by Robert Ward
“We are here to enjoy this planet,” I say, as my mind is carried out of my body, two hundred miles a second. The heart beating beneath my skin, fast, faster (only the briefest of thoughts about heart attacks, and I laugh it off).
“Beautiful,” says someone.
“Wow,” says someone else.
And I understand (now) that these words are codes to those of us who know their secret meanings. And I am struck with wonder that all this is rushing into me, all this secret knowledge that is as plain as the nose on any grandmother’s face. This knowledge which can free the whole world and make everything simple and beautiful, and now Mal shows me a flower, and puts it behind my ear, and whispers to me that she thinks I am beautiful, that we are all beautiful.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, beautiful. We are all beautiful and …”
But Head interrupts me with a serious look. He stands above me, forty feet tall.
“You are going to learn some more secrets very soon,” he says. “Tonight our brothers are coming for the chanting.”
“Groooooooooooooooooovy,” says a small blond girl with hair all over her legs, and the sound of the words trails out like music or like a stream of beautiful white smoke which is thick in front of your eyes, and then slowly, slowly, blows into the air and back into the void from which it came.
It is the night of the meeting, we are waiting in the farmhouse attic, Head has lent me his clothes to wear. I have on black felt pants, and a flower-stained shirt, and authentic Mexican boots. I hope that the sweat pouring off my body does not smell these wonderful garments up. I picture Head flying into a rage, telling me that every vision I have had is canceled out by my foul body odor. It occurs to me that this is a paranoid thought, which I should not be having, for how can I have paranoid thoughts when there is no me. (This is an important concept in Krishna Consciousness, as I understand it. Since you and the Universe are the same thing, it is impossible to have any negative thoughts, for all is perfect in the cycle, and that includes even terrible things like bad thoughts. When Head told me this I recognized it as circular logic, and this circular aspect of it fits in with the whole, for everything in a circle comes back to everything else and all is one.) In spite of that fact, I must admit to a certain amount of trepidation. I am sweating all over, and my hair is greasy, and my heart keeps skipping beats, which is no fun at all. Also, the room has changed. I don’t mean that one of the Taurus commune girls pranced in and exercised her feminine touch on the furniture, for in this tribe, a Krishna tribe, there is no real difference between men and women; therefore, a woman would not have these feminine instincts. What I do mean is the shadows from the candle which looked so warm and inviting just a few hours ago now seem ominous and terrifying. And the Gothic faces carved on the feet of Head’s antique chair, which he bought so cheap up in San Francisco on quaint old McAllister Street, look too real, and I will not sit next to them because they are definitely going to come alive and make fatal bites on my ankles. I feel as though I am the Prisoner of Zenda, who is doomed to die on the rack, while wild dogs howl outside the barred windows. I would leap from the upstairs roof, but for the moat filled with man-eating piranha fish.
I would like to tell Head how the speed is wearing off and about how paranoid I am, but this is impossible, since I know that his advice would be simply to remember that we are all living in mirrors, and that we are all reflections, who must transcend our naïve beliefs in the reality of our negative emotions. I am shaking badly, which is a familiar state of affairs, but this time it could be serious. What if I took too much amphetamine and never come back to normal. I picture myself as a specimen in San Francisco Hospital, the only known case of heart pop.
“Ve haf here, ghentulmenz, a young speed frrreak who vun day, vile valking in der beatnik area of town, blew into a touzen pieces.”
I go into the bathroom and try to put cold water on my head, but my hands are too shaky to turn on the tap. Paralysis. I can’t believe it. I am going to be paralyzed for the rest of my days from this. I stare into the mirror and see a blurry image. Blindness too. This is horrible. I will be a hippie basket case, and my friends will feed me brown rice through a tube.
Back in the attic, Mal is looking fantastic (if my eyes are seeing right) in a pair of tight Levi’s and a buckskin jacket. She is handing each of the silent people who enter a flower. I try to walk around the other side of the room, because I do not want to let the flower slip through my shaky fingers. Everyone else is in fine spirits. I sit in the back and watch each and every person get into a cross-legged position like yogis.
Head comes over to me, dressed in a fire-engine-red tunic, smiling gently:
“If you will assume the lotus position you will receive the maximum vibrations from the chanting.”
I smile and try to pull my left leg over my right one. It will not go. This is horrible. I give a nervous laugh and switch to my right leg. It fits under my left leg, and I smile and try to pull my ankles around. This maneuver causes me unbelievable pain, and I try to lie on my side, to get more pressure on the joints. After several minutes of tugging, I feel my bones snap and know that I have broken my legs. I will be taken to the hospital, where they will beat me with a rubber hose for having long hair. And now, as I lie here on my side, I see Mal take a front-row seat and hear the chanting begin. I try to chant with them but the pain in my legs makes it impossible for me to feel the vibrations. Head is sitting in the very front, rolling his head like a gentle cloud, and I am here in the back in a rare state of horror. I try to nudge up to the guy in front of me to tell him to get me a stretcher, but it’s a futile attempt. I do manage to roll over a little, but my feet hit something and knock it over. This terrifies me, and I fear all the hippies coming out of their love trances, under the illusion that I am the destructive force in the room.
What am I going to do? I ask myself.
The pain has moved up my legs now and I am feeling it vibrate all over my chest and shoulders. I am seeing double, and the Hare Krishnas are getting louder and louder, and what’s more, the pain in my legs is working, really working, on my glands and I begin to pee all over myself. I roll to my left and knock something else over. This is no good, and I decide that perhaps this too, this very pain I am suffering, is preordained, that it is a test to see if I am really able to sweat for Krishna Consciousness. So I decide to chant and bear my cross.
“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” I say weakly, and then feel a scorching pain at my feet.
“Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna,” I go on.
Now the pain at my feet is getting hotter, and I jerk my head around and see flames. It appears that I have kicked over a candle, and the flame has caught onto a poster of Jimi Hendrix.
“Help,” I yell. “Help, fire.”
My voice cannot be heard over the now tumultuous roar of Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.
I nudge up to someone’s back and bite it hard.
“Whaaaaaa,” the person yells, jumping to his feet.
“Fire, fire,” he shouts, grabbing the ecstatic boy next to him.
Then everyone is leaping up and running out. No one is staying to fight the fire. I am still trapped in the lotus position, both legs broken, and the flames licking hotter and hotter. I see Head standing by the attic steps. He is looking past me, at the burning wall.
“Head,” I whimper. “Head, help.”
“Groovy,” he says, “Beautiful …”
“Head … whoa, Headdddddd …”
But Head is gone, and I realize that I will soon be suffering from the illusion that I am a piece of smoldering flesh. I begin to roll frantically toward the steps, yelling “Mal … Head,” crushing the stranded flowers as I go. When I reach the top, I grab the rail and give myself a big pushoff. Then I am rolling, head over broken legs, down the winding staircase. Halfway down, I see Head coming toward me. Ah, I think, he has not forsaken his hippie brother.
“Head,” I say calmly. “Here I come, Head.”
<
br /> “Groovy,” he says, stepping over my body. “You keep right on rolling, baby. I gotta go back for my stash.”
I bite my wrist and roll the rest of the way down the steps.
XXXV.
Back on the Street and My TV Debut
After having my legs fixed at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (they were not broken but merely sprained), I do not go back to the Greta Garbo. I do not want to see Phantom’s leering, mocking smile, and the mere thought of Mal’s mystical pep talk gives me the shudders. I do not know where I want to go, nor what I want to do, so naturally I end up back on the street. But the street has changed overnight. Now there are ten thousand people, twice as many shops, and all of it is loud and in living color. Great swirls of color on little feet marching through the wetness, and underneath the color is a pale, yellow skin, and the bony, protruding jaws which come from the bad food we are eating and the crummy drugs we are ingesting. I stand in the street once again, waving my Oracle, which will, of course, run Head’s column on this week’s method of transcendence. (Maybe it’ll be breathing exercises, or maybe it’ll be hopping a freighter to Japan, you see what you do is hide in the big cone-shaped things on deck and when you get in there you see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and the whole thing is a fucking movie and you are back on the street again, high on Methedrine, Methedrine which is bad bad bad for you, ask any of the rock bands, it’s bad, they will tell you that it is pure death, absolute denial of the living spirit inside, and they will shoot their own arms full of it, and get up there on the big stage, and tell you again, for three dollars and fifty cents a head.)
“Bitter, bitter, bitter,” snarls Warren.
I do not answer but grind my teeth. Up until this moment, I have not been one to look back, but now I am looking back. It is all I can do.
You might wonder how it is possible to reflect, with those colors swirling by you, and with the speed rushing through you, and the chicks that you are laying, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, balling every night, in someone’s strange room, while records are playing, and your friends, your newest friends, are sitting on the other side by the picture of Buddha, shooting more of that good stuff into their veins. But I do reflect. I think of things that I have not told you about before, that I have not thought about until that moment on the garbage street, when there seems to be no future in looking ahead. (And perhaps this is what Head was talking about all along—street therapy.) But I am remembering Kirk, I am remembering Walter, and how they seemed to be living people with certain definitions to them, certain characteristics that you could count on. I think of Walter as gentle, and poetic, and in touch with himself, and I remember him in high school losing that definition as he tried to get into the fraternity. Those wonderful fraternities which were the next step up from the Aces. I remember him carrying books for a boy named Tom Pearson, a boy who is now in West Point. The name of the fraternity is Alpha Pi, and the people in it all looked like Tom Pearson. All of them well built, and all of them walking with their hands at their sides, which was something that was somehow considered “cool.” And I can see Walter, walking alongside Tom Pearson, both of them with their hands at their sides like zombies. And in the cafeteria he would carry Tom Pearson’s tray, and to show his gratitude Tom Pearson might smash mashed potatoes in Walter’s eager face. I remember Kirk telling Walter to stop it, but he was convinced that this was the means to salvation, that only Tom Pearson and Alpha Pi (and the automobiles, and the button-down shirts, and the real silk ties, and the real shell cordovan shoes) could give him whatever it was he needed. So he went on with it, carrying higher and higher stacks of books, and listening to Tom Pearson telling him in front of hundreds of people at the drugstore that he was Walter the goat, that the goat was the lowest form of life on earth, and Walter standing there in front of Kirk and all the others, saying “Yes, I am Walter the goat,” and then someone might slip up behind Walter, kneel down, and Tom Pearson would push Walter over the other brother, and, of course, all the books would fall into the street. Kirk and myself would want to leave then, because we would not want Walter to know we had seen him, still smiling, pick up each and every book, all the loose papers in the gutter. Finally, there came the last vote. Walter came to my house, laughing, and wearing his silk ties and his cordovan shoes, and told Freda and Glenn that he was “getting in,” that all the things he had gone through were only tests, and that he was finally making it. And I remember Glenn saying to him “That’s great.” But when I left the room for a minute, Freda came to me and said that she certainly hoped Walter got in, but that she did not trust Tom Pearson because his mother was a snob at the Waverly Methodist Church. And perhaps what I remember most clearly now, standing here on this surreal street, is my own reaction. I am filled with disgust and envy. I want Walter to be blackballed but I am not certain whether it is to maintain his liberty as an individual or anything else. For if he does get in, he will have a big car, and he will screw (or at least neck with) the girls who live in Ruxton, and he will have some strange repellent-charismatic power over me and Kirk. But perhaps not over Kirk. Kirk has thought it was a bunch of shit from the beginning, and is off with Baba Looie in some drive-in hamburger joint, taking some speed (but it is nothing to what is burning me up now). Then, of course, there is the phone call, and Walter has not made it. And he stands quivering on his cordovan wing-tip soles, and the phone is falling from his hands, and he smiles very sincerely at me and says, “I’ve got to go.” I want to comfort him. I am the strong and true friend. “They are just Wasp assholes anyway, Walter,” I say, and he nods at me, and goes off in his freshly washed car, and does not come back for three days.
Why do I now begin to think of these old images? It is like a drunk that I once experienced, while trying to look into Susan’s window, to catch even one pink glimmer of her fresh-bread thighs. I can see her—yes—she is in the light in her slip—yes—and the slip is coming over her head—yes—and I am drinking sloe gin, without a mixer because I have overheard Aces saying that mixtures are for fairies, and she is standing there in her bra and panties—more sloe gin, and I am sticking my tongue in the bottle imagining that it is Susan’s cunt—I have the biggest erection in the world, but then as she starts to take off her bra, I begin to remember seeing Mother Freda and Glenn fucking—it was on a Sunday, and the electric fan had pulled a nice breeze into the house—their bedroom door is open—great hanky legs, little bony acne Glenn fucking—in-out in-out, and I am holding my ragged teddy bear (I chew on it in my sleep, and sometimes wake up screaming, because I am certain I will gag to death, like the small child on “Medic,” with Richard Boone, before he was Paladin, and he had acne too, but his acne made people say he looked manly, while Glenn’s strawberry skin made him only freakish)—here I am watching Susan, sitting in the bushes, watching Susan, whom I have had my balls busted for, but I have this mental image of Freda and Glenn, and the net result is a feeling of heat, and then of throwing up, all down the bush, all down my khakis—and yes, Susan is naked now, in front of the window, but I am swirling around, Glenn’s little white penis, disappearing into this huge dark hairy cave, which no bear would ever sleep in, no matter how cold, no matter how tired….
I wonder why I am remembering this shit. Why are these images floating through my mind with such intensity, the intensity of the clouds Walter and I pointed at up on the Hill so long ago. It occurs to me that then I was free. There on the Hill, digging, I was free. I try to remember other times that I felt like that, but I cannot. Perhaps one or two moments playing touch football, when I would gather in a long toss from Kirk, maybe then I felt like that.
“Get your Oracle,” I yell. “Get your Oracle.”
I am aware that I am being very sentimental, and have a great loathing for my indulgent emotions. But the images come forth anyway. I am amazed that I cannot control them. I see myself in the fourth grade, having a hallucination in class—seeing gray dots get larger. I walk up to the teacher, Miss Rochelle, a wo
man who has spider arms, and I tell her that I must go to the bathroom. She says, “No … this is not possible.” I insist that I go to the bathroom. I tell her that I must wash off the gray dots, which are now no longer dots but living organisms that are threatening to eat my skin. She looks at me funny, and I pick up the inkwell from her desk and attempt to smash her with it. I miss her, drop the well and walk slowly from the class in a trance. The gray is all over me.
Now I am unable to sell my papers. The idea has come into my mind that I am crazy. This is not whacky wonderful crazy that we all laugh at. This is crazy crazy where you will stand in a white room for days on end. This is not black humor. This is black like the West Virginia night. I am standing on the psychedelic street, shaking badly. More thoughts are going through my head, and mothers are coming by in cars, looking at me and thinking how lucky I am to be free. This is irony. And more thoughts, the worst thought of all, worse than anything I have told you up to now, don’t be mad, O reader! Don’t be mad! I know I set you up with jokes, this was necessary, this was entirely necessary. Here is the worst thought of all that was had by me on the street corner of Cole and Haight during the day my mind went all funny:
I am over at the baseball field, and Walter and Kirk are shagging my feeble flies. After the game, we always play a game called Three Flies In. I hit a long pop, which Walter misses. Kirk laughs at him, and Walter says, “You should blow me, shithead,” and then Kirk says, “God will punish you for that.” And Walter says, “God? God blows too.” Can you imagine my pain, good reader? (And do not let me put you off with dialect, with rhetoric. This is the only honest passage in the novel.) I stood there in the slanting sunlight, in front of the twisted-up backstop, and the words bounced around in my mind. And after the words came images. I had a terrible vision of Jesus Christ kneeling down in front of a huge cartoon cock. It is perhaps important that you realize that the cock was not real, but a definite cartoon, with lined-in folds of skin and charcoal pubic hair. I stood there, the bat dragging in the dust, nearly got smashed by Kirk’s throw in, and the picture got animated. Jesus’ mouth fell open, and the cock began to harden, which made it go straight up, and Jesus could not reach it. It was way above him. So he climbed on a steel ladder, and grabbed the cock, and went hand over hand (just as we did in gym class) up to the top of the cock, and I stood there right through Kirk and Walter yelling “Hey, Ward, let’s go on with the game,” as I watched Jesus getting trapped in some pubic jungle, fight his way out with his little sharp, religious teeth, and sit on the very head of it. “Ward,” they yelled, but at this time a remarkable part of the dream came into being. Lo and behold, Jesus’ mouth had gotten very big and he was sucking on the cock. The image was very real, and I laughed and laughed, and called in Kirk and Walter to tell them. We all thought it highly amusing, can you believe that? We all saw the same wonderful picture. But what happened after dinner was not wonderful. I could not get Jesus and that cock out of my mind. Glenn and Freda would sneer at me over the frozen carrots, and the cock would not go away. The Town of Thatched Rooves was no help either. No help at all. The cock and sick Jesus, and an audio part too, which went “God blows. God blows. God blows” over and over again, some Reed Hadley monotone, simply obscured all the goings on of the Town. And then came the sick moment of revelation: I was being made to think of the cock by Jesus himself, as punishment for my own sin. No matter what happened to me from here on in, no matter if I became Johnny Unitas’ successor, I would have to see the picture and hear the words. And oh, pure horror! The horror of knowing that what I was doing was all theater, like the Phantom’s theater. All of it just a stage show, but I was the actor who would suffer the part. And for six months I walked through the wavy street with Jesus gnawing away on the big cock, and my nights were filled with a glowing, sweating pain in which I begged the Great Master, the Big Fisherman, for some mercy. I also reneged my doings with the Aces (I could not tell this to you one year ago, when I started this, but now I must), swore never to miss church, fell on my knees in frenzied hysteria vowing to go to Africa and become a missionary. No go.