That, however, may not have been an earth-shattering crisis, these things happen all of the time. But something out of the ordinary had happened. He had smelled something that night. He had smelled Jenny. This beautiful gypsy woman had smelled exactly like Jenny had, and this triggered a chemical reaction in Winston’s blood similar to that of a baking soda rocket. It had caused passion to bubble through his body like he had never felt before. Having a bit of intuition remaining in his shattered inner self, he interpreted this as his essence. He then realized that his essence was before his eyes many years ago, but he had been too self-absorbed to see it. And now no one cared. So he hit the piss for fifty-nine more days in Mexico, trying to erase these thoughts from his consciousness. His success would be worthy of slow-clap accolades.
As he stumbled around on the white sandy beach of day sixty-one, he started talking to every person he saw. The junk flying from his mouth could have been piled higher than the excretions from thirteen bulls in a flax field. He was making no sense, and flew from person to person like a drunk hurricane, until finally he fell to the ground and lied there snoring for the remainder of the day.
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“ Wake up you! Wake up, you’re littering the beach. Hmmphh. No good Yankees, they get that worm into them and they get all loco. Get up you nobody!” Winston’s eyelids blinked up and down, and blurred lines of blue and yellow turned into basic shapes and patterns. Finally, the image of a dirty hobo appeared before them and he could tell immediately that this creature had recently urinated itself. The dirty man was holding a thin piece of driftwood and began to poke him with it.
“Ahhh! What happened to me? Why are you poking me?” Winston asked weakly. He sat himself up and spat out an acre of the beach. His head pounded, his eyes ran away from the sun, and his muscles trembled from dehydration.
“You think you can just lie here in a drunken stupor on my beach?” the hobo asked as he poked him again in the chest. “ What gives you the right to become a gasping, heaving eyesore, draped upon this pristine canvas that my toes live in? Huh?”
“I’m sorry sir. I, well, I was just trying to escape my misery. I was trying to find my freedom, and this is where I ended up, passed out on your beach. I just want to be totally free from the world sir. This was the closest I could get, but I feel even more trapped than before.” He wept in his hands and cowered over his own limbs like a tacky roof-top gargoyle. How embarrassing a sight it was. Again the stick poked him.
“Listen boy, I’ll tell you a story that might help you out. But then you had better get the hell off of my beach and straighten yourself out. Now listen closely. I’ve been blessed enough to know what it feels like to be perfectly free from the world. In fact, I still am. I know the secret to self-liberation and I can share it with you if you promise me one thing. When I’m done, you’ll get the hell off of my beach!” the hobo appeared more like a messiah than a man who had recently urinated himself as he spoke these words of jubilation. His tattered rags for clothing fluttered in the cool breeze, creating a silhouette of cloth behind his battered body that was being supported entirely by a driftwood cane.
“Deal,” replied Winston as he remained seated upon the dunes created by his own self-loathing grains of infinite skepticism. “Tell me your secret.”
“Well, I’ll first have to tell you about how I became aware of this secret. So, where to begin? Oh yes, yes. My name is Driftwood Steve. That’s probably the best place to start. And yours?”
“Winston”
“Very good Winston. Well, this is a story about the day I first realized that I was perfectly free. That day, the day that I realized that I was perfectly free, was the morning after a rock concert. You may have heard of it, it was called Woodstock,” Steve said as he attempted to comb his fingers through his beard. He, of course, paused for a few moments as he focused all of his attention to freeing his entangled fingers from the webs of harsh times dangling from his chin.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of Woodstock Steve,” Winston replied disgustingly.
“Well I was just checking. Anyways, I was fortunate enough to gain my independence at a remarkably early age. My father was a drifter who never came home and my mamma paid no attention to raising me. So, when I turned sixteen, I left her shack and tried to find my own way. What I found was a cardboard box and an abandoned barn on the south end of Brooklyn. Man, I lived there for eight years, in that box in a barn. I did one pile of thinking in that box.” He turned his head up and to the left, almost as if the trip back in time had stirred up something real deep within him. He now stood silent, just like two lovers immediately after intercourse.
“So you never left this barn during the eight years?” Steve lowered his head and his eyes lost their wonderment. He groaned, and finally pulled his fingers free from his chaotic labyrinth of a beard. He placed his hands on his stick and lowered himself onto the sand.
”I never left that barn once man. Not once. I lived just like the animals did. My body learned the feeding times just as those of the horses did. I would hide in the loft until the farmer had left and then I would eat with the animals. It was fantastic!
“I suppose it would be Steve. It sounds peaceful. Sounds simple.”
“Yes, the 60’s were simple times for me. I guess, in a way, I was rebelling too.” His head again turned and tilted and his eyes began to tell the story. The glimmer above his pupils screamed of remorse, and the sharpness of his squint was telling enough to evoke anger in an otherwise innocent bystander. “I heard about Woodstock from a newspaper the farmer had left in the barn one day. I instantly knew that I needed to be a part of it.”
“So you left the barn?” Winston asked in an attempt to speed the story along. He honestly thought that there was very little that he was going to learn from this bum and that he would be much happier to continue down his self-navigated path of personal dissatisfaction.
“Aye, I did. I rode the rails and eventually made it to Woodstock. Man, it was a time. Beautiful women everywhere being as free as a piece of driftwood in the Atlantic Ocean. As free as a man in a box in a barn even. The people there man, they answered to no one. I partied there and grooved to every beat and, at night, I slept in my box.”
“Ha, ha. You brought it with you?”
“Of course I did. I still have the fucking thing, I use it to write down thoughts whenever I have them. That and for toilet paper when I can’t find any. Anyways, the festival was truly astonishing. But on the last night something happened. I was listening to this incredible band while swimming in a sea of people. You know, just grooving. And then, all of a sudden, everything started to move in slow motion. People became blurred lines and, after a little while, I became almost completely blind; all I could see were tiny black dots. And then I felt this incredible pain shoot up my left side, and my face began to droop.”
“You had a heart-attack?” Dr. Stone interrupted anxiously.
“No, it turned out to be a panic attack. It was like all of my focus was being used up to prevent myself from falling down and passing out and nothing else seemed real; people, music, lights, none of it seemed to be there anymore. It was as if the concert had just vanished into thin air. I guess I collapsed to the ground that night, right in the middle of the crowd.” Steve paused for a while and leaned heavily on his stick, forcing it deeper into the sand.
“And that’s what made you realize that you were free Steve?” A panic attack?”
“Pretty much, yeah. You see, when I woke up I was extremely confused and scared. I was just shook up by the whole thing. And that’s when it actually hit me. I had no one to talk to. No one to seek comfort in. I told people about it desperately as they walked by that morning, but no one would listen. Not one person at that entire concert gave a fiddler’s fancy that I had scared the shit out of myself. Not one person in the whole world cared because I had no one. And that’s when I realized that I was free; that I was alread
y dead.”
Again he paused. Speechless, motionless, and distant. Several minutes of sand-staring silence came and went, but Winston’s brain remained idle. This story had little to no impact on him because he felt that he already knew this. Winston himself was in his own way already living in a box in a barn, far away from anyone that had ever cared for him. He felt alone already and was beginning his mission to find what would make him happy. He knew that caring caused pain and that every obligation he possessed was a burden to his being; he was free too, he thought.“You think you’ve gained your freedom by coming to Mexico, don’t you?” Steve inquired telepathically. “I can prove that you haven’t.” He then, very calmly, revealed a dirty, rusty handgun from beneath his tattered brown shawl and pressed it against his own temple. “Should I do it?”
Winston tensed up immediately and a million tiny spiders began dancing up his spinal column. His upper lip twitched violently, and his forehead resembled a cold glass of water on a hot, sunny day. “Don’t!” he yelled. “Don’t do it! Please God, don’t do it! I believe you! I believe you!” he cried, eyes full of tears. He was now sobbing heavily. He lifted his buried face from the sand, only to discover that Steve now had the gun pointed straight into his face instead. Winston howled ferociously. “Please, get me out of here God! I don’t want to die!”
“You see,” Steve said loudly. “You’re not free. Your type is never free.” He pulled the gun away from Winston’s face and returned it to his own temple. Click went the trigger. The click was immediately followed by insane laughter. Steve pulled himself up off of his knees and walked away cackling. “Stop littering my beach!” he said.
Part 3 – Winston the Man
Chapter 11 – A Message Left in Mexico
“Daydreams are for Dinosaurs.” -Wise People“
I wasn’t always this way. I used to be a nice guy. In fact, I used to be the nicest person in the entire world. But that was before I died. I don’t know when the exact moment of time was when I died. I just know that I haven’t felt alive for a long time and everyone hates me because of it. No one wants to hang out in a graveyard for any longer than they have to. Hell, most of the people I know get uncomfortable in an old folk’s home. How could they possibly be comfortable around me, a man with no spirit? For the last two years, I’ve dedicated my time to watching clock hands tick and calendar pages flip. It has felt like an eternity, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. If I honestly had to decide, to decide what has killed all of my desires in life, I would have to say that it was when I realized that nobody wanted to fall in love with things anymore. Love was too scary of a thing I guess. Every time that I fell in love with someone or something, I was made to feel like a coward. ‘It’s too easy,’ they would say. As if falling in love is less of a rush than only enjoying new things. Somewhere during these last two years, desiring to covet what made you happy every day became unstylish and undesirable. If ideas or lovers weren’t entirely foreign, they were unworthy of an individuals’ attentions or passions. Being passionate towards the familiar became a passive pleasure and the assertive became alien to me. And now I’m buried deep inside this hole of emptiness and sorrow. The only light I see occurs in my dreams, where people still desire passion over freedom; I only feel illuminated where people aren’t scared of tears, but that place left two years ago. ‘Daydreams are for dinosaurs’ they tell me. I guess it’s time to find out why that is because searching for my essence has made me miserable and alone. No more daydreams. No more passion.”
– Found written in black marker on a cardboard television box on the floor of Winston’s cabana floor in Mexico. Found by a cleaning attendant on march 18th, 2018, exactly 22 months after Winston had been scared to death by Driftwood Steve.
Chapter 12 – The Legend of the Pleasure Harvester
“I knew I was too messed up to drive when I tried to gas up my horse.” - Drunk Prophets
“Vroom! Vroom! Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh. Vroom! Vroom!” After a short sputter, the mighty machine was off, growling proudly as it climbed the rolling hills of lush, green, virgin landscape. It sped mightily downward towards richer pastures, depositing dark gray puffs of superiority into the translucent ambiance above. The driver of the machine smiled brilliantly from inside the windowed encasing. He was dressed in an expensive dark suit, wore a gold watch, and smoked a cigar while continuing to smile and laugh and laugh as if he had just fallen in love one million times simultaneously. Clearly this machine had brought him immense wealth and joy.
As the magnificent creation of human imagination prowled the landscape unimpeded, a vast sea of water stole the focal point. Birds grazed and bathed in its bounty. Large dimples rhythmically appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in the sea, and the fowl continued to feel nourished. Above the dimples, large drops of water could be observed quite readily as they fell from the sky. It immediately became apparent that these were the source of the ripples and also the source of nourishment for the birds.
Above the drops, a supernatural image persisted. A large, human mouth complete with shiny white teeth, an accentuated jaw, and a protruding masculine chin existed. It hovered in the sky directly above the providing basin, slowly salivating. The salivations, then, were the source of the large drops which were in turn the ripples. The ripples provided the oxygen to the sea which in turn provided life for the creatures that the waterfowl were feeding on. It was perfect harmony being bestowed and sustained by a perfect being. The large mouth must have belonged to God!
“Vroom! Vroom! Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh. Vroom! Vroom! Another short sputter and the mechanical beacon of the encased man’s jubilation proceeded onward once again up another hill. When it reached the top, the machine stopped and the man stepped outside. He tossed his cigar onto the terrain and stomped it with his Wellington. He removed his over-bearing sunglasses and threw his hands up into the air as if celebrating an immense victory. “Yeahhhh!” he screamed.
“Yeahhh,” was echoed back to him with much more magnitude.
“Yeahhh!” he screamed again. Once again, the celebration was returned to him. At the bottom of the hill, the source of the echoed ecstasy could be found. The noise was coming from a large gathering of villagers. They all stood at the bottom of the hill, staring at the man and the machine with their hands clasped together as if they were praying. The man climbed back into the glass encasing of his machine and drove down the hill towards the people. When he arrived, he was hugged, kissed, and bowed to by millions upon millions of villagers. It was quite obvious that the majority of the inhabitants were also well dressed and highly delighted. Beautiful dresses and gold bangles accentuated women’ bodies and flamboyant suits the men. Amidst the crowd, a powerful-looking man approached the machine operator.
“How was the harvest Senator?” the powerful-looking man inquired.
“There is plenty of crop to be harvested for many millennia to come, Mr. President.” The powerful-looking man turned to face the masses.
“Eat, drink, buy clothes, fulfill your every desire my children!” he roared as he too held both arms in the air. The crowd screamed ferociously and began dancing and kissing in the valley. “Well done Senator,” the president said as he shook the senator’s hand. “Well done. Keep it up my boy!”
“It’s my pleasure sir. This is some machine you’ve built,” he complimented as he tapped the contraption on the hood.
“I know. That’s why I named it the ‘Pleasure Harvester’. I don’t want to imagine what our lives would be like without it. We’d probably be living in caves somewhere by now.” They both chuckled and held on to their fat, happy, jiggling bellies.
“Pleasure to serve sir,” he said as he hopped back into the vehicle of sustainable lavishness.
“Vroom! Vroom! Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh. Vroom! Vroom!” And back up the hill it went. As the operator navigated back over the green pasture, the machine sputtered again. “Puh-puh-puh-puh.” No “Vroom!” proceeded.
“Time to fuel up,” the se
nator said aloud to himself. He opened a compartment and revealed a gigantic flexible pipe that looked like the world’s biggest drinking straw. He pushed a small red button and the straw began to expand outwards. It whistled as it continued to extend for miles upon miles. The whistling finally stopped. The straw had reached its destination. After a few minutes, the senator retracted the straw and continued along in the harvester.
“Vroom! Vroom! Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh. Vroom! Vroom!” it roared. As he sped across the majestic landscape, birds could be seen flying and squawking overhead. He reached down and lifted a pair of binoculars to his face.
“Twenty-seven,” he murmured to himself. He then peered to the sea and observed the scene. “Yeah, plenty of fuel left.” He sped away until the sea of decreasing proportion was out of sight. As he drove, debris could be noticed being thrown up from behind the pleasure harvester. Up until this point, the sea and green pastures had dominated the focal; the debris had went unnoticed. It had always been produced, but it hadn’t received the attention that the rest of this vivid image had. As the details of the debris became sharper, a horrifying sight slowly unfolded. Flying out from under the harvester, shooting behind the path of this vessel of wealth and prosperity, was something utterly terrifying and nauseating. Laying there, in the lush, green, virgin pastures by the shrinking sea, were the chopped up remains of severed human heads. Bleeding, pussing, oozing remnants of human life lay upon the green fields, fertilizing the land for future harvests. The few heads that had managed to still display recognizable characteristics revealed more information. The faces looked exactly like those of the villagers. The faces belonged to their future children and grand-children.
Searching for the Fountain of Youth Page 6