He opened his eyes as Todd hollered from the darkness below, “Dude! Eureka!”
Dashka and Willie found Todd standing over a cow patty from which sprang a small cluster of brownish-white mushrooms. “Psilocybe cubensis,” he announced. He plucked out the four small mushrooms, handed one each to Willie and Dashka, and immediately popped the other two into his mouth. “Straight from the cowshit to your mouth! C’mon, chow down!”
An hour later, Willie still had the taste on his tongue, but he was beginning not to care. The high had started in his stomach, some rumbling and bloating in mild reaction to the fungus. He briefly had the thought, heightened by pot paranoia, that Todd just could be wrong with his mushroom identification.
Maybe I’m dying.
But then he and Dashka took another toke of the mellow Lebanese hash. Almost immediately his stomach relaxed (one of the well-known medical effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in both marijuana and hashish) and his tension eased. It was a good combination, hash and mushrooms. The mushroom high could be a little edgy, a little speedy when it came on, but the gently dulling hashish glow took the edge off, smoothing it all out like the Teflon strip on a razor blade.
Willie’s housemate, Jojo, and Todd’s housemate, André, had shown up and gone shroom-foraging with Todd, leaving Willie and Dashka alone. Dashka shivered and snuggled up next to him, sheltering from the chilly bay breeze now blowing over the pastures.
“The sky is fucking amazing,” she said, looking up.
“You can see the nebula in Orion’s sword,” said Willie.
Funny, Willie thought, why did the Greeks, who were into anything priapic, call it Orion’s Sword rather than Orion’s Wang? It’s so there. No sword ever hung so directly between the legs. True, the girth would, if it were a phallus, make Orion exceedingly well hung, but what the hell, he was a giant, right? You’d expect him to have a giant cock, too, maybe even well out of proportion, the better for terrifying the local maidenry. Maybe the ancients were thinking that Orion must be wearing a tunic, since he’s wearing a “belt.” But why did it have to be a belt? Why not just his waist? The Greeks were mostly naked anyway, especially their heroes. No, the banana-shaped object must surely, to the ancient Greeks, have been Orion’s Tool. There must have been some intervening, repressive regime — no doubt Northern European — who decided that the constellation of Orion’s Johnson would somehow offend Jesus and so, for the sake of public morality and entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven, covered up the Great Hunter’s loins with a tunic and turned his wiener into his sword . . . or worse, his “hunting knife.” Hunh. His naked blade, more like. Beaver-hunting knife. Ha! First thing tomorrow, I’m going to start a public campaign to have the constellation referred to by its full and proper name, Orion the Hunter, He of the Shining Waist and Massive Schlong.
Willie was stoned.
He was just embarking on a tributary stream of consciousness about whether any planets in the constellation of Orion’s Schlong might be inhabited, and what they would think if they knew they lived on a big interstellar dick, when his reverie was interrupted.
“What is that?” Dashka asked.
“What?”
“That . . . galaxy . . . or supernova. That!”
Willie was always amazed when otherwise intelligent people didn’t know the difference between a galaxy, a supernova, and the Pleiades — which, he informed Dashka, was the cluster of newborn stars she was pointing at.
“It looks like it’s waving. Shimmering. Like a fairy cobweb.” They sat in silence for a few moments, just looking at the stars. “Do you believe in astrology?” she asked.
“No. Why, do you?”
“Scientifically? Not really. Although as a faith, I find it more credible than Christianity. I’ve never seen an angel, but I certainly know a Libra when I kiss one.”
Willie stared at her for a moment. It had been a one-in-twelve chance, he told himself. “Maybe that has less to do with the planets than with the malleability of the young mind,” he said. “I was probably seven when a reputable newspaper told me that because my birthday is October seventeenth, I’m ‘charming, but fickle and indecisive, with a tendency to let the approval or disapproval of others, especially parents, weigh heavily’ on me. That stuff stays with you.”
“So why Catholicism?” Dashka suddenly asked. “Why is Shakespeare’s religion important? Why should we care? Why do you care?”
Willie couldn’t tell her the truth, that he didn’t really care, at least not about Catholicism. He couldn’t tell her that the “research” for his thesis consisted of the last hour of a movie about Sir Thomas More and one line from a sonnet that he’d stumbled across while frantically trying to pull together a thesis — any thesis — for his already scheduled approval meeting.
Willie smoked a little more to cover the fact that he didn’t have an answer, and found himself asking why, aside from the compelling oddity of his name, he cared about a dead playwright.
Why do I care? What’s the Bard to me, or me to the Bard, to paraphrase Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two, yet here I am quoting Shakespeare, even to myself, like verses from the Bible or something. Why?
Finally he said, grasping to tie it all together, “I guess Shakespeare’s the closest thing I have to a religion. Maybe if I figure out his faith — his God, his passion, whatever it was that moved him — ”
“Then you figure out yourself?” She whistled. “Heavy, man. Self-realization via Shakespeare.”
“Catholicism and astrology aren’t options for me. So maybe I’ll find the meaning of life in a sonnet.” He crumbled a little more Lebanese into the bowl. “Or maybe in a cow patty. Or a hash pipe,” he said, reaching for the lighter next to Dashka.
She snatched it up and held it away from him teasingly. “Or maybe you’ll find it somewhere else.” She took his right hand and put the tips of his fore- and middle finger in her mouth and sucked them where they were dusted with the sticky residue of the hash. “Mmm. Sweet.”
“Sex, drugs, and Shakespeare,” Willie said. “A sure path to Nirvana.”
“Who said anything about sex?” Dashka said, and began giggling. Soon they were both laughing, Willie grinding his teeth together as the endorphins released by laughter and arousal raised his heart rate, and the blood pumped psilocybin faster and faster into his brain, and suddenly he was peaking, his face feeling like chilled alabaster, his breathing like silk, his torso . . . where was his torso, anyway? He suddenly felt impossibly skinny, as if he could put his hands on either side of his waist and pinch them together. He was giggling uncontrollably, his nose running, his eyes streaming with tears of laughter, his tear ducts feeling raw and swollen to the size of chestnuts. Next thing he knew, he and Dashka were kissing and dry humping, the short, dry, cattle-mown grass from the summer crunching beneath them and a few green blades born of an early fall rain releasing a freshly scented hint of spring yet to come.
Dashka had her knee between Willie’s legs, rubbing his hard-on with her thigh, and he could feel a sticky stain developing on his boxers. He wedged a hand in between his own leg and her crotch and rubbed, getting a suggestion of labia but mostly just hard blue-jean seam. He was wondering if he should try to unbutton her jeans or maybe get to her bra when she rolled him over twice, laughing, ending up with her on top and Willie with his temple one inch away from a huge cow patty.
He did a take, and then a double take.
Crowning the patty was the largest mushroom he’d ever seen.
Psychedelic mushrooms, when one is tripping on mushrooms, have an eerie blue glow about them, like Frodo’s sword when Orcs are near. This one was haloed like the aurora borealis, shimmering blue with a secondary corona of shifting green and white.
“Holy . . . fucking . . . shit,” Willie said, and he meant every word.
Chapter Four
If the Protestant orthodoxy was the tyrant in Reformation England, then the English Jesuit priests of the Counter-Reformation were its dissid
ents. Educated in exile, they began returning to England around 1580 to preach the “Old Faith” to their hidden flock. Their movements were conducted in cloak-and-dagger secrecy, for they were officially heretics, traitors, and outlaws. Several were also neighbors and acquaintances of William Shakespeare.
The rest of William’s day at the New School had been uneventful, with the exception of Oliver Gasper’s sudden gusher of a bloody nose, the treatment of which left a deep, scarlet stain on William’s white sleeve. He was closing the schoolhouse door, preoccupied with libidinous thoughts of the girl he was rushing off to meet, when a horse splattered up the muddy, straw-strewn street and checked up next to him, steaming and huffing.
“Good den, sir,” its rider said, and dismounted. “I seek the schoolmaster of Edward the Sixth’s New School.” His clothes were stained and torn, his horse muddied. He had long black hair and a wispy black mustache, but no beard. His eyes, too, were dark, black on black, and there was an intensity to them that put William on edge.
“You’ve found it, at the end of the day,” said William warily.
“I bear a gift for schoolmaster John Cottom.”
William thought quickly. Alexander Aspinall was attending to administrative duties inside. “Whence comes it, and who bears it?”
“I am Simon Pray, clerk to a lawyer, Master Humphrey Ely of London. He got it of John Cottom’s brother, Thomas.”
“Master Cottom is master here no longer,” William replied. “He vanished some weeks past.”
“Vanished?” said the horseman, and his face fell. “Has he no relations here?”
“None in Stratford. He was of Lancashire.”
“Lancashire . . .”
William could see him calculating: another two days’ ride. The horseman looked to the east. His horse stamped impatiently.
“I have urgent business in Shottery . . .” he said, half to himself, then turned to William. “And my Master Ely would have me whipped upon returning so tardy to London.” The horseman’s cutpurse eyes appraised William, up and down. His glance lingered at the bloodstain on William’s sleeve, and then again at his throat.
Finally the horseman looked William deep in the eyes, and said deliberately, “I would ask thee, young sir, if there be an inn of Stratford where a man might — in the blessed embrace of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three Persons and one God, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary — rest secure?”
William understood the code.
“The Bear,” said William. “Not the Swan.”
The horseman nodded as though he already knew the answer. “I give you gramercies, good sir.” Then he hesitated for another beat. “Know you John Cottom?”
“Ay,” William answered. “In sooth, I love him as a father, and am greatly discomfited by his sudden absence.”
“Then I would ask a further boon of you, and a greater.” The rider took a parcel wrapped in a rough cloth from the horse’s saddlebag. “I am charged to deliver this to Master Cottom, yet I have other cares which crave my attendance. As one who loves John Cottom, who knows his family and their whereabouts, might I prevail upon you to complete the delivery? It is a precious lading.”
The horseman looked up and down High Street, and as no one was paying them any mind, he unwrapped the parcel to reveal a fine mahogany box. Bigger than a tinderbox but smaller than a hurdy-gurdy, it was inlaid with ivory delicately fashioned in the shape of a St. George’s cross — a symbol of the Old Faith on the Continent.
“What does it contain?” William asked.
The horseman hesitated for a moment, then replied, “It is locked.”
“Is there no key?”
“None. Nor was there any when Thomas Cottom gave it unto Master Ely.”
William took a deep breath, and looked at the inlaid cross glittering in the late afternoon sun. He couldn’t have explained why, but somehow its very brightness frightened him.
“Will you take it to John Cottom?” the rider asked quietly.
“Nay,” said William, shaking his head. “I cannot. My teaching here is my family’s sole support, and the term has just begun.”
The horseman dropped his voice even lower. “It would aid the cause,” he said, dark eyes aflame.
William hesitated. Between the shining cross and the horseman’s unnerving stare, he felt nearly bewitched. But suddenly the schoolhouse door slammed open. The horseman covered the box again as Aspinall emerged and looked at them suspiciously.
“What, William, hast thou lingered to practice thy declensions?” Aspinall stepped around the corner of the building, opened his breeches, and began to piss. “Master Cottom also warned me of thy difficulties in Latin. And who is this, thy tutor?”
“Merely recommending, magister, a reputable inn to this weary traveler,” William responded with a slight bow.
Aspinall looked back and forth between them as he piddled against the wall, steam hissing and rising. “The Swan,” he said to the rider. “Not the Bear. The Swan’s the only tavern for a virtuous man.” He gave his prick a lusty shake. “If you be not virtuous, then you may drown yourself at the Bear, though in recompense you will hang in this life, and burn in the next!” Aspinall laughed at his own wordplay as he tucked his tool away and hiked his trousers.
“I thank you for your words of caution,” the horseman replied with a twitchy smile to Aspinall, who was headed back for the door. “One must indeed exercise care in one’s faith,” he added with a glance to William.
Aspinall grunted and, with a last dark look at the rider and the bundle in his arms, returned to the schoolhouse.
The horseman waited a moment, then addressed William. “If you are of the true faith,” he said quietly, “to perform this office may be your family’s salvation.”
William took a step back as though he were being hounded by a beggar. “Nay. I and my family care little for faith and not at all for causes. I prithee go to.”
“See, then, how I go,” the rider said, replacing the box and mounting his horse. “Fare thee well, boy.”
He splattered away down the street toward the town’s two largest inns, leaving William standing in the cold fall air with Alexander Aspinall’s urine trickling past his feet.
Chapter Five
. . . my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels . . .
— Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.106
Willie and Todd sat cross-legged like monks before an image of the Buddha, meditating on the mushroom.
“Cubensis,” Todd said. “Biggest I’ve ever seen. Probably thirty grams. One shroom, dude, thirty g’s!”
“Should we dry it, or . . . ?”
“No need. We could just eat it, if we had a party. It’s enough to get ten people ridiculously high.”
Willie considered the group. Another couple of Todd’s friends had arrived. One, an older-looking guy with a mustache and long black hair, knew Dashka from high school, and they were making small talk about mutual friends. Willie’s roommate Jojo was lying on the blanket with André, giggling; they had found some mushrooms of their own.
“I’m already plenty high,” Willie said.
“We could sell it,” Todd said. “Piece this big, fresh . . . it’d bring top dollar, man. It’s like a collector’s item. Bragging rights. Tell you what, I could set up a deal, and we could split the dough.”
Todd lived in the student apartment above Willie’s. He was the drug dealer for most of the east side of the campus. He had fine, angelic blond hair that almost glowed on the rare occasions it was clean, and glistened when it was greasy. He had pale, almost translucent skin that turned a little ruddy around the cheeks in cool weather. He claimed to be a grad student in philosophy, though Willie had never seen him with a book. He had a huge record collection, and mostly stayed in his room blaring prog rock and Grateful Dead at weapons-grade volume and making a nearly incessant thumping soun
d on Willie’s ceiling as if he were rolling a sofa back and forth across the floor. Willie had finally asked him what that sound was, and Todd had answered, “Rolling the sofa, man.”
Every few days Todd would emerge from his room and go around the graduate student residences and Kresge College, knocking on doors, bam-bam-bam-bam, “Gotta pay my tuition!” or bam-bam-bam-bam, “Gotta buy books!” or bam-bam-bam-bam, “Gotta date tonight, who’s paying?!” He’d dole out bags of crappy shake, an ounce for ten bucks. It was nasty, guaranteed-headache stuff, but at ten bucks a lid you could smoke it all night — and pretty much had to if you wanted to get high. Occasionally he’d have more exotic stuff. Blond Lebanese hash was common; mild and sweet-smelling, it crumbled easily in your fingers and left a flowery mist behind in the air. You could smoke a half a gram and still translate Latin, probably better than if you were straight. Black Afghani hash, sticky and oily like an extra-rich truffle, was less desirable: smoke that shit and don’t plan on moving for at least two hours. And then he could sometimes get his hands on higher quality sinsemilla buds from Mendocino, and upon request, Ecstasy or Quaaludes. Once or twice a quarter he had blotter acid, the best being Mickey Mouse brand, each sheet comprising a hundred perforated tabs on which were replicated the classic image of Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Fantasia, a stream of stars doing Mickey’s magical bidding between his fingertips.
Willie had never sold drugs before, but now he considered it. He was almost broke, and there would be no support check from his dad for another week or so. He had exactly nine dollars in his pocket. “How much can we get?”
“I know this guy. He’ll be perfect, man. I bet he pays two hundred for it. He’s outta town, though. You’ll have to run it up to the Renaissance Faire.”
“The Renaissance Faire?! That’s in Marin County, isn’t it? Why don’t you go?”
“I got other biz. You’re going up to Berkeley anyway, right?”
“Well, yeah, but — ”
“So you’re halfway there. I can get you on the pass list. You’ll get in for free. Come on, dude, it’s free money.”
My Name Is Will Page 3