difference.”

  It was nice sharing a simple moment with Vivian. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about the past year, when Tony and I had snuck into the fallout shelter during the choir concert. I missed him terribly.

  Jake called to let me know that he planned to invite people over to usher in 1973. I was still enjoying the quiet time at home—Lenny had even been civil for the most part—but I worried about my paintin
gs and other belongings, so I headed to Little Rock.

  New Year’s Eve, I sequestered myself, smoked a joint, and finished working on a painting that I had been struggling with for weeks—a portrait of myself standing between two roman candles, each sending flares into a starlit sky. Occasionally, someone would try the doorknob, with its broken lock, but was prevented entry by the chair I had wedged against it as a barricade. One guy pushed on the door so hard he almost got through. I chased him away and braced the chair tighter.

  My throat became parched from smoking pot, and I grew ravenously hungry. Despite the risk that someone might invade my room, I ventured out to forage. It was 1973 already, the change having gone unnoticed in the haze of drug use and furtive sex. Someone had put on the Cheap Thrills album of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janice Joplin sang the Gershwin tune “Summertime” as I made my way through the crush of bodies. Nothing remained in the kitchen cupboards or refrigerator, so I drank the last dregs from people’s beer bottles and finished off near-empty bowls of potato chips.

  The music was so loud that I worried it might attract the attention of our neighbors, who were none too happy about hippies living on their street. Once outside, though, I realized that there were far rowdier parties going on than ours. In one yard, a crowd egged on two men drunkenly slugging each other. If the police bothered to answer a complaint, Jake’s wouldn’t be their first stop.

  Back inside, I made my way to the bathroom. Someone had collapsed at the sink with a tourniquet on his arm. I lifted the person’s head, pulling back a thick strand of sandy-blond hair.

  It was Ernie!

  Gently, I pulled the half-spent needle from his arm and splashed cold water on his face.

  “Ernie!” I cried. “Open your eyes! Look at me.”

  Only gradually, after I had soaked a towel in cold water and placed it to his forehead, did color return to Ernie’s cheeks. He began to murmur unintelligibly and then to choke on his own tongue. I bent him over the toilet as he began to vomit. Holding Ernie in my arms, his emaciated body felt as though it weighed nothing. I knew I should call an ambulance, but with all the drugs in the house, I was afraid.