She took her eyes off me and looked down at the table. After moments of deliberation, she said, “I just want you to understand … to be okay….”
She was compassionate, that’s for sure.
My mind was restless. Disorientation and lack of awareness will do that…. If I couldn’t figure out who I was, who she was, and what was going on, how could I formulate the means by which to be okay? All there was to work with were the fragmented slivers of tangible memories.
And far too many drunken stupors.
“I don’t know if I know you…. I can’t remember your name and you act as if we were a deal … I’m not quite sure … if I am making—or can make—any sense….”
“Of course.” She touched my cheek sweetly and somehow I think I felt okay.
THE BLONDE grabbed the red notebook she had been reading and doodling in earlier, opened it and handed it to me. I recognized the writing as my own short hand.
The following is an excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “Planet Fever.” Handwriting matches that of Edward Bikaver
The American Standard is a Toilet. But that is not part of the story. This is:
In a dark and ominous room, seated around a large heavy oak table are serious and stern men wearing stiff black three-piece suits. At the head of the table is seated the NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI)
The NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI) grips either side of the table and leans forward. “Ahem—the commission has concluded that this planet is, in fact vulnerable to electronic/psychotronic warfare from within and without. ‘Twould be a relatively simple venture: computer attacks could shut down communications as well as major power grids. This means all televisions, radios, electronic credit, on-line services, gas pumps, scanner machines, RADAR units, video game machines, automated tellers, microwave ovens, GPS systems, computers, plug-in sex toys, missile tracking systems, Las Vegas—in other words, the very essence of their civilization and culture—could verily be shut down and then “rescued” then monopolized….”
The rest of the men at the table nod in agreement.
The NEW NARRATOR/DICTATOR (aka PHOS ATOMOS PARADOSI) slams his fist on the table. “But there is a rogue element hiding out, a RAT who can usurp our plans. Find him and use him for devious purposes then discard him like a used rubber on the outskirts of Tijuana. That’ll be all.”
The story CUTS TO:
The interior of a cheap one-room apartment in a rather run-down part of Hollywood, California.
BIKAVER sits on his futon couch reading the newspaper and drinking cheap beer. A knock on the door. BIKAVER sips his beer then sets it on the coffee table in front of him. “It’s open!”
The door swings open and standing at the threshold is the BLONDE—no make-up, blue eyes, soft lips: simplistic beauty.
“Hi, Mr. Bikaver, you’ve been expecting me, no doubt….” she says.
She walks toward ME (I mean BIKAVER), sits next to him and crosses her legs. She takes out a cigarette, lights it and begins to smoke.
“I missed you after you ran out of the bar last time,” she says.
It must be noted that BIKAVER is tense and in slight shock, elucidated by the nervous tapping upon his knee of a stubby pencil he has grabbed off the coffee table.
“How the hell did you find me? I thought after I switched stories, themes, genre … I mean hell—this is a story within a story; I figured that would definitely toss you off my scent.”
The BLONDE exhales cigarette smoke. “Eddie, you are not in control here. I’m not in control. It is, in fact the fate of this plot-line—no matter the story, theme, genre or format—that we be together. They want us together, don’t you see? Relax and be a content character. I’m here to help you.”
“That’s a lie. You’ve been sent here as a spy to infiltrate and sabotage my—I mean this—story.”
The BLONDE stuffs her cigarette into the half-empty can of beer that Eddie had yet to finish. “This is not your story, Mr. Bikaver. Don’t you understand the big picture? You’re not the only one living here—there are other characters here besides you to help evolve and accomplish this tale. Your place is crucial—both as author and character—to the outcome, but this universe does not revolve around you. You revolve within it.”
Eddie’s consciousness suddenly drifts out of his body, out of his apartment, above the city, upward, off the planet, out of the solar-system, out of the Milky Way, out of the known Universe.
“I remember writing that. I can at times remember you. But chronology of time is … hazy and scattered at best….” I rubbed my head.
“Just take it easy, Eddie … you have enough intelligence to over-come this mental oppression. Remember, I am here to help you. You will have to trust me.”
I thought about the word trust.
Trust, at this point seemed irrelevant. Whether I trusted anyone or not, the world, the powers that be, this gal, the doctor, or whoever the hell was running the show were going to do what they wanted with respect to me. All I could do was ride along and try to guess what was coming up next. The company of the Blonde was greatly appreciated, that I knew.
She sensed my appreciation and returned it with a smile.
FOR TWO and a half months the Blonde (who had “reminded” me her name was Mona on more than a few occasions) and I spent “quality” time together: going out, hanging out, making out and simply enjoying each other’s company. I liked her, and she liked me.
Day by day the loose shards of memory and fragments of my identity re-interconnected, little by little, making the picture of my life’s jigsaw puzzle more lucid.
Mona and I had met in a bar a few years back. She had found our conversation to be strange and fascinating, but abruptly cut short by her jealous boyfriend’s beer mug thumping my head, which rendered me unconscious.
That’s right. He wore a black three-piece suit. I never thought I had a chance with her; maybe that’s why I seemed comfortable talking to her, because I wasn’t even trying to pick up on her. But he figured otherwise. That’s why he cold-cocked me with the beer mug. What was a guy in a suit doing in a dive bar anyway?
“He had issues.” That was the extent of Mona’s assessment of her former beau. After the knockout, Mona broke it off with him and decided to take a chance on me for reasons I still can’t comprehend.
Anyway, the trauma of that blow later induced randomly recurring blackouts and hallucinations. That’s what was wrong with me: the hallucinations and delusions were so vivid, my mind was convinced they were valid aspects of lived reality, as though dreams and waking life were integrated. My time with Moroni. My drunken stupors. My work-in-progress. And of course, Mona.
When the mind cannot decipher between “reality” and “non-reality,” the human being winds up in very lame circumstances. If everything is real, then nothing is real (because nothing is included with everything). Such trivial paradoxes are rather amusing philosophically; to actually place a living, breathing, thinking, shitting, eating, rationalizing, linear time-oriented critter into such a circumstance causes great discomfort to that critter.
Simply put: it ain’t fun.
My notebooks were journals of both physical and psychological aspects of my life. They were, in a sense part of my “therapy,” allowing me to document my everyday existence. When read (by myself or someone else) as an objective log of my daily life’s events, my own shift from “reality” to “fictional reality” became apparent. The goal, obviously, was to grasp and maintain awareness of the difference between these “realities” and “fictional realities.”
Prior to having been knocked into a life of perpetual confusion, I had been a mediocre writer who had spent his time scrounging for money and drinking booze. After the blow in the bar, I had become (according to the recorded writings) some sort of covert operative working to subvert a world-domineering entity that controlled the entire human race via subliminal, economical, political, philosophical, educational, soc
iological, psychological, spiritual, mathematical, irrational, unnatural and vital means.
My façade was as a drunken bum.
“No one would ever think twice about a bum!” my journal read. “When flooded with alcohol, all neural roads and byways become inaccessible or downright treacherous. Their brain-scans are almost impossible to conduct—like going to a mountain pass during a blizzard to do a sobriety test on vagrant….”
Oh, how clever I supposed myself to be.
But the truth was, during these stints I’d disappear for a period of time, prompting Mona to call the police and file a missing persons report on me. Eventually I’d be picked up in a random ally, sidewalk, freeway underpass, or park bench, stinking drunk and muttering incoherent gibberish while clutching one of my notebooks.
“You arrre leeving een a dreeeam und vaaking state hybreed.”
That’s what the Doc had told me.
SPEAKING OF Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch: he was a world-renowned psychiatrist. The reason I had originally landed in his office was because the Blonde—I mean Mona Malena—had heard about him in an ad on the radio for his clinic in the Redondo Beach area. His specialty was working with and curing cases such as mine. He deemed these cases the suffering of “temporal neurological displacement disorder,” the symptoms being “figments of reality intermeshing with fragments of imagination for a synthesis of strange perception.”
Yeah, I thought it sounded like a bunch of quackery, but Mona seemed to think it would help get me realigned with reality.
And she had pretty much come to her wit’s end at that point.
Götzefalsch had invented a revolutionary drug called “Fractalyn,” which he decided to test on me. When absorbed into the system, Fractalyn sends micro-robots deep into the brain so the patient becomes a living movie studio in which every tangent of thought is perceived and downloaded into a visual file and stored.
The patient becomes both spectator to and part of the entire mind production. These neural director-robots label all mental perceptual procedures as “fragments of reality” or “figments of imagination.”
The director-bots then organize the two components into their respective camps and send them to the “thought editor/producer bots”—who decipher which thoughts would be profitable to the organism’s sanity. The chosen ones are then released into consciousness or as dreams.
The drug acts as a type of “psychological Roto-Rooter” which cleans out the pipes in the brain from all the hallucinatory and irrational clogs. Booze, of course imperils the effects of the treatment.
Whenever I relapsed into drink, the progress I had made would regress back to the starting point and then some. Hiking is a good analogy: if I had hiked one mile, then had a slip with the booze, I’d find myself two miles back in the opposite direction of my starting point. When that did occur—which was not irregular—Dr. Götzefalsch would intensively sober me up and put me under heavy hypnotic sedation, and sometimes house me at his clinical facility.
“This veel cause great deeskomnfort und deesoreentation”—and the shock sober treatment was very uncomfortable and disorienting.
“Ze kraveeng for ze booze vill steadily deemineesh”—eventually it seemed to do so, but my brain-patterns still went to the drink out of habit.
I had to become “de-habitualized.”
And that’s where the journals came into the picture. They served as a method to keep track of my fragmented ongoing drunken stupor, as well the pill’s effects.
Though I never told her, Mona was a Godsend and the fact she had cared for and put up with my B.S. during the aftermath of self-induced blackouts spurned me on to try and be a “better man,” whatever that was.
My troubles tested and anguished her; the only conclusion to be drawn for the reason behind her patience and help could be boiled down to two words: true love.
LATELY I had been waking up earlier and earlier in the morning, so began a ritual of driving to a breakfast joint out in the inland desert of L.A, one I had frequented as a kid and teenager growing up in the suburbs called Chino Hills.
I had begun to look forward to that predawn drive. It seemed to help clear my head.
I climbed into the pickup and drove off. The clutch was beginning to show signs of slippage, and I reckoned I’d have to get it fixed in the near future.
Through the winding roads and intermittent neo-suburban desert sprawl, the truck rolled into the small, old-school breakfast joint called the “Freeborn Diner.” Their policy: feed the customer behemoth portions at an absurdly low cost.
How had it remained in business for over quarter a century? The place was always jam-packed, that’s how. The guy who owned it was a part Czechoslovakian part Cherokee chef who came across as cynical and cranky, but was in fact as gentle as a doe to those allowed into his tribe.
Aside from being a gourmet hash slinger, he had a gift of astute societal observation and was well versed in history, psychology, etiquette and cussing. The man’s humble, yet profound intellect resonated in ways beyond the operations of academia and media.
He was what they once referred to as a wise man.
And, as I said before: the man could cook—especially eggs Benedict.
“Chief, your stuff is gourmet cuisine. Still cheap as dirt,” I said the first time I had returned to his place in years, shoveling the ’68 Omelet into my mouth.
“Well thanks—thank you much. But you’re wrong. My stuff is not cheap like dirt. Look around, these days dirt ain’t cheap!”
His place, a service station, and a bar had once been the sole inhabitants for a mile either way off the once two-lane, half-paved road. Back then, people wouldn’t have taken money to own the deed of the shoddy land his little diner rested upon. I used to ride my BMX bike up and down that road to his diner without having to worry about traffic.
Today, his little restaurant resembled an archeological relic from a bygone era wedged within a mosaic of strip-malls, mega-shopping-complexes, gas station/junk food Meccas, cappuccino/latte/whatever-other-exotic-called-caffeine-fix joints, health spas, banks, movie complexes, sports bar-and-grills, theme-oriented restaurants, repetitive townhouse condos, and cheaply built houses, all adorning a six-lane road that had traffic aplenty.
“American Dreams: how can they all be the alike?” Those were the sort of pontifical questions the Chief posed to his clientele.
As an aside: Chief had acquired his English via a couple of foul-mouthed Italian immigrant mechanics, his own mother and father (both spoke very little English), and a George Carlin LP entitled Occupation Foole.
His mother was born a Lakota. She married a Czechoslovakian beer-brewer named Vaclav and the couple had baby Chief. In 1920, because of the asinine 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the United States, Vaclav moved his young family back to Europe. And that is where Chief grew up. His parents believed in keeping ancestral traditions intact, so Chief had been passed Eastern European habits, as well as some Indian customs (he liked the term Indian because rather than feeling demeaned by it, he laughed at how it reflected the absurdity and stupidity of the people who assumed that nomenclature upon them).
In 1968, when the Soviet Union rolled tanks into his beloved city of Prague, Chief decided to flee Europe and return to the U.S. (which had long since ditched the 18th Amendment via the 21st Amendment). He was 50 years old at that time, and one of the first things he did when he got to California was to purchase (with all his savings) this diner and the land underneath it from a very old friend of his dad.
He had learned the craft of brewing beer from his father, who had learned from his father, and so on. Chief’s masterpiece brew was a golden bodied pilsner he called “Shiky Na Nový Světový Rád” which translates (from Czech) into “Piss on the New World Order.” The label had a tactful illustration of a farmer and Comanche chieftain urinating onto the back of an enlarged one dollar bill—both their streams targeting the eye atop the pyramid.
The beer was the best I
had ever had.
I PARKED in the lot and breathed a sigh of relief; I had beaten the morning surge of people, who tended to be loud and boisterous.
An overwhelming aroma of bacon & eggs, hash browns, along with an underlying scent of pipe tobacco and brewery wafted through my nostrils.
“Morning, Chief.” I took my usual stool at the counter and grabbed the piping-hot coffee that had been promptly set before me.
“Eddie, how the fuck are you, eh?” Chief gulped down a glass of milk, set it down and donned his “Old Glory” cooking apron.
“Best as I can be. What’s new?”
“Same shit. Those bastards won’t leave me alone with their fuckin’ money offers. Now they got fuckin’ lawyers who want to find a way to get place with bullshit laws. They probably pay fuckin’ politician to make bullshit law to steal place from me. Son-of-the-bitches politician lawyers … always stirring up the shit and figuring out ways to rob us.” He cracked a couple of eggs and tossed them on the burner. “Fuckin’ money, money, money. I pay tax to some fuckin’ politician I don’t know or care for so I can give good food and good beer to good people so he can make me pay for license and license and license and tax and tax and tax so I can be legitimate and legal so I can pay more so the son-of-the-bitch can stuff my money into his obese pants pockets and go and gamble in the stock market and have good time with his fat pig son-of-the-bitch banker buddies while I barely keep my head above water. Fuck him—he and his obscene pig friends will cook in hell. Shit—they probably own hell and charge devil rent. Maybe they need more room for hell so they try to buy land from me to put on extension. Hell is too overcrowded already!” He bellowed a laugh and tossed the bacon on the burner.
The little bell above the door jingled as some guy walked in. He sported a ponytail under a faded ball cap and wore dark sunglasses, work-ridden overalls, a grubby heavy-duty flannel jacket, and duct-taped work boots.
Planet Fever Page 5