“Would you like to tell me your name?” I asked.
“I’m Sara. And I know yours already. You’re Witch.”
Sally said, “Witch! You’re having a conversation with her! Please tell me everything she says. I’m just dying!”
I tried to describe Sara’s voice to her. I couldn’t actually hear it with my ears but I could see her mouth going and I knew what she was saying. I don’t think there was any sound involved at all. It was just pure communication. Except that I spoke out loud. Maybe Sara would have heard me even if I hadn’t, but it didn’t occur to me to try. I had a voice, so I used it.
So the ghost and I chatted for a while. Sometimes I asked questions for Sally and relayed Sara’s answers. It all seemed very natural at the time. And now as I think about it, it still does. The lady was dead, but so what? Body or no body, she still had things to say. I can’t record her words accurately, of course, because I wasn’t actually hearing, not in the usual sense. My head just sort of supplied words to go with her meanings. And this is the story that came out of it:
Sara had been living in this house for more than 100 years. Before that she and her father had lived in Puerto Rico, where he was an exporter. Then they moved to New York and she’d lived here ever since. By the time he died, in 1890-something, Sara was a full-fledged old maid, and afraid to leave the house. She said the streets were dangerous then. I wanted to say she ought to have a look at them now, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Anyway, after Sara died, she was still afraid to leave the place, and simply stayed in. She told how awful it was to stand by and watch while all the family furniture was moved out and their effects disposed of, but there was nothing she could do about it. ( Somehow I guess she was able to salvage that rocker—or maybe it was just a ghost rocker. We didn’t get into that.) Over the years a series of different families moved in and out, none of them very interesting to her, so she sort of checked out most of the time. I didn’t ask how ghosts did that, but I suppose to protect themselves when they’re bored, they have their little checking-out mechanisms just like other people do. . . . In the 1920s a couple of honeymooners moved in and she fell in love with both of them. Soon they had three sons, and everything went along beautifully for about ten years. Then the depression came along and the couple started quarreling about money all the time, so Sara began checking out again. She still loved them as much as ever, but when they were unhappy their conversation was repetitious and tedious to listen to. The boys grew up and went into the Army, and one of them, Sara’s favorite, got killed. World War II, I guess. Sara kept hoping he’d come back as a ghost and live in the house with her, but he never did. So Sara took the gold star that had been hanging in the window to commemorate his death and began wearing it around her neck. I’m very confused about how ghosts pull off these little stunts, but I suppose the gold star is a ghost like the rocker, and like Sara herself. After the war the house was full of grief and sadness until finally quite suddenly the people moved away. I asked Sara if she’d ever spoken with any of the members of that family and she said, “Yes, I talked to them a great deal at first, all of them. But the only one who ever heard me was the one little boy, my favorite. I used to tell him bedtime stories and in the mornings he’d tell his mother about the lady in the rocking chair that visited him at night, and at first his mother said, Oh, that’s nice, dear, but after a while she started getting angry with him. So one night I told him I thought I’d better not talk to him any more for a while. I was afraid as he grew older our conversations might confuse him, so I forced myself to be still. Later, years perhaps, or perhaps just days later, I’m not sure, I tried to talk to him again but he couldn’t hear me any more.” Sara smiled rather sadly at this point. “That’s life,” she said. “People come and go.” Afterwards there was a long series of people in the place, none of them the least bit interesting to her. Then suddenly a couple of years ago Peter moved in and began to accumulate his family of freaks, and she’d been fascinated with life ever since. She said if she was forced to carry on a conversation with a straight person right that minute, she didn’t think she’d remember how. She threw her head back and laughed, then she rocked back and forth a couple of times till she’d calmed down. I asked her how she felt about the life style of Peter’s family. She thought it was wonderful and beautiful and brave. “Just wait,” she said, “until you meet Will. You’re going to fall in love with him.” I said I thought I already had, in a way. And she said, “But you really will, when you meet him. Do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to bring an end to war!” I tried to question her further about Will, but she started going on about the others. She said she’d learned to meditate with Cary and whenever we formed a circle she always joined in. Her favorite event of the day was the mealtime Zap. “Tonight,” she said, “I’m stoned on acid.” That blew my mind. I told Sally. Sally said it made perfect sense, you didn’t need a body to get high. “In fact,” she said, “you can probably get higher without them!”
Then Sally said, “Listen, Witch, I think you should ask Sara if there’s anything we can do for her.”
I said, “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but ask.”
So I did.
And Sara said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I’d like your advice. Do you think I should leave here? It’s been a hundred years now. Often I feel I should move on, but I’m still so frightened I just end up staying. And of course I’m more torn than ever now, because I’d miss you all so. I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped my head.”
Sally loved that. “Oh, we’ve helped Sara’s head,” she cried, clapping her hands together. “Isn’t that super? Tell her she’s helped mine, too. Tell her every time I pass her in the hall I dig her cool. From now on, of course, I’ll speak! I think I’ll speak now.” She looked into the comer where I’d been looking and gave a tentative little wave of her fingers. “Hi there, Sara dear,” she said. And then, to me, “What’d she say, Witch, did she hear me?”
I reported that Sara thought she was an especially beautiful person, and Sally clapped her hands with joy.
But I was interested in getting back to Sara’s problem about whether or not she should leave Canal Street. I wanted to know why she was asking my advice. I told her whatever experience I may have had as a ghost in the past had completely slipped my mind, so I didn’t know what to tell her.
Sara said, “Yes, Witch, but you know as much about it as I do. And you’re much more level-headed than I am. Please, take a moment, imagine yourself in my shoes. What would you do?”
Suddenly I knew exactly what to tell her. “If it was me,” I said, “I’d stick around here and groove until it wasn’t interesting any more. Then? Who knows, if I felt like it, I’d probably take off.”
“Even if you were frightened?” she said.
I told her if it seemed the right thing to do, I thought I’d try to leave even if I was frightened, but I couldn’t be sure.
By this time we’d been talking for a long time, probably an hour or more. The conversation must have been taking tremendous energy from me, because suddenly I felt totally depleted. I told Sara I thought I’d like to rest for a while. She understood, but she was disappointed. “I’m not usually so selfish,” she said. “It’s just that you’re the first person in more than forty years who’s heard me when I spoke.” I said I thought that must be really awful, and she said, “You get used to it. Now go rest, Witch Gloria, there’ll be other days.” When she called me Witch Gloria an odd little look went with it. I was just on the verge of asking her if she realized I sometimes called myself that secretly, when she said, “I watch you write in your journal. I hope you don’t mind. If you do, I’ll stop. I promise.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think I mind. Is it interesting to you?”
“Oh, yes!” she said.
Wow, I thought. I’ve got a reader!
It must have been around mid-trip when we got into the Electric Prunes. Be
fore that each of us had been pretty busy doing his own thing, Archie alternating between playing his guitar and freaking out, Nyoom and Cary spending most of their trip squatting Buddhalike in a corner trying to get into samadhi, Roy and Jeanette appearing and disappearing all over the house. At one point they took a shower together, giggling like children and playing games with foam from the shampoo. I was invited to join them and might have except that at the moment they asked me Sally and I were on the way up to Will’s greenhouse to visit the gnomes. Anyway, the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor brought us all together. When the Kyrie started, everyone more or less fainted with rapture on the Big Room floor. Roy lay next to me and held my hand and whispered how glad he was we were tripping together, because I was his favorite person in the entire solar system. It’s a good thing I was lying down, because his words gave me this enormous love blast, which I can still feel even now. A lot of the things you experience on acid seem (whether they do or not) to disappear into thin air the next day, but the loving never does. You remember it and keep on feeling it. At least I do. Also, Roy and I had shared a whole big Electric Prunes trip back in Belle Woods, so the music made us aware again of all the terrific highs we’d had together.
After the Gloria, I said to him, “Isn’t this music absolutely superultramysticalMcZapp?”
He said, “SuperultramysticalMcZapp?”
I said, “Right!”
He said, “Loved the McZapp.”
And I said, “I thought you would.”
When it was time to turn the record over, Cary came up with the notion that we should all lie on our backs, each of us making the petal of a flower, with our heads touching in the center and our legs pointed in seven directions, like this:
He said we’d be a living mandala and all the power of the trip and the music would be centered in us and give us an experience of spiritual union.
It did. And there’s nothing I can say about it. I don’t know how to describe spiritual union in words. You’re not you. You’re everybody. And not just those who happen to be present. You’re everybody who ever lived or died. I don’t mean you’re brothers either. I mean you are them and vice versa.
Even Percy the Cat seemed to feel the power of it. He climbed onto Nyoom’s stomach and laid there with his motor running and didn’t even fart. The little tiny part of my mind that was still me felt safe and beautiful and holy and perfect. It was as if I’d slipped out of my body and joined the music at its source, and the source was—well, I suppose the word is God, but maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. Anyway, I was getting a tremendous light show behind my eyes, too, an endless river of color and form flowing through the middle of my head and then spreading out, filling my entire body and extending even beyond it until there was nothing but this infinite river containing every form I could possibly remember or imagine, ivory columns, marble statues, perfect colors, fourth of July fireworks, faces, celestial landscapes, fishes, maps, abstract forms all in 3D and full color, masks, exquisitely carved images, mosques, fruit, animals, cathedrals, fantastic butterflies, serpents, birds, flowers—I could fill pages and pages. It went on and on and I can’t remember all I saw, because the flow was so constant there was hardly time to dig each thing separately. All you could do was groove on the flow itself and hope it would never stop. Every once in a while one of us said wow and I remember feeling absolutely certain each of us was tuned in on the same flow of images. But there’s no way of knowing for sure. It went so fast you couldn’t compare notes. Somewhere along the way I had this thought that what I was seeing was the river of life. It was flowing through me and I was its banks. But now that I write it, it doesn’t look right.
When the record ended, Cary Colorado said, “Does everyone have his eyes closed?”
We all said yes.
“Is everyone getting a light show?”
We all said we were.
Then he said, “Don’t change the record yet. I want to recite something from Demian. Is that cool? Because it’s a very heavy thing. Would everyone like to hear it?”
Most heads tend to be Hermann Hesse freaks, so of course we were all delighted and urged him to go ahead.
It was beautiful. Cary was so stirred up by what he was saying that the words sort of quivered out of him like cum, and yet the sound he made was strong and clear because he was seeing the truth of it all so thoroughly. I couldn’t concentrate on the full import of each thought, but later I got him to find it for me and now I’ll copy it here word for word as it appears in the book:
If the outside world were to be destroyed, a single one of us would be capable of rebuilding it: mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and flower, yes, every natural form is latent within us, originates in the soul, whose essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create.
When Cary finished reciting, there was a long super-high silence.
Then Archie Fiesta said, “Would it be cool to play the Doors? I could dig Morrison right now.”
Nobody answered. I guess the others felt as I did, that nothing could be cooler at that moment than silence. But Archie got up and put the Doors on, and we all lay there and listened. I felt myself gradually being brought down. We’d been on a space flight and this was re-entry. The process was gentle and the rock beat was good but the overall effect was sad and bitter and down-headed. Listening to Morrison, I felt I was hearing the song of Archie Fiesta’s soul.
Can you give me sanctuary
I must find a place to hide
A place for me to hide
Can you find me soft asylum
I can’t make it any more
The man is at the door
I felt someone stirring, so I opened my eyes to see who it was, and there was this strange woman standing there. Not a ghost either, but a real flesh-and-blood lady with great bosoms and enormous eyes, smiling at us. I was so surprised, my first reaction verged on freak-out. Then Cary said, “Doris!”
I was relieved to know it wasn’t a stranger, but then I had a guilt flash. Why is it when I’m tripping I always imagine a straight person sees this big strobe-lighted sign on my face flashing, This Chick Is Doped to the Eyeballs, in psychedelic colors?
Ever since I got to New York, I’ve been seeing practically everything with Mother’s eyes. I never used to do that at all, not even when I was living in the same house with her. But now I always find myself wondering what she’d think if she could see me. I’d like to get over this because it tends to turn everything sour. I don’t want to look at the world through the eyes of anyone but Witch Gliz—unless of course I chose to enter into somebody else’s trip, and I certainly wouldn’t choose to enter Mother’s.
Archie turned down the stereo and there was much hugging and kissing and everyone talked at once. Peter’s father had finally died. Then Peter and Doris had decided she should come back to New York alone while he stayed on for a few days in L.A. to take care of his father’s affairs.
After my first big Oh-Christ-Mother’s-Caught-Me-Tripping-Again paranoia flash, I took a look at Roy. He was in a state of alarm, too. I guess we must have looked like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods, because pretty soon Doris noticed us standing there together and she smiled at us. Then Jeanette introduced us.
By this time Doris had begun to look familiar to me. On acid you often seem to feel you knew everybody in some other incarnation. I said I wondered if we could have met before somewhere.
She said, “I don’t know. But maybe it’s like they say, we’re all members of some ancient tribe, and we’re just beginning to know one another all over again. Anyway, you’re Witch, and you’re Roy, and I’m Doris.” Her voice is wonderfully low with just a hint of gravel in it. She has enormous eyes with a lot of lid showing, and when she looks at you, you feel as if you’re really being seen. The three of us eyeballed one another for a while in a kind of sweet, profound silence. You’d have thought she was on acid right along with the rest
of us.
I knew we liked each other. But Roy still looked scared, as if he thought there was still a good chance of being thrown out. Doris seemed to pick up on his fear, because after a few seconds, her mouth started to scrunch up like she was trying to keep it from melting. She loved him. She loved us both. But how could she? How could she love us so? How could we mean anything to her? Then Roy’s face cracked open in the biggest smile I’ve ever seen from him. The next thing I knew he was getting hugged against these great bosoms of hers, and I was having jealousy rushes. I guess she knew it—she seems to pick up on everything you’re feeling—because one arm reached out and grabbed me and then the three of us huddled for a long sweet moment. Roy was getting something he needed and hadn’t had any of for about a million years, and I felt like I was getting earth-mother lessons from the number one expert of all time.
A few minutes later, when Doris went up to unpack, Roy and Jeanette and I followed her to the foot of the attic stairs, waiting for her reaction to all the work they’d done up there. For a full minute there wasn’t a sound, and then all of a sudden Doris let out a great ooh, followed by a whole series of them. And in a minute she started flying down the stairs until she saw us there looking up at her. Then she said, “Angels have been here! Angels have been here!” and her face was all wet with tears. So we all three went up while she raved about every little detail. I hadn’t lifted a finger up there, so I said, “It wasn’t me, it was Roy and Jeanette.”
She must have carried on for five full minutes, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes and frowning with the heavy import of it all. She said it was like a miracle. Spirits had come with magic wands of love and transformed her hovel into a palace.
Roy was in Seventh Heaven. When Doris began to run down a little, he started pointing out exquisite details she’d missed. For instance, he’d painted the inside of Peter’s closet! Doris thought that was sensational. She carried on about it as if no one in history had ever come up with such an innovation. Then Roy became modest. He said it wasn’t really that hard to do, but it was the sort of thing that often gets missed—unless a person is thorough. Everything he said for the rest of the trip seemed to be geared to pleasing Mama. He was making plenty of headway, too. Once, for instance, Doris stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at him. “God, you’re adorable,” she said, and then went right on with what she was talking about.
Season of the Witch Page 14