by George Foy
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain
Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion
The pilot leaned on the bell for the sixth time, thinking this was undoubtedly a waste of energy. There was no way the guy was going to be in, it was only three a.m.
Still he kept ringing. It felt strange to realize that after four years in New York he had nowhere else to go.
He knew a couple of people downtown but they were all in the Trade and to visit them now would be like going to a dance, knowing you were infected with stigs, and spitting into the brandy punch.
It was odd to realize that Rocketman, on exactly the same night, had ended up as homeless as he. It was the Curse again, he thought, fancifully, bitterly. The Curse of Marak.
He looked up and down the lobby, a little nervous. Since leaving the TransCom Building he had not been able to shake the idea that someone was watching, and taking notes, and following wherever they went. He had on a headset that looked like a Walkman’s earphones, plugged discreetly into the ECM on his shoulder. It was tuned to the frequency scanner and the traffic, as far as he could tell, was normal; but his uneasiness would not pack its bags.
Rocketman, for his part, always felt as if someone was watching, following, and taking notes wherever he went – not just on him, but on every other innocent human who somehow had become aware of the sick skein of conspiracy spun by the world’s military-industrial keiretsus over the last sixty years. He too looked around the lobby, but this time it had less to do with security than with his continuing awe of spaces bigger and longer than the shut-off corridors of Bellevue.
The lobby took up a quarter block. Long mirrors and fake Egyptian busts and couches filled its corners. Ranks of mailboxes stuffed with expensive journals hissed with the loony Muzak of buzzing microchips. The chips delivered seasonal tunes whenever you opened the journal to a certain advertisement and often when you didn’t. Fifty or sixty electric versions of ‘Old Hundred,’ sandwiched in a whisky ad in the New Yorker, played too fast, at different stages, at the same time. It sounded like an attack of killer June bugs. Other chips, triggered by the pressure of being stuffed in the same box with eight pounds of junk mail, released samples of perfume or played quick matchchip videos of Virtix productions. The cracks around the mailboxes flared with light and gave off different smells, with no recognizable pattern.
Security cameras covered the lobby’s every angle. A Sikh doorman watched them intently from a cubbyhole full of monitors. Rocketman turned up the collar of his jumpsuit and the pilot, cued unconsciously by his friend, pulled his travel jacket collar higher around his neck.
Upstairs, PC clicked on a monitor and said, ‘Jesus.’
‘I’ve got guests,’ he told the girl, back in the bedroom. She was pulling on her panty hose.
‘Guests,’ she said in a flat tone, ‘at three a.m. Of course you do.’
She finished getting dressed so fast she took down the same elevator that brought up the pilot and Rocketman. She did not take the crinkled plastic with her.
‘Hope we didn’t interrupt anything important,’ the pilot said as the elevator door hissed shut behind the woman.
‘Nothing important,’ PC said. He gestured them in. On the way through the entrance the pilot noticed a strip of clear plastic wrap hanging from the back of PC’s pants.
‘Dag, PC,’ he said, ‘you been wrappin’ yourself up again?’
‘Fuck off,’ PC said sourly. He could feel himself blushing. He ripped a square of LayWrap the size of a large napkin from his trousers, wadded it up, threw it in a corner of the hallway.
Despite the embarrassment he was quite happy he’d been able to get rid of the girl so easily. His ‘guests’ had allowed him to bail cold out of the confusion of feelings stemming from the dispenser incident. He led them into the kitchen. This was where he basically lived. The rest of the apartment was so big he got lost in it.
‘So you guys really are in trouble,’ PC said in wonder an hour later, after the pilot had told PC of the bust at TransCom, and Rocketman had told the pilot about Roberto.
‘It’s a well-planned plot,’ Rocketman said darkly for the fourth or fifth time. ‘The Sour Lake Roustabouts – they’re back.’
‘I don’t know if busting smugglers qualifies as a plot,’ the pilot objected. ‘I mean, Black Tuna, the Boyd Brothers. Not exactly the Vienna Choirboys, ya know what I mean?’
He drained a bottle of PC’s Oude Gansevoort, and got another from the ten-foot refrigerator in the middle of the kitchen. He was on his fourth or fifth beer and he still had not succeeded in laying the bitter aftertaste of Rocketman’s news. Roberto was not dead, which was something – hell, it was a lot – but in his mind’s eye the pilot kept seeing Oakdale; the four perimeters of mines and razorwire, the automatic machine-gun nests, the gleaming control tower, looming like an alien spacecraft two hundred feet high in the middle of the compound.
Frankly, Oakdale scared him. Like BON, it lived in a growing loophole in the Bill of Rights. Like BON, it had become what it was after the Manila raid, when the AGATE laws were passed. It was supposed to be a gang war with walls. The only difference between Oakdale and South Chicago, people said, was you could leave South Chicago. People claimed the Oakdale goons never used harsh methods; they just fed you to the Kurds or the Chechens or the Santa Martans if you did not cooperate.
People said lots of things, but nobody outside knew for sure, because in the five years since BON, through its tame corrections corporation, took over the camp, no one had left Oakdale except to be buried.
‘So what’re you gonna do?’ PC asked anxiously.
The pilot sighed. ‘Hire lawyers, I guess,’ he said. ‘Give ’em what I know on Roberto, so they can tell me what they can’t do, at four hundred bucks an hour.’
‘Not much anyone can do,’ Rocketman commented, ‘against them.’
The big man twisted his bottle in his hands. He had chosen to sit in the corner nearest the butcherblock table. He kept looking around PC’s kitchen, his eyes large.
The kitchen was big as an average living room. It was filled with every convenience known to City man. Super-Cuisinarts, tortellini-makers, automatic bread-bakers, paella-mixers. A Tibetan-food blender, microwave ovens, a VR satvid. Gigantic color posters of fruit covered the walls. Antiseptic blue formica covered everything else.
The screen of a Micronta Homeframe glowed in one corner. All the kitchen appliances, the airco and heat, the security cameras and proximity alarms and lights, were hooked into the Micronta. Its screen-saver featured Mai Tais flying toward each other, colliding, exploding in a gout of colorful juices.
The satvid showed an advertisement for a product that totally eliminated sweat.
The pilot threw his empty bottle at the recycler, and missed.
‘Dag!’ he exclaimed. ‘I still can’t believe it. Roberto, Obregon. And Eltonjohn’s dead.’
Rocketman got unsteadily to his feet, paced a couple of yards up the kitchen and back again. PC opened the freezer and took out a small plastic bag full of jisi yomo. The jis’ was fresh, probably Ecuadorian, so green it was almost phosphorescent. Rocketman paced quietly up and down. After twenty paces he said, ‘We got to fight this. We got to stop things like this,’ he continued, ‘like what happened to my shuttle.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ PC asked in the middle of measuring out perfect cones of jisi yomo on the butcherblock.
The B-Net news came on.
The lead story was about Jimmy Hoffa. The former Teamsters chief was announcing a spiritual crusade to spread the word of God. A view of Hoffa’s bald head filled the four-foot satellite-TV screen. It was covered with fat pink scabs of skin cancer, and pucker marks, as if it had been underwater a long time.
‘Heaven don’t work no different from Washington, or Detroit, or Vegas,’ Jimmy Hoffa yelled at the audience. Hoffa’s face was as wrinkled as a piece of paper that had been scrunched up, then smoothed out, many times over. The skin u
nder his eyes and cheeks drooped like warmed LayWrap. Cancer had worn away part of his left ear, and one of his eyes was completely bloodshot. He had large gold caps on his teeth that flashed in the spots as he spoke. ‘Jesus had to deal with Pilate! You wanna save your soul, you gotta pay off the Lord! You wanna go to heaven, you gotta give some kickbacks to Jesus! That’s what Jesus told me! He wants cash up front!’
Fierce approval from the crowd. Shots of chanting supporters – ‘Haw – ffa! Haw – ffa!’ A sleek man in an expensive suit clapped enthusiastically to one side of the podium, but his eyes were still and calculating. Hoffa pointed at the slick man.
‘The good Pastor Johnson—’ (another round of cheers) – ‘Good Pastor Johnson has seen the way of Christ. He has passed on the word of our mission. So I say to you, brothers and sisters – go forth and get rich! Just suck them credits in! Then you come back to me, and ask me what kind of protection money you willing to pay, what kind of payoff eternal salvation is worth to you, and I will go personally to Jesus Christ almighty who saved me from the scum of the marsh and the wrath of the Gambinos and I will tell you what it costs to enter the kingdom of heaven! That’s the way of Jesus Christ almighty! That’s the American way!’
Hysteria in the crowd. Close-ups of people chucking UCC-cards in the air. Shots of people trying to storm the spotlit podium of Meadowlands Arena where Hoffa addressed a special convention of the Johnsonist Church of Jesus Christ Almighty Incorporated. The camera panned around Hoffa’s bodyguards as they repelled boarders. The bodyguards were all deformed. They wore black robes and tall black rubber boots. They shoved off the religious with blows from the butts of sawn-off shotguns. One of the bodyguards had a withered arm, and a thigh with two joints. He swung his lupara like a shillelagh from the other arm, whirling it around his head by its rubber sling.
‘Shit,’ the pilot exclaimed, ‘I know that guy!’
‘Then you’ve got a shortcut to heaven,’ PC commented, ‘as well as some interesting friends.’
Rocketman had continued his pacing right through the revival meeting, mumbling quietly to himself, but at this point he stopped beside the table, jammed his fists in his jumpsuit and said, ‘You know what?’
‘What?’ PC replied.
‘We could go find Hawkley.’
PC had been cleaning out the jis’ factory. He blasted it warm with a blow-dryer, spooned a cone of jisi into the pyrex globe. He played the lighter flame under the accumulated powder, waited till it turned turquoise, fitted the can of nitrous into the nozzle. Simultaneously, he blasted in the gas, and inhaled. ‘Aah,’ he sighed, when the toke was safely locked in his lungs.
‘Seriously,’ Rocketman said.
The pilot laughed. He could not help himself. The jisi yomo neutralized the globe’s nitrous oxide, but the contact high from PC’s hit made laughing easier.
‘Some?’ PC offered, passing the works along.
The stimulant made things appear green and brown, the color of jungle. It made you sense the pain of all living things. High on jisi, you could watch a vase full of tulips and feel the agony of the amputated stems, the dreadful parch as pistil and pedicel, losing chlorophyll, grew increasingly unable to draw water into their upper veins and filaments. You could stick your head through the window and above the noise of trucks and jets and wind hear the ten thousand different melodies of suffering, from disease, boredom, betrayal, anger, and solitude – above all, solitude – that suffused the city blocks immediately around.
And yet, in the eloquence of this new sense, the jisi also made you feel comfortable. If pain was everywhere – this the drug whispered in the tunnels of your brain – so was the peace to be found in accepting that fact. High on jisi, you felt like you were sleeping in a hammock woven of soft vines, even when you were straphanging on the Seventh Avenue express at rush hour. It was an equivocal drug for an equivocal city.
‘Hawkley’s a myth,’ the pilot observed, much later. He had found PC’s vodka in one cabinet and was experimenting with Easter egg dyes he’d found in another. Three drops of deep blue turned a glass of superchilled vodka the color of kingfisher feathers. Add yellow. Add lemon. Add melon liqueur. ‘Everybody knows his book was written by a whole buncha people. Like the Christian Bible.’
‘What book?’ PC asked, and walked to the other side of the kitchen.
‘Hawkley’s not a myth,’ Rocketman said. ‘You’re too young to know the difference, but I saw him once.’
‘Hawkley?’ the pilot quit his alchemy in amazement. ‘You saw him?’
‘For sure.’ The soothing swells of jisi yomo had calmed Rocketman’s nerves.
‘It was in ’67. I went to San Francisco that summer, like every other middle-class kid in the bourgeois state of California. Those were hippie days, man – sexist, egocentric-city – but Hawkley was making acid back then and his acid was the one thing that could make you forget all that.’
‘And you saw him?’ the pilot insisted.
‘From far away. It was at the Love Pageant. You know, the day they made LSD illegal in California.’
‘Dag,’ the pilot said. ‘Really? Hawkley’s real? No one ever tole me.’
‘So anyway.’ Rocketman brought down his hands and spread them wide, a symbol of simplicity and ease. ‘To get back to what I was saying.
‘My idea is, we find him. He tells us how BON manages to bust all the smugglers, what Roberto said. You come back and save the ass of all the freetraders left. You’ll be a hero, man!’
‘Not exactly,’ PC pointed out. ‘Not to most people.’
‘Freetraders are cool, man,’ Rocketman growled at PC. ‘They slip ’n’ slide, go anywhere, when they want.’
The pilot looked at his vodka glass, which was turning a disgusting swampy color. He shook his head.
‘It’s the craziest idea I ever heard.’
Rocketman flushed. ‘Fuck you, man,’ he said hotly. ‘Don’t tell me what’s crazy, what’s not crazy, I’m a fuckin’ expert on that, I know the difference.’
‘I’m sorry—’ The pilot put his arm out toward Rocketman, but his friend jerked away.
‘You just scared.’
‘I’m not scared,’ the pilot retorted. ‘What’s to be scared of, compared to everything else?’
‘So what’s stoppin’ you?’ Rocketman insisted. ‘You got contacts. Anyway, what else you gonna do?’
The pilot opened his mouth to reply, and paused.
Thought it over for a minute.
He had no idea what else he was going to do. He certainly was not going to risk another run, not with the kind of heat they’d had waiting for him off the Continental Shelf.
He could not stay in New York, or anywhere he was known. If the Feds had found his apartment, they knew more about him than he’d ever thought possible. And those data would be online by now.
PC fed two pounds of barley flour, a gram of cilantro and a half-gallon of pre-soured yak milk into the automatic Tibetan tsampa-maker. He tapped out the right time and temperature on the Micronta but he had poured in twice too much sour milk, and tsampa started blooping out of the machine five minutes ahead of time and so fast that it had covered five square yards in as many seconds. ‘Oh, shit,’ PC said, and picked up a sponge to mop it. Tragically, the tsampa-maker was an industrial machine guaranteed to put out a minimum of thirty Imperial gallons every twenty minutes and the sponge was hopelessly inadequate to the task. ‘Fuck!’ he yelled, ‘help!’ He sprinted for the closet where the mop was stored. The grayish-white tide of sour gruel was invading the kitchen with the irresistible speed and momentum of Mongol hordes. It got under PC’s feet as he ran. His legs vanished from under him and he hit the floor with a distinct ‘Ooomph!’ stomach-first in the advancing flood. ‘Yaaagh,’ he yelled, ‘tsampa!’ The pilot stepped carefully to the Micronta and clicked on the ‘cancel’ symbol.
Rocketman helped PC mop up the kitchen floor.
‘To hell with tsampa,’ PC said, ‘I’m sick of it already. I’
m sick of Vicious Vindaloo. I’m sick of the whole—’
‘Shhh!’ Rocketman interrupted him. His face was set and rigid. He pointed his mop at the Virtix screen.
The TV showed a night-perspective of Bellevue hospital. A reporter dressed in a thick sheepskin coat held the mike in a gloved hand. ‘Authorities believe one of the inmates, a former aerospace engineer, put the rocket together in secret. His body has not been recovered—’
‘Hey!’ PC shouted. ‘That’s you!’
Rocketman did not reply. The sight of the South Mental Health Tower in the background had driven him back into his corner. God started licking the tsampa, taking up where Rocketman had left off.
‘Jeess,’ PC said, throwing his mop into the sink. ‘You guys are really way out, you know. I mean you’re on the news. You do things. It’s – it’s – it’s interesting, goddammit!’
The pilot poured fresh vodka. He tried straight green dye this time.
‘It’s true, I don’t want the Trade to die,’ he said slowly to Rocketman. ‘And if what Roberto says is accurate – and it must be, I mean, look at the facts – the Vikings were waiting for my jet; that cutter was right there where I picked up the Chileans. I mean, right there!’
The loss of Eltonjohn had not dissipated; it had simply gone underground, accumulating with other pain in pockets. With the heightened perception of jisi, he could see the pockets move, the pain spread inside him, in subtle color-lines that ran through his nerves, pooled, then overflowed the dams of ganglia, lighting his muscles in different hues. It looked like his new ECM program.
The pilot slammed the dye bottle down so hard it cracked right up its plastic seam. Livid jade spots appeared on the table and on his nose. He clasped one hand over the other to control his muscles. ‘Those old Coast Guard cutters only go thirty-five, forty-five knots. They had to know exactly where we were. I mean, that sort of information doesn’t grow on trees.’
An ad for pest poison followed the Bellevue report. The ad used military terminology to describe how it would exterminate coyotes and rats, raccoons and cockroaches. The verb ‘kill’ was repeated eighteen times in the voice-over.