by Bull, Rod;
There were a lot of grey areas. Who was right, who was wrong? Chris smuggled drugs to get guns for the IRA, to get the English out of Ireland.
Something was still bothering me. What was I looking for? All my self-examination, judgment, wheeling and dealing were not going anywhere! Meditation was something I had been dabbling with on and off, but again, what was the aim—to be a better person, do good works, be kind, become more aware, wake up, see into the future—what?
Zen pundits talk about Nowness! Tibetans say Rigpa is the ultimate, a state beyond time with no job to do! Is this subconsciously what I had been looking for, the genuine state of Instant Presence unemployment?
One of the things my searching and sleuthing had shown me was that there are many false states, frozen states, which are highly dangerous when they parade as the real thing. Many so-called teachers have this Dharma Ego! Was I trying to track down the fakes, catch them out?
Chris had moved to Paris, taking my girlfriend Stella with him. This was a bit of a blow, sending me into a slough of despond. Although I admired him, I could not trust him; what was he up to? Stella was very beautiful, and she liked the excitement of drugs, gun running, and pornography.
The French police left Chris alone while they concentrated on the OAS, the Algerian Liberation Army. This worked well for Chris; he could work with both the IRA and the OAS, because they both needed guns. Being of a jealous nature, I wanted to find out what Chris was up to; I felt Stella was in danger. My friend Pierre was in Paris at the time, so I had an excuse and a place to stay.
At this time, Charles DeGaulle was staging big rallies around Paris, which the Algerians were trying to disrupt, spreading tin tacks all over the Champs-Élysées, causing multiple punctures. For hours, Paris could not move!
De Gaulle was speaking at the Place de la République, and it was difficult to get through the police blockade if you did not have a pink de Gaullist card. Slipping down a narrow back alley, I managed to slip by the police. Looking around, I spotted Chris with a bunch of Algerians. They must have had fake IDs, and they were shouting, “Non Fascisma, Non de Gaulle!”
One of them suddenly broke through the police cordon around de Gaulle, spitting at him. All hell let loose, people running everywhere, police on horseback, swords drawn, hitting people with the flat of the sword or with long truncheons. Others had machine guns, waving the masses down the Metro steps! People were getting badly beaten. There was blood splattered all over. The Algerians were breaking through the grating around the trees, hurling chunks of iron at the police, splitting heads open. I walked slowly, trying not to get caught up in the mass hysteria. Feeling a clip on the top of my head, I looked around and saw the Flics flicking people on their heads with their long truncheons! Some used their swords. Time to run down the Metro stairs, vaulting the turnstiles, just in time to be splattered with blood from an old man being beaten by the Flic!
Once when I was travelling in Algeria, the French Foreign Legionnaires, a brutal bunch of broken, scarred faces, hauled me in. What was I doing, where was I going, who had I been talking to? Hours of investigation, and they eventually let me go, only to be stopped by the locals. Luckily, the British Consulate was nearby. I yelled out that I was English, and they let me in. Seeing the brutality of the French up close, I could see why the Algerians were so angry! Chris was somehow involved in this, trying to cause a revolt, as the Algerians wanted the French out.
Was Chris trying to help these causes for money? Or was it some romantic idea? The poet Rimbaud had also been a gunrunner. Or was he just angry? Whatever it was, it was dangerous.
The Baader Meinhof Gang was a group of disenfranchised and disillusioned youths who were responsible for various murders and kidnappings. They had kidnapped and murdered a prominent German businessman. A lot of people were angry that the Americans had put a lot of ex-Nazis in power after the War—some were known butchers—the idea being that they were the only ones who could run Germany at that time.
Chris was in Germany then, and he spoke the language, had connections. Was he involved in some way?
A Dose of Clap
I bought a ticket from Sydney to Bombay via boat and said goodbye to my brother and friends. My idea was to hitch-hike back to England from Bombay. The boat trip was very interesting. I met a filmmaker, writer, and painter who I later met back in England. The painter asked me to take some gifts he had to a friend of his in Bombay. When we landed, I somehow found my way to this bloke’s house.
It turned out that he was a diamond merchant and he asked me if I would be his agent in England. I didn’t know what he was thinking. Somehow, I don’t think I looked the part. Anyway, I said I would try to help him. He gave me a bunch of photos and brochures and invited me to stay for dinner.
We sat cross-legged on the floor, served by his ten beautiful daughters who were lined against the wall, smallest to tallest. I began to eat, dipping the bread into different bowls just as everyone else was doing. Then the shock. I was on fire! The daughters had to keep bringing me water. Sweat was pouring off me. One of the bowls had some white stuff in it. Tasting it cautiously, I found it was yogurt. Thank God! It was the only thing I could eat. I had had hot curry before, but this was like eating fire.
Bombay is an amazing city, teeming with people and amazing buildings. Gangs of kids, trained as thieves, roam the streets and encircle you. But I had nothing to steal. I kept my money in my shoes.
Finding a drink was a bit of a problem. Eventually, I found someone who took me down many alleyways to some-one’s kitchen. I thought I was going to be done in. The rice wine moonshine tasted like washing-up water.
I stayed in Bombay for about two weeks. Then I started hitchhiking back to England. When I got to the outskirts of Bombay, I saw a fallen sign in the bushes pointing to London, 8,000 miles. This was a little daunting, especially because it was not pointing anywhere. I slowly made my way to Lahore on the Pakistan border.
While staying there, I got a dose of the clap and very reluctantly went to the local hospital. I was told to wait in a side room and take off my pants. Standing there half naked, my dick was swollen and felt like it was on fire. To add to my humiliation, the doctor was a woman, with female students in attendance. She started shouting at me that it was very bad to come to their country and have sex with the local girls. She then pointed at my dick, describing the swelling and symptoms to her students, who were all tittering and trying not to look embarrassed. I was beyond embarrassed. Just stunned.
“Just give me something to take the pain away,” I said.
The ordeal went on for a week, in which time they gave me some foul-tasting drink that made me piss a lot. It was agony. Plus they gave me shots of penicillin. All week, the doctor gave me lectures on morality and showed more female students my dick. Every day, there were more and more students until the room was full.
At this point, I was willing to do anything because the pain was so intense I felt like I was not there. Everything was stripped away to nothing. A very weird feeling. It was like nothing could affect me. Immune. It was a great relief. Everything just dropped away. After about a week, the pain went away. Thank God or Krishna or whatever. Lahore was a very auspicious place to catch a dose of the clap. As soon as it cleared up, I hotfooted it out of there with the sound of the doctor’s voice ringing in my ears, “No sex, no sex.” She sounded just like my mother.
It took me about three months to get back to England, traveling through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Greece. It was brilliant seeing all of the different cultures. I got rides in trucks, police cars, buses, bikes, dune buggies, trains, and boats.
Once I was traveling with some Japanese sea scouts going across the Caucasus Mountains. At one point the scouts thought that the truck driver had not taken them to where they wanted to go. It was snowing hard so the driver decided to stop at a roadside café for the night and go on in the morning. The Japanese scouts pulled out their knives. The mountain Turks are known to be vicious, looki
ng steely-eyed under their turbans, and they pulled their own knives out. I don’t know what got into me. I jumped up and got in between the scouts and the Turks, somehow talking them out of a bloodbath. The next day the snow had stopped so off we went as if nothing had happened. It’s strange how things turn out.
The thing about hitchhiking is that you never know where you will be or what will happen. It is unnerving, thrilling, and also very addictive. You learn to face your own fears. Things that you are afraid of in your imagination often vanish when confronted.
The sounds, smells, and sights while traveling through different countries make impressions on the mind. The cry is still ringing in my ears from the towers in Isfahan bringing forth images that are more real than actually being there.
Esoteric Quarks
Eventually I got back to England and started looking for my friends. I stopped by Pierre’s house. Talking to his father, I found out that he was in Southampton, involved with the works of Gurdjieff, which he felt was much too deep for me. I felt a strange need to meet up with Pierre again, hoping he could answer some of my questions. Tracking him down in Southampton, I found he was working for a man named George Jerrack who was a mime-dancer, apparently, second only to Marcel Marceau. He had a restaurant, café, and nightclub on different floors of the same building.
It was fantastic to meet Pierre again. We had a lot to talk about and a lot of catching up to do. We quickly got back to our all-night sessions, mixed with fags, dope, and grog. Very soon he started talking about the ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff. I could feel my face starting to turn pale, although I had read snippets of these ideas in Colin Wilson’s book. Pierre was going much deeper. I asked him if he could please speak fucking English. One of the ideas that sent my head spinning was that Judas was chosen by Christ to betray him, as he was the strongest and most loved of the disciples. According to Gurdjieff, the whole saga was a carefully thought-out play. He also talked about what happened at the Last Supper and said that it was Christ’s flesh and blood that they ate and drank. This would be the disciples’ connection to him when he died.
This was all a bit much for me. It sounded like cannibalism. But this was just the beginning. Pierre then started relating Gurdjieff’s ideas of the laws of the universe. At that point I passed out. The combination of dope, grog, and fags had caved in my head, but my brain was still racing on, working, thinking that I should try to understand some of this stuff.
Pierre had mentioned Gurdjieff’s book, All and Everything. With a certain amount of difficulty, I managed to obtain a copy. It was in very small type. This gave me an uneasy feeling since I had not long ago graduated from comics. As I started trying to read this book, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach set in. Would this be way over my head? Buying this book may have been a big mistake, but I did it, so I was going to read it! I started struggling through. It was definitely not for chumps—there were sentences a page long. By the end of the sentence, I had forgotten the beginning as well as the meaning. I got stuck for weeks on one of the chapters, “The Laws of the Universe.”
Gurdjieff really wanted you to search for the hidden meaning and made you stretch your mind and imagination. Something like the Zen koan, except it went on and on, to destroy any belief systems, so you could start with a clean slate. With a lot of help from drugs and Pierre, I started to understand a little of what Gurdjieff was saying, and Pierre and I spent many a long night like dogs at a bone, trying to figure out what the fuck G. was getting at. Thanks to methadone and dope, we came up with some pretty amazing notions, but what to make of it all? Could these ideas help me to understand myself better? One of the insights that came out of all this soul-searching was the idea of doing something for no reason, for no reward or gain. Was this really possible?
Short-Order Cook
As usual, the money had run out, and it was time to find a job. André, who ran the café coffee shop for George, offered me work as a cook in the café. Again, being a little worried, I wondered, could I do this? André assured me it was easy. Everything was pre-cooked.
What he didn’t tell me was that the kitchen was about 10 feet by 6 feet, very small. I was put on the evening shift, 5:00 p.m. to midnight. All was going well until around 11:10 p.m. Suddenly the place was packed. The pubs had just closed. The orders just kept coming! Four egg sandwiches, six bacon sandwiches, eight hot dogs, three curries, five spaghettis. They were shouting these orders in from the counter. There were no tickets. I just had to remember. I tried to remember the large orders, which caused a lot of complaints.
One evening I looked around for the hot dog rolls, which were on heated spikes close to a hatch going out to the café. The rolls were gone. Thinking maybe I didn’t put them on, I put more on. Turned around again, and they were gone. Seeing red, I put my arm through the hatch, grabbed the first person I saw and started to scream abuse at them. It turned out that this was not the person who had taken the rolls. He complained that he had never been spoken to so badly.
To make things worse, the phone was in the kitchen. There was no room for two people, let alone spreading out phone books. One night I grabbed the carving knife and just started shouting and waving the knife at the person using the phone. “Get out, get out!” I screamed. For me, this was a high-stress job, and I wanted more money. André set up a meeting with George Jerrack. He just kept saying that we were artists and poets and esoterics, and we did not need money. This did not go down well with me, as I felt that I wasn’t any kind of artist, or whatever.
Most of the people I knew at that time were into some form of art. Maybe this was my real calling? That’s it, I thought, be an artist. This was a little tricky, as I had no talent. That is until after smoking some dope, I started to carve some soap sticks, turning them into totem carvings. From there into chalk and stone. The problem was that I could not sell any of the stuff. How could I make some money so that I could keep doing the sculpture, which I was amazed I was able to do? For the first time in my life, I enjoyed what I was doing.
Andre knew a lot of people in Southampton. He was a wheeler-dealer. At that time, there was an American aircraft carrier being refitted in the harbor. Andre had found out that the crew had run out of dope and were looking for a large quantity. I felt that drugs had somehow saved my life, bringing stuff out of me that I had no idea was there. Thinking this would be good for everybody, I had not seen the down side of this proposition. So Andre, Pierre, and myself decided to try and get some pot for the U.S. Navy sailors. It seemed like a good idea to keep them happy. As the Japs found out, don’t piss off those Yankees!
Pierre and I set out. Our plan was to go overland to North Africa to find the cheapest pot. As usual, our plan was not well thought out so we went a very roundabout route, which was amazing in one way, seeing lots of different places. But it took us much longer than expected, and traveling separately we met up in Athens.
Pierre always got good lifts. He got one ride from Milan to Athens, for example. It took me about a week and twenty lifts.
Pierre had a bright idea of island hopping to get to Turkey. A couple of times it was so rough that we had to turn back. Eventually, we got to the Greek island of Samos. We could see the Turkish coast a few miles away. We actually thought of trying to swim over, but not being good swimmers and also having stuff to carry, that wasn’t a bright idea. Pierre wanted to steal a boat and row over. I convinced him they were fishing boats and people’s livelihood. Pierre, using all his wiles, man-aged to get us on a fishing boat going to Isnia, a small Turkish port. We split up again, to meet in Istanbul.
On my way, I stopped in a small town. Sitting down in the town square at one of the tables, out of nowhere came this wild looking Turk, who sat down beside me, waving his arms at the waiter. Wine arrived and then a huge plate of kabobs, rice and salad. He made motions with his hands to eat and drink. He had a little himself and then just kept motioning me to keep eating and drinking. I was very nervous, not knowing what to expect or how to pay for t
his. He was truly wild looking, eyes popping out, hair standing on end, scary! After a while he got up, paid the waiter, turned to me hailing salaam and disappeared. It was always unnerving for me, traveling in Eastern countries. Sometimes people were not very friendly to Westerners. At other times they would be very generous.
Stuck in the Astral
Many weeks had passed since my last debacle with astral travel. To tell the truth, I was scared to try again. But the dreams kept nagging me, especially the one with the two Karmapas. Maybe this dream would be easier to penetrate?
Chris had gotten back from Paris; hopefully he could help me again with the hypnosis lark. We met at the French pub for a beer or two. I asked him about self-hypnosis, about getting stuck and trying to get back. He said he had the same problem and only a shock had brought him back. He was saying it was always better to have someone doing the hypnosis, as strange things sometimes happen, freaking you out. The person doing the hypnosis can then bring you back quickly. After a few more beers, he agreed to help me, but only if he could get me back without having to worry every time about me getting stuck, saying he did not have much experience, having only done it a few times himself. We agreed to try it out on the weekend, so if anything went wrong we had a day to recover.
I arrived at Chris’ place on Saturday morning, hoping for an early start in case of any hiccups. It was raining as usual, which made Chris’ room even gloomier. There was just one bare bulb for light, no furniture, bare walls, and a sleeping bag against the wall. Chris was sitting cross-legged on a cushion when I came in. “Let’s get going,” he said. “Why don’t you lie on the sleeping bag? I’ll just sit here.”
It was cold and damp, as there was no heat in the room. I could feel myself shivering as I lay on the sleeping bag. Chris started to talk me into a hypnotic trance. His voice was slow and deliberate.