Percy the Cat had broken loose with one of his midnight specials. His farts are always terrible but at night they seem to get worse. Peter’s reaction to this one was so wildly serious the rest of us started to laugh.
Cary said, “I don’t think he shit, Peter. It was just a fart.”
“Just a fart? Oh, thank God! Because if that was a fart, what’s to become of us all when he starts shitting?” Jeanette was howling by now. She actually fell over and doubled up, hugging her belly.
Percy just lay there showing no interest whatever in the scene taking place. “Look at him, look at this cat,” said Peter. “He emits this fatal gas, the worst fart I’ve ever smelled in my life, and acts as if nothing had happened, nothing at all! We’ve simply got to get Mrs. Goldoni to stop feeding him six times a day. He’s fat! Look at the size of him! He looks like the cat of some German! I’m ashamed, ashamed of him. Percy, for Christ sake”—he leaned over, looking straight down at the cat—“you’ve got to cut down on your eating! Be a cat! Be lean! Be a real panther! Go chase pigeons! Cease and desist this constant nightly farting!” Peter gasped and clutched his throat. “Oh, sweet Jesus help us, he did it again!”
By now we were all falling all over the floor, and the more we laughed, the more Peter carried on. He’s a fantastic ham, and you could see he was digging it even more than we were. He swooped down and picked up Percy and deposited him at the top of the stairs. “Please, Percy!” he said. “Fart elsewhere!”
“Now I ask you,” he said, rejoining the circle, “how in God’s name are we to create a golden age if people like me keep shoving their own trips off on to others? That’s exactly what I’m doing, you realize! It’s true, it’s true! It’s my hangup! I’ve just spent five minutes teaching a cat when to fart.”
Jeanette was absolutely wrecked. She let out a whoop at this point that caused Peter to break up altogether. Pretty soon he was laughing and hollering, with the rest of us, and Jeanette was begging him to stop. “Help!” she cried. “My face hurts! I can’t laugh any more!”
When we’d pulled ourselves together, somebody said they could dig some ice cream, and then everybody got a radical and virulent case of the Munchies. We all headed for the kitchen. Sally whipped out some really far-out date-and-nut cookies from Nature’s Cupboard on 7th Street. And in a few minutes we were all sitting around the big table having ice cream and cookies.
Then I heard Peter saying something to Archie that made my ears pick up. “Archie, may I ask you a personal question?”
Archie said, “Sure.”
And Peter said, “Are you on meth?”
“Am I on it?” Archie said.
“Mm. Do you shoot speed?”
“I have. Yeah, I’ve shot up once or twice.”
“Now come on with that once-or-twice shit. How often? Have you shot up a lot?”
“No. Not a lot.”
“More than once or twice, though. Right?”
“Well, altogether, yeah. But just once or twice lately.”
“Tell me what you get out of it?”
“I don’t know. I guess the main thing is the first rush.”
“The first hour? The first big blast?”
“Yeah.”
“And you feel how? Like you can do anything?”
“Right.”
“That’s what I figured. But can you do anything? Or does it just feel like it?”
“Well, I guess mostly it’s like you think you can do anything. But you tend to spend the whole trip getting ready to. And you don’t really do much. Except talk a lot. And everything’s clear. You know what I mean, Peter? You can see everything really clear. All kinds of things make sense.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh, people, I guess. And things. You feel like you know just how everything works. And you do!”
“And then what?”
“Well, then you keep on knowing. For a couple days sometimes. Like if somebody asks you something, you can tell them the answer.”
“Can you remember the answers later? For instance, now, can you remember some of the answers?”
“I, I, I, um, I wonder if we could talk about it some other time.”
“Sure. But why not now?”
“I’m getting, um, nervous.”
“Okay, we’ll stop talking about it. But just that one question I’d like to get straight right now. The answers you get, on meth, they don’t really stick to your ribs, huh?”
“I don’t know. I guess not.”
“And when somebody asks you about it later, does it always make you nervous?”
“I’m not sure. I, um. Nobody’s asked me before, so I can’t remember. But I really would like to stop talking about it though.”
“Would you like to shoot up right now, Archie?”
“Would I like to shoot up right now?”
“Mm.”
“Sure. I’d like to. I don’t mean I’m going to or anything. But I’d like to. Because it’s—it’s really . . . Well, I’d like to, that’s all!”
“Are you hung up on meth, Archie?”
“Hung up? No! I don’t ever have to take it again—if I don’t want to. Listen, just because a person takes it once or twice, that doesn’t mean they’re addicted.”
“What did you do with that little brown bag?”
“That little brown bag?”
“Yeah. What’d you do with it?”
“I got rid of it.”
“Where?”
“I stashed it.”
“Where’d you stash it?”
“This place I know.”
“Your pocket?”
“No!”
“I love you, Archie.”
“I love you, too, but why is everybody looking at me like—”
Sally Sunflower said, “We love you, Archie. You’re our beautiful brother.”
“Amen!” said Jeanette.
Doris said, “Archie knows he’s very much loved in this family.”
Nyoom said, “Perhaps at this juncture we might proffer a small Zap to Señor Fiesta.”
“Oh, great!” said Cary Colorado. “But let me go pee first. I don’t want to have kidneys on my mind.”
While Cary was in the bathroom, Archie said, “Listen, I feel really good right this minute. I really love you all. I know I broke our thing, and I feel like a real turd about it, but I swear on my life I’ll never do it again.”
“Do what?” Jeanette asked. “Shoot up?”
“That, too. But what I meant was, I’ll never bring hard dope in this house again. I swear.”
“Better take it slow, Archie,” Peter said. “Don’t swear you’ll never shoot up again. Unless you mean it. Because broken promises are, well, they’re bad news. They can do real damage.”
I had a hunch Peter was right. I’ve always had a very spooky feeling about promises, that they have to be kept. But I wondered exactly what kind of damage breaking them could cause. So I asked him.
“Well, lots!” he said. “But the main thing is, they can cause a person to not like himself. And that’s the worst.”
Cary Colorado came back with an empty bladder and all revved up for the Zap. He said, “You waited for me, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” Doris said. “What kind of a second-rate Zap would it be without you?”
We all sat at the table and joined hands. It felt good. It always does. But it wasn’t one of your really major Zaps. My mind kept going and I couldn’t even get it to slow down. I kept thinking, Why hasn’t Archie promised never to shoot up again? I hoped he’d speak up right in the middle of the Zap and make that promise. But he didn’t. Then I thought, Maybe I’m hoping too hard. You’re not supposed to have specific desires for specific results. You’re just supposed to be open and empty-minded and feel love going through you. So I relaxed every part of my body, consciously, and for one split second my mind was empty. And I thought, Ah, my mind is empty! And then of course it was full! Full of pride. And I knew I had to
let go all over again.
I took a quick look at the others to see if their eyes were closed. Jeanette and I caught each other peeking, then we smiled and closed our eyes again. At that moment I saw, sitting right smack in the middle of my head, Hank Glyczwycz. His eyes were black with sadness and he was looking right at me. Without even thinking about it, I opened my eyes again and spoke up. “I’m sorry, everyone, but I’m not doing very well. My mind’s all cluttered up.”
Peter looked at me. “What kind of clutter?”
Everyone opened his eyes except Cary, but we all kept on holding hands.
“Mostly worries. For instance, I just saw the face of this man I know, a new friend who lives in Staten Island. And he’s terribly sad.”
“Anybody else got a cluttered head?” Peter looked around the table.
“Well,” Doris said, “I might as well confess. My mind just baked a blueberry pie. That only took a few seconds. And before that—I’m sorry, Archie, this is all just in my head, remember, but I might as well say it—I was going through your pockets! Doesn’t that take a nerve? Anyway, I’m afraid I wasn’t doing much zapping.”
“I get the feeling,” said Cary Colorado, “that somebody here is afraid of the rest of us. It’s almost as if someone is sitting here thinking the rest of us are all full of shit.” Then he opened his eyes and looked at Peter. “Do you suppose there could be anything to it?”
Peter said, “I don’t know, maybe. Does anybody here think we’re all full of shit?”
Jeanette said, “I don’t. I think we’re all just wonderful!”
Then Archie said, “I don’t think anybody here’s full of shit either. I think you’re all very groovy in fact. But I think the rest of the world is shit. Maybe that’s what Cary picked up on just now. We’re all sitting here holding hands and that’s great. But all I’m thinking is, These people don’t really know what’s happening! Well, I do. This whole fucking world is doomed. And it should be, because it’s a lousy place. And I say that’s what’s happening—fast!”
“I must say,” said Nyoom, “there is massive evidence to be summoned in support of such a view. But I’m not certain it hasn’t already been summoned and found wanting. That is to say, I find the view myopic.”
“C’mon, man,” Archie said. “What the hell’s ‘myopic’ mean?”
“Short-sighted. I speak with affection, and respect, Archibald, dear brother. I realize (A) that your father has retired to the drunk tank at Bellevue, (B) that you have recently received a rather urgent communication from the draft board, (C) the musical group you had such hopes for has dissolved, and (D) that you have developed what is perhaps a somewhat worrisome fondness for Methedrine. I can see how in such circumstances one might imagine that the sky of communitas under which we labor here might seem just faintly overcast with futility. However, it is possible to view these—”
“Nyoom,” Archie said, “I’m going to have to level with you. You’re my brother and all, but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, man. I really don’t.”
Nyoom raised his hands gently, palms up, and nodded. “Lucidity has never been my long suit. I yield the floor.”
I think everyone expected Peter to take over at this point, but Cary was bursting with things to say. His eyes were glittering and his face shone. He licked his lips and said, “Can I say what I think Nyoom might have meant? I think he was trying to say we can’t judge real reality by the material scene. Because, man, God is reality, and anything you can look at with your eyes is just one of the faces He’s wearing. It’s all Maya, illusion, appearance. What’s real is the thing behind what you see. Call it God. Or the Creative Force. Or call it Schmidlapp! It doesn’t matter. Because all it is is life. The life principle. Livingness. Man’s task is to fit himself into life. No, he doesn’t even have to. He doesn’t have to fit himself in. He already fits. His job is to see how, and then cooperate like mad! Please let me get this point over, because I’m dying to say it out loud.” At exactly this point poor Cary’s eyes went blank, and his face took on a desperate expression. “Oh, shit!” he said, “I lost it! God-fucking-damnit, I lost my thought!”
I told him I could fill him in if he wanted me to. He grabbed my hand across the table and said, “Oh, please do! Only I guess I shouldn’t be getting so excited about it, should I?” He smiled. “What if I do lose my point? There’s still God! Oh!” He pounded the table with the palms of both hands. “Now it’s all come back! This is tremendous! Do you see what’s happened? I gave up! I remembered the only thing that’s important is God, and the second I did that, I got my thought back. Wow!”
Peter and Doris were right with him, smiling and beaming and nodding their heads. But Archie wasn’t.
“I’m getting really nervous!” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck anybody’s talking about!”
“Okay, okay, okay!” Cary cried. “I’m going to get really specific, right now! Okay? Let’s say a person has to go downtown and hassle with the draft board, right? Is that specific enough? Okay, what does he do? He thinks, Ah, God is taking the form of the draft board today, only the draft board doesn’t know that. I do, though. And I know I’m one of God’s faces, too! Therefore, I’ll just go right downtown and tell them who I am!”
“Right, right,” Archie said. “You just trot down to the draft board and tell them you’re God, huh?” Archie scrunched his face all out of shape to show what he thought of the idea. But he’s one of these people who always look beautiful even when they’re thinking ugly and taking the grimmest possible view of things.
“No!” Cary shouted. “Of course not! What do you think I am, a complete asshole? Naturally you don’t go down and tell them you’re God. You go down there and act like a person who knows it! That’s what I did in Denver. I called them Sir, because I respected them! I said, ‘Sir, I know you people are mistaken about this entire war thing. The Vietnamese are my brothers just like you are. If you insist upon taking me against my will, I promise you I’ll fuck up, because I can’t cooperate with the murder of my brothers. That’s final,’ I said. And I didn’t get drafted.”
“Will did it that way, too, baby,” Jeanette said. “And he’s in prison.”
“That doesn’t matter!” Cary pounded the table. “He’s still God in prison! And he’s not killing innocent people! What’s prison? I could get through it. ‘I can fast, I can meditate, I can think.’ Isn’t that what it says in Siddhartha? Prison is fabulous for fasting and meditating and thinking. Look at Malcolm X! Look at Eldridge Cleaver! Those guys were created in prisons. They got together with God and created themselves.”
“You’re doing beautifully, Cary,” Nyoom said. “Now why don’t you proceed to the question of Methedrine? I’ve been given to understand that behind bars it’s in rather short supply.”
“Methedrine is shit!” Cary said. “I know because I’ve had it. All you get is this one stupid rush, and then you spend three days wishing to Christ you were unconscious! There’s no real high in it, man, it’s just hysteria! I can get a better high from meditating—and no crash landing either.”
“Well that’s just great for you,” Archie said. “I’m just tickled to death to hear about how high you are all the time. But I’m not. And neither is 99 per cent of everybody else in the world.”
“I’m not high all the time, and I didn’t claim to be. But I’m learning. And so are a lot of other people. Millions. Millions of people are learning to get high and stay high. And that’s because we’re waking up. The whole world is waking up. The whole world is God and God is waking up and learning how to stay high. Amen, goddamnit!”
Jeanette said amen. Then I said it. And pretty soon we were all saying it at once. Except Archie and Peter. Archie said, “Amen my ass.” And Peter said, “I’m going to bed.”
Then he got up from the table and picked up his ice cream dish and his water glass. “You all realize the day I’ve had? I buried my papa this morning and flew across a continent. I feel like
I’m about to collapse.”
Roy said, “Let me take care of your dishes?”
“No, no. Thank you, lad. Everybody wipes his own butt around here. Including me.”
We all paraded into the kitchen with our dirty dishes, but Archie stayed at the table, alone and forlorn. Through the doorway I watched him blinking and squinting his eyes nervously while he finger-traced the ring left by someone’s water glass. Peter went back in there and stood behind Archie. He put his hands on his shoulders and said, “I feel too poor to go to sleep without a toke of grass. You want one with me?”
I couldn’t hear Archie’s answer, but it was super-affirmative. Doris watched the two of them go upstairs together and when she saw me watching, too, she said, “He never gives up on anyone. He doesn’t know how.”
WILL’S GREENHOUSE, SUNSET, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1969
I can’t see the sun itself from up here. There are too many buildings in the way. But I can see what it’s doing to the sky and I find the whole thing much too beautiful.
Cary just left. He brought some of the plants back up. While he was here, we watched together for a while. I asked him if he could stand it. He said, “Yeah, I can stand it. It wrecks me—but I like to be wrecked.”
I’m not sure I do. When a thing is too beautiful, something in me aches, and I don’t entirely dig it. I suppose it’s lonesomeness I feel. Cary isn’t much help either. He’s got this thing going with God and it’s obviously so heavy and so satisfying to him, he doesn’t seem to need other people as much as I do.
When he left just now, I looked at the sky again and shivered all the way down inside, even though it’s not at all cold. Then I found this old denim jacket of Will’s and put it on. It feels really good to be inside of a man’s sleeves.
Will must have shoulders like that gold Prometheus at Rockefeller Center.
I wonder if my father missed me today?
Season of the Witch Page 19