“Here comes the avatar!”
“Let us have it!”
“You are the only man alive!”
“Give us some knowledge-words!”
“We’re hungry!”
Miller stood in front of the assembled group. The shouting ceased. Then he started as though he had already been talking like he did the night before.
“…and so when I say that all the men here are homosexual, I mean that all of them are except for me. And the reasons should be obvious. You women here have finally found the straight man, the straight arrow. And that man is not to be found on a movie screen. This is the movie screen right here. Understand?”
“OH YES!”
“Look—people are very concerned about saints. Let me tell you something: every one of you here has a chance to be a saint, understand? It’s no big deal. Once you get the transmission that I’m talking about, you are going to be just like Saint Francis, Saint Jerome, Saint Johnny Carson, Saint Adolph Hitler—you are going to be the one on the headlines. Why? Because you will have gotten rid of the newspaper. When you get rid of the stage, guess what? You’re the star of the show. And I’m the one who gets rid of it. Not for you. I don’t do anything for you. I do it underneath you. See, I’m the doormat and the umbrella at the same time. I’m the dirt on the sole of your shoe but I’m also the big blue atmosphere.
“The trick is, first your name has to go up in flame. Once you get rid of your name then you can really get a life that’s on the edge. Listen, we can do this right now. Who wants to do this right now? Who is ready for the new world?”
“WE ARE, MILLER!”
“MILLER, WE WANT TO DO IT!”
One of the women in the group walked up to Miller with an enormous newsprint sketchpad and a pen. Miller took a page out of the pad and taped it to the wall.
“Who is first? Who is going first?”
“I will!” shouted a curly-haired fellow with an alpaca sweater.
“Okay, friend, tell me your name. No, not the name I gave you. Tell me your OLD name, your misery name, we’re going to get rid of it altogether.”
“My name is Ed Petri.”
“Your name WAS Ed Petri!”
Miller wrote the name on the giant sheet of paper which was taped to the wall. ED PETRI. Then he produced a lighter and set the sheet on fire. The paper scorched the wall, sending lines of soot up towards the ceiling. Ed Petri’s head rolled around as the paper burned as if he were receiving visions. Miller looked on from behind the sunglasses.
“That’s it! That’s all there is to it. You see how easy it is? Who’s next?”
Somebody else volunteered. Miller taped another page in the same place on the wall. The process went on for twenty minutes. Miller burned page after page until a large section of the plaster was a blackened smear and the floor was covered with soot and ashes. People all over the room were rolling their heads around and going into delirium as their misery-names were torched. The room was now totally filled with smoke. My throat burned.
“I can’t breath!” said a man near me who had not yet volunteered to have his name burned. The man had been hacking and coughing for the last ten minutes. Miller pounced on him.
“Vellum, Orbit!” Miller shouted to two men sitting near the front row. They got out of their seats. One was in his forties and balding and the other was younger with short, sweaty arms and blue sandals. They were larger and stupider than the other men in the room. (Commune cops, I thought.) “Take this asshole to the Orange Room! On the maximum!”
I thought there would be some protest from the coughing man but instead he lit up. “Thank you, Miller!” The two guys Miller had spoken to took the offender by the arms and led him out of the living room.
“You see you have to let go here, people. You have to give it all up and take a good look outside of the fish pond. Don’t be tricked by smoke. Your parents are smoke. Your wives and husbands are smoke. You see? You have to flush it all away. Even PETS,” He said with a stiff armed wave.
“Wait a second Miller—PETS?” came a familiar voice. It was Mandy.
The interruption caused Miller to pause. Then he kept right on rolling.
“All I’m saying, Perseverance, is we have to get disembroiled from the past. You see, a pet is a good friend but let me ask you this—who is feeding who? Who is wearing the collar? Who has fleas? You or the cat? You or the frog? Are we animals? Are they people? Maybe they are. But how are we going to know for sure if we are down there with them eating bugs?”
“Well MY DOG doesn’t know about any of this!”
“Let me tell you a story. I had a dog once. The dog was a Doberman. He had a name. I had a name. Every day we walked around with our names. That’s the problem. I traded him in for the transmission.”
“You traded your dog?” Mandy shouted.
At this note, the people in the room started coming out of their name-burning reveries and paying attention to the goings-on. Miller took a quick glance at where the two guys who dealt with the last incident had been sitting. Presumably they were still in the Orange Room. Nothing happened for a few seconds. A couple of ashes drifted from the wall to the floor.
“Look—we all have Dross. Dross is what sticks to the skin even after the flaming up of Truth. What you have to do is decide what you want to do with it. Do you want to eat it?
“Do you want to sleep with it around your neck? Dross? Let me tell you a story. There was a fellow early in the transmission. We’ll call him Ned Deasley. But I called him Decent Mineral. Anyway, he had this picture of his family he used to like to carry around. Now, listen. I have nothing against the family. It’s just that we are here to plunge the bowl, you know?” Miller looked around the room. The people responded with a few oohs and ahs and somebody shouted, “Tell us more about it, More-teller!”
“Anyway, every time we turned around he would have this picture of his parents and his brother standing in front of palm trees and wearing polo shirts. His family was called Martha, George, and Junior. Only I called them Idiot, Liar, and Little Vomit. You see they were killing him, and I could see it. One day I noticed that something was wrong with the other people around here. Nobody’s energy was right and everybody was hesitating all the time. I get these feelings, you know. I call it ‘the big wind,’ and I got one about this guy’s family. Well finally something had to be done. What I did was this: we took the photo from him and sent him up to the orange room and really gave him the maximum session. Sixteen hours of straight friendship. We gave him the Absolute Love Beating which is the highest level of friendship-violence. And while we were doing it we called each other Martha, George, and Junior. Pretty soon he saw that it wasn’t us doing it, it was his family. You know, the old misery-world clan. And when he saw that, he got the transmission all at once. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“Listen, Buddy,” Mandy said. “I got into this thing because you seemed to have some unique ideas about the universe and some interesting diet-tips and stuff. But I don’t give a shit about this guy and his photo. I didn’t hear anything about a dog in that photo! Let me tell you something about my dog: I took him to Dolores Park and he made friends with a goose! Have you ever seen a dog do anything like that? Bubbles should be the one giving the transmissions! That goose followed him for two blocks!”
“Let me tell you another story…” Miller started in.
And this was the moment I have been talking about. The fulcrum moment. Mandy could have gone one way or the other with this nutjob. And I am not pretending to be a hero—it could have just as easily been me in her shoes and her tipping the fulcrum. But it wasn’t. Somehow I acted. For once. And what I did was not much. I got up and walked over to where she was sitting. People were still stunned by the overall interruption to Miller’s usual magic spell so nobody stopped me. The feeling in the air crashed even more when I broke the spatial order
. Now Miller was talking again. His voice droned on behind me. He may very well have been telling me not to get up, or summoning other men to take me to the Orange Room. I was indifferent and I could no longer hear him. I walked through the smoke as if through a tunnel. It was silent. She looked up at me from her seat. Mandy and I were alone in the communion of infinite skepticism. I spoke quietly and quickly, knowing that I could be interrupted at any second.
“Look, Mandy. This transmission—I mean it’s fine and everything. I just don’t really like smoke, or houses, or bathrobes… I mean, I don’t really know what’s going on here. But I have to get out. I can’t stand it. I’ll tell you what: why don’t we just go do something normal for a few hours, you know, like get lunch or take the dog out or something, and if you want you can come back, but I’m done with it. Do you want to go to Lazlo’s or something and just think about this? You could come back tomorrow if you want.”
Miller was still talking and gesticulating in the background.
“Yeah—I suppose. But I’m not recommitting to the misery-life just yet,” she said.
“Fine. I’m just talking about having a few gin and tonics and walking the dog, Bubbles.”
“Okay.”
I could see relief on her face. She got out of her chair and we made our way through the seats toward the front door. People around us were horrified as they watched us destroy the world.
“Wait!” shouted Heliotrope. Her face was red and she looked wild-eyed. Her neck and dress were smudged with ashes.
Mandy, now resolved, turned on her with sudden menace. “Don’t fuck with me, bitch!”
“No—we want to come with you!”
Filament got up from his chair and joined Heliotrope. “We’re embroiled,” he explained. Without another word the four of us walked toward the front door. I turned and took a last look at the red eyed group and at Miller standing in front of the crowd in his pitch-stained bathrobe. His expression was unreadable behind the sunglasses. He looked as though he had spent his entire life in the cloud of black smoke that was killing the room, a red monk of the ruins.
“You’ll never be saints,” he pronounced as we walked out the door and shut it behind us.
Once outside we all moved quickly. “We better get out of here before his thugs get done dealing with that coughing guy,” Filament said. We got into Heliotrope’s car and drove back down the hill.
Our new friends still had apartments in Berkeley, but they offered to drive Mandy and I over to her house in the city. We chatted a little bit about this and that along the way. The sun was out and the wind blasted through the little sedan as we cruised over the Bay Bridge. Mandy and I sat in the back seat. She put her head on my shoulder and I laid my arm behind it. As we traveled across the bridge I thought about what Miller had said: “You’ll never be saints.” He was right, of course.
We got to Mandy’s place. Jennifer and Clayton (their real names) dropped us off, saying they were grateful to us for “deprogramming them,” but I told them we couldn’t take any credit. It wasn’t independence of thought that allowed them to get out of that joint, but simply the fact that they were desperate to fuck each other—you could see it. Mandy and I went in and greeted the dog. Bubbles leaped up into Mandy’s arms. Mandy turned the television on. A true crime documentary droned along with the usual resolve. We took a shower. We had sex in there. The dog ran around and pushed its head past the curtain into the shower at one point. Then we got out. I was unhappy to have to put clothes on that still smelled like smoke. She made coffee. We drank it and then took the dog up to Dolores Park.
Later at Lazlo’s, Mandy drank gin and I drank Scotch. The African music was humming away from the juke box. Neither of us said much for about five minutes. It was pleasant. Finally, Mandy spoke up.
“What do you think of those big, soft pretzels?”
“I don’t eat that shit.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not even food. Those things are just like—I don’t know, like weird bread-balls or something.”
“YOU’RE a weird bread-ball.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
She reached down and yanked one of my shoelaces untied and left it hanging there.
Sophisticated Devices/Make No Mistake Page 6