CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

In which I make numerous side trips in my quest for responsibility

 

It just so happened, as it was likely to do, that between Kansas and Santa Cruz there was a happy little place called Campbell Hot Springs, where I intended to spend a night or two sharing the joy of my new freedom from the job scene before heading on to Leanne to try and convince her that I was completely ready to bring home the tofu for the rest of my life.  It was Spring and I was ready for some more affection, even if I had to quit smoking or whatever, which I would deal with when I got there.  In the meantime, I had nothing to worry about since I was visiting Judas; I could go into a trance and either follow instructions or just wander around.  I stopped worrying about what people thought of me right away, when Judas turned around without warning, looked me in the eye, said, “Just be yourself,” turned back around and left me in the cabin trying to think of ways to illustrate his comments materially.  I ended up joining him out in his garden, where several shirtless young Swedish women were trying to do some serious gardening with me throwing dirt on my head and rolling around in it.  After spending the whole winter in my room in Lawrence, Kansas, to find myself back in California all of the sudden exacerbated the serious case of culture shock that I had—as a secret agent from outer space—apparently been born with.

The owner of Campbell Hot Springs was a Triple Scorpio named Leonard Orr who popularized Rebirthing and other New Age concepts that have become permanently embedded in the world-views of many people who have never even heard of him.  Today you can look on the bulletin board of any food coop on the West Coast and you’ll find flyers posted by somebody hoping to help the world heal itself of its wounds by teaching you and I how to breathe continuously.  Leonard Orr popularized all that, and he also popularized concepts like prosperity consciousness, survival consciousness, affirmations, and others.  At Campbells we were required to be “rebirthed” every day in order to live there, but since Leonard wasn’t living on the property, no one was enforcing his rules.  He changed the rules every time he showed up anyway.

Campbell Hot Springs ended up filling a similar role in my life as Rivendell had done: I could go from one scenario to another as needed, I had an instant group of friends, and there was no need to either make plans or to go anyplace in order to have an interesting social life, along the lines of an extended family, since there were plenty of people hanging around all the time and lots of different rooms and cabins and hot tubs and tents wherein conversation could be had, and most of it with people who had specifically come to this place in order to learn how to feel good.  The time I spent at Campbells was challenging, because although my squatting there was tolerated, I knew from my experience at Rivendell that I had to work, so I fell into a kitchen job quickly and had a fun time with Barbara and Gita keeping all the folks fed, but since Leonard was trying to teach us all how to be happy capitalists, I had to somehow scrape together enough money for a meal after working for free to prepare that same meal.  According to the tenets of prosperity consciousness, Barbara was supposed to be making a profit from her kitchen, and unsolicited comments—officially termed resistance—upon that very point from both residents and visiting seminar-goers never stopped coming.  But it was a fact of life that I was forced to somehow come up with at least two or three dollars each day that I intended to eat.  It was apparently some kind of test of my ability to not be overwhelmed by my survival consciousness; to operate out of prosperity consciousness and not scarcity.

Even more so than at Rivendell, it was necessary to have some kind of business.  One of my businesses was to build little dancing men called limberjacks, which I had learned about from my friend Charlie at the pipe organ factory, who made beautiful limberjacks out of all kinds of exotic wood.  You hold the little wooden man out over the end of a springboard and hit the board rhythmically, and the limberjack does a loud tap-dance on the board, swinging his legs and arms around in big circles, and generally going at it to beat the band.  I sold a small handful of limberjacks, and even shipped one off to a man I met who owned a bookstore in Amsterdam.  Another of my occupations was as official know-it-all: I advertised that I had all the answers and would answer any question at the rate of $5.00 per question.  I felt that this approach fit Leonard’s framework since it involved concepts he espoused like being in touch with infinite intelligence and being willing to receive.

My one and only customer was very happy with my services.  When she wanted to know what she should do about the fact that she’d paid a lot of money and driven all the way up from Los Angeles to take a seminar directly from the famed Leonard Orr, only to discover upon her arrival that Leonard had decided—without bothering to warn anybody in advance—that he would delegate the whole blasted thing to a couple of seminar leader wanna-be’s who had to look at their notes and didn’t seem familiar enough with their material to tell us anything we didn’t already know.  After due cogitation on my part, I had to inform the poor woman, a Ph.D. psychologist, that now that she knew what was really going on, she had the choice of going at it from the perspective of a ripped-off victim looking for revenge, or from the perspective of getting as much as possible out of the real situation as it actually existed.  She was happy to write me a check for $10, and then something else happened the very next night.

We were all in a big carpeted room sitting around in a big circle on the floor, 50 or more people, and everyone was taking turns describing the Rebirthing sessions we had all just finished.  A very large, soft man was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the circle, swaying and smiling and rolling his eyes and waving his arms in ecstasy as he described the incredible metaphysical and visionary breathing session he had just had.  This man was a businessman who had come from Hawaii for the seminar and was trying to give Leonard a sandblasted sign business for Campbells to run as a cottage industry.  As I watched the man gibber and glow, I was somewhat bored and quite sure he was indulging himself to impress us with his advanced spirituality.  I was not so much looking at him as staring in his direction, my eyes more or less out of focus.

Then I noticed that something in my blurred visual field was sharply in focus, and I froze my mental state exactly where it was, knowing what to do because of all the flying dreams I’d had in which I had learned how to prolong the flying experience by gently allowing the perspective of knowing I could fly to stay untouched and the mind to stay turned away from it.  Around the big man’s head and shoulders, in the air several inches from him, were large irregular splotches of nearly opaque, vivid dark orange light.  Having never seen any part of an aura before, I was totally impressed with the experience.  As soon as the meeting let out I rushed out into the lobby to look for someone to tell about my experience, and there sat the sober-faced middle-aged Ph.D. psychologist lady from Los Angeles who had paid me $10 the previous day to tell her what she already knew, she was perched on the edge of a sofa arm, sort of staring into the air in front of her, which was thick with people who had just gotten out of the meeting.

I walked up to the woman without hesitation, and I told her, Guess what, I just saw that one big guy Terry’s aura.  She turned her deadpan gaze to meet mine, and said, “Yeah, it was dark orange.”

Whoa, now that is some real shit.  But that ain’t all.  A few months later, Judas ran into this same character Terry in Hawaii where Terry lived, because Judas was having trouble with his wisdom teeth and people were standing in line to have Terry work on them.  It turned out Terry was a psychic healer.  The result was that Judas no longer has any wisdom teeth, because Terry dissolved them.

I had recently learned how to do people’s numerology charts and was quite popular around campus as a numerological analyst, because I was so confident of my abilities.  I had distilled the interpretations of each numeral from several books on the subject, down to one complex of related topics for each of the digits one through nine.  My readings were general enough that I usually struck a chord with my clients.  Because of my enthusiasm and reputation I ended up meeting nearly everybody that walked onto the property, and I pretty much had to assume that I had finally arriven after lo these many long and weary years of drudging and painstaking work in the fields of existence.  I started writing a metaphysical book about the nature of reality that I called This Magic Moment.  I would lecture in the tubs to anyone who would listen; it was fairly easy to get people into a conversation about metaphysics, and once they figured out I was an authority on spiritual matters, I often had a happy little audience, complete with the occasional heckler, as long as I wanted to keep on squirting words out of my face.

However, I must admit that for the most part, my audience was named Sunny.

Sunny was one of Leonard’s Inspiration University students.  These were people who for whatever reason wanted to pay thousands of dollars up front to follow Leonard around the world on his seminar tours and pilgrimages to India as he tapped into all the New Age centers, such as Scandinavia, for proof that he could create large sums of cash quickly by talking about his ideas.  The mortgage payment for Campbell Hot Springs was $3000 each month, so Leonard had never lived there because he had to travel to make money.  Inspiration University and its leader had just arrived at Campbells, and things were getting interesting.  Sunny had gotten a scholarship to Inspiration University, meaning she still owed Leonard several thousand dollars, which Leonard wasn’t worried about since he kept her around as a mascot or some sort of token hopelessly neurotic spoiled Jewish princess.  In Leonardese, “She processes other people’s stuff.”  Wow, heavy stuff.  One of a cult- leader’s techniques is to keep everybody wondering what the hell they meant by what they just said.

Sunny’s father was the inventor of Jalapeno Jack Pasteurized Process Cheese.  She had black hair, blue eyes, and freckles, as a woman should, but besides being fat, she was nearly ten years older than me, so I just kept her for a disciple and let her follow me everywhere.  She was on disability, since doctors had her convinced that she was manic-depressive, so she bought me meals to entice me to go places with her in her car.  I thrived on the attention, not to mention the food, and on Sunny’s childlike helpless act, which made me the guru in the relationship.  And besides that, she bought me meals.

A typical confidence-building exercise that I thoroughly enjoyed making her attempt was to walk down the dirt road that led to Campbell Hot Springs at night in the dark with her eyes closed.  Even though I walked right next to her, it was hard to get her to walk with her eyes closed.  But it was absolutely essential that she do so, because my ability to tolerate being around such a helpless person made it necessary for me to wring my imagination for the drops of inspiration that made our friendship possible at all.  What I’m trying to say is that her helplessness and mine fit together like hand and glove.  My normal routine of seeking out—or just sitting around waiting for—friends that I could talk down to was still intact, even in this unusual setting populated by world travelers and downright foreigners.

There was Alice.  She was a plump, shaven-headed, obsessively shirtless young Swedish artist who had gotten romantically involved with my friend Oshean Freewave Germley when he had moved to Campbells from Rivendell.  Now Oshean had preceded her to Sweden, so anxious was he to live with her there, so I spent some time walking around the forest and mountains with her, making her inhale the intent that she needed to help herself with the fear of men that she claimed plagued her, and once even sleeping next to her in her bed, platonically like siblings, because she seemed to find my presence comforting.

As is bound to happen to a young man on a mountaintop with few obligations, no money and just enough food to stay alive, I soon found that I had achieved total enlightenment.

I had been dabbling with Rebirthing just enough to fit in, but I’d found when I was conducting breathing sessions for others that they seemed to crave an emotional catharsis and they expected me to comfort them through it.  Having completely lost interest in anything resembling Primal Therapy, I generally avoided the social aspects of Rebirthing and experimented with just strictly breathing continuously all the time.  My favorite parts of any Rebirthing session were the feelings of vibration, the involuntary spastic behavior of fingers, toes and facial muscles, and the little dreams I had when I would stop breathing and pass out from time to time.  These sensations, amounting to an altered state of consciousness, were far more interesting to me than trying to force traumas out of my system, and besides, those wonderful vibrations made me feel all warm inside, so what was there to squawk about?

It was some time after Leonard moved on to the property that he started confronting each of us on-by-one in meetings about how we were paying our rent.  He complained constantly about the $3000 per month that he had to come up with to pay the mortgage.  When all was said and negotiations were complete, everyone but I got to stay on the property, but I was told I could go live in town at the historic Globe Hotel since I had no source of cash whatsoever and had never taken the initiative to negotiate for living quarters on the property.  I was not going to humble myself to beg to live there because I had already taken the initiative to work hard in the kitchen growing alfalfa sprouts and washing every dish that was used in the lodge seven days a week, and didn’t see the further need to take the initiative to kiss Leonard’s Scorpio ass, but I still was grateful that he hadn’t thrown me out entirely.

It was on the 1-1/2 mile-long walk from Campbells to Sierraville that the breathing began, probably as a result of boredom with the walk.  Leonard owned the historic Globe Hotel, which happened to be empty except for the pretty Swedish girl who was in charge of it, and me.  She wouldn’t let me edit her romance novel, which she worked on constantly whenever she wasn’t sunbathing naked by the pool at Campbells.  I didn’t care because I was breathing.

I certainly didn’t need any Rebirthing.  I was breathing continuously and deeply, in and out, in and out, at all times.  The paralysis and loss of muscle control, which Rebirthers call the creeping crud—and which MDs call tetany—and which I actually enjoyed, disappeared and all that was left was a steady vibrational sensation running through my body, making me feel like I had died and gone to air central.  I embodied the song I wrote there, based on Joybroth’s dogma: Have fun, don’t hurt, things change, it’s easy.

Which I changed to:

 

Keep on the Firing Line

(based on an old Pentecostal hymn)

 

When you’re feeling like you’re feeling

like feeling bad,

Keep on the firing line.

 

Now could be the best time that you

ever have had,

Keep on the firing line.

 

Ride the wind, it doesn’t have to

blow you away,

Keep on the firing line.

 

When you decide you’re happy,

then you will be happy,

Keep on the firing line.

 

Have fun,

Don’t hurt,

Things change,

Don’t worry.

Be yourself, it

Isn’t always easy.

 

When you decide you’re happy,

then you will be happy,

Keep on the firing Line.

  

Although Judas was worried about me since I was breathing so hard all the time, it felt so good that I refused to stop.  One night as I was walking to the historic Globe Hotel, I got a feeling that the hotel was on fire.  It wasn’t, but when I went to the local cafe in the morning for coffee, the volunteer fire department was in there chowing down after putting out the fire that had destroyed Cabin Five at Campbells in the middle of the night, and my favorite British pixie friend Gita and Campbells general manager Yvonne’s ex-husband Joe had barely escaped without injury.  Cabin Five had been my haven as Judas’s unofficial roommate when I had first arrived at Campbells.

In those highly oxygenated days I was so relaxed that I could go to sleep anytime I wanted, anytime of the day or night, just by deciding to.  I remember laying my head down on my pillow in my little wooden room upstairs at the historic Globe Hotel.  The days had been running together like they had during my Green Dragon acid binge, because I didn’t care about routines, mine or anybody’s.  With no thought about it, I stopped mourning the lack of food, cigarette money, pot, and She Who Was Born To Have Sex With Me, and literally lost interest in finding entertainment, because there was no more anxiety to stomp down with constant stimulations and distractions; like a child who has never thought about it yet, I assumed I was happy and therefore I was, since I wasn’t thinking about it.  And besides that, I had a steady vibrational sensation running through my body.  I was seriously not in my normal miserable prison.  It was sort of like waking up in someone else’s body—and realizing that I’m just returning from someone else’s body.  I was not the same neurotic asshole.  I was completely lightened up.

I had walked to the Globe not so much because I’d decided to, but because I was busy breathing and was already walking, and had no reason to seek entertainment amongst my peers on campus, so I just kept breathing and walking.  Once in my room, I lay down to experience the exhilarating new phenomenon of instant sleep.

I was so guilt-free in those few weeks that I could never forget the experience; the rest of my life seems clouded by comparison.

I had a dream on one of those impromptu trips to my room in town.

The “Stumped-No-More” dream proceeds as follows.

Now, I always was a sitting duck for anybody that knew how to communicate.  But the person in this dream know how to talk without words, and I was absolutely captivated.  I found myself in a glowing environment, and I was unable to see, for all the orange-yellow light, until finally I noticed that I was walking down a dusty road, and between the wind whipping up the dust and the bright sunlight in my eyes, it was hard to figure out where I was, but I eventually discovered that I was walking down a very narrow dirt street between a bunch of old wooden buildings, and it soon became apparent that I was in an abandoned ghost town.  But what had gotten my attention to begin with, before I could see anything, was this music coming from who knows where.  This music was the sort of sound that you’d never hear twice in your life, and that you could never reproduce or remember.  If I tried to compare it to some known genre, that would reduce it to someone else’s concept of that genre.  This music was beyond description, and yet every note was as plain as day.  There was nothing unusual about it except that it had been written by a genius a hundred times that of Mozart.  I could not help but try and find the source of the music, and that’s why it became important to know where I was in that orange glowing environment.

The little wooden buildings were arranged in long rows with narrow dusty streets between them.  There was nothing else there, nothing growing, no signs.  The buildings were not uniform but they were all about the same size.  It was definitely a ghost town.  I was carrying a briefcase.  I was wearing an old-time business suit and a little round hat.  I kept following the music, turning down the dirt lanes between endless rows and columns of small dilapidated shacks, and my excitement grew as the volume grew, telling me I was approaching its source.  Finally as I turned to my left around the corner of a shack, I knew that I was going to find what I was looking for, and there it was.  I stopped dead in my tracks and gawked at the being that I saw before me producing all this infinitely multi-faceted and perfectly textured music all by himself.

I had stopped at the edge of an empty town square full of blowing dust.  Across the square from me sat a naked old man on a big pile of filthy old rags.  The man had no arms and no legs, only stumps where his appendages had been lost at the elbows and knees.  He was the filthiest human being I had ever seen.  He had long, nasty-looking gray hair with yellow and black streaks in it.  His beard was longer than a crocodile, tangled and wrapped around his body in endless rats’ nests.  I could almost smell him across the square.  I could tell he was blind because he was not looking at anything in particular.  He rolled on his back on the big pile of rags, his stumps waving in the air, producing this perfect music.  Between his two elbows was attached a single violin string, and between his two knees was attached another violin string.  In his toothless, rotten, spit-encrusted jaw he clutched a violin bow with which he scraped away at these two rusty strings.  He changed the notes of the song by waving his stumps around in the air, thereby increasing and decreasing the tension on the violin strings to change their pitch.  That’s about all I can say about that dream, except that as I could feel it about to end, I was more disappointed than a junkie on Jones Street.

Sometime later I wrote a song about this dream called “Stumped-No-More,” and it goes like this:

  

Stumped-No-More

 

Stumped-No-More the fearless fiddler had no legs nor arms,

so,

strings stretched twixt his steamy stumps,

bow clenched twixt rotting happy jaws,

he played like he was getting paid.

Now what do you think about that?

 

I stumbled innocently upon old Stumped-No-More in a

ghost town one fine day,

drawn by tones that spoke of no such home for no such dream.

Sun beat, dust blowed, Stumped-No-More the fearless fiddler

was apparently just warming up.

 

Knowing that uncalled-for babble has been known to

draw two loves to battle,

I neither spoke nor breathed as song crouched on

and sank claws into my skull.

I love small talk; bullshitting about nothing

turns me on, but I managed to refrain.

 

Sounds I’ve heard ever since my decision-making center

settled down on physical terrain,

but I knew as Stumped-No-More scraped away that

ordinary sound waves,

heretofore interpreted

as noise, truth, or music

were as far removed from

the potential of bliss as pleasure is from pain.

Now what do you think about that?

  

That dream remains to this day one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had, in or out of the body, but it wasn’t the only notable event that occurred during those days of 24-hour-a-day continuous breathing.

One day I walked into Sierraville for no reason and went upstairs to my room where I put my head down and closed my eyes and relished the constant vibration that coursed through my body, of which I never tired.  Instantly I was asleep.  Not too much time passed before, you guessed it, I had my first out-of-body experience.  I was having a dream, although I did not know I was dreaming, in which I was squatting down next to my bed there in my room, going through my backpack which was on the floor leaning up against the foot of the bed, and I found a $20 bill in my wallet, and I said to myself, But wait!  I don’t have a $20 bill!  Something’s wrong!  And I looked up, and there, six inches away from my nose, right in front of me, was me, laying in my bed, and I jumped up and dove straight into my body through my forehead, and sat up in bed.  I would have been completely ecstatic, except that I was breathing, so I was merely excited and pleased that I had finally proven to myself that the people who wrote books about psychic phenomena such as auras and out-of-body experiences are not charlatans or liars, because I now had had these same exact experiences myself, and I could now read those books and rest assured that the authors at least might be talking about something that could actually happen to me.

Back in Santa Cruz I used to get poison oak a lot because I liked to go look for rocks out on our 33 acres out on Freedom Boulevard.  Judas was an herb doctor at that time, and he used to give me a lotion made out of mugwort and isopropyl alcohol that would turn my skin green and make me smell bad.  It  didn’t do anything for my poison oak, but it made me feel like I was at least trying and made me look and smell as disabled as I felt.  When I lived at the historic Globe Hotel, I got poison oak again because I’d gone to Santa Cruz to visit Ellen at her post-Rivendell residence where she lived with several other former Rivvies.  When I arrived in Santa Cruz, I got dropped off in a place where I had to walk through the dark about five miles down little country roads, and just before I got to her house I went behind a bush to take a leak, not that anyone was around to see me, and my act of discretion cost me plenty, because I got poison oak in a serious way and it seemed to predominate sensitive areas of my body.  Putting green stuff on was not an option this time; I had to figure out what to do.  I didn’t go to the store to get anything, because I assumed that whatever they might have there would undoubtedly cost money, and I didn’t have any of that.  I lived under a roof due only to the good graces of Leonard Orr, and my willingness to wash dishes every single day.

When I got to Ellen’s house it was around midnight.  I had not written or called to announce my imminent arrival.  I knocked on the door, and after a little hesitation from the nearly dark house, I heard someone coming.  The front door opened and I saw Ellen’s face through the screen.  She looked at me and her mouth popped open.  Her eyes sparkled and twinkled as always.  She looked at me and said, “Oh my God!”  I looked right into her sparkling eyes and said, “Oh my Goddess!”

She opened the door and let me in.  I had a fine time hanging out with my brothers and sisters for the next several days while I developed a terrible case of poison oak and caught the flu.  I ended up spending nearly two weeks there in a separate building where I wouldn’t infect anybody.  During this time I learned what I had to do with poison oak, and when I got back to the Globe Hotel I continued this practice, and I still do to this day; it is my personal remedy for poison oak itching.  What you do is, you never scratch with your fingernails, but every morning and maybe once or twice more through the day, if necessary, you get in the shower and turn it on full blast, good and hot, and if you have to you get a shower head on a rope, and you direct the spray right at the itchy spot.  It will feel better than sex, and it will scratch the itch without abrading the skin.  When you’ve got all the good spots you turn up the heat and do everything again, turn it up again and do it again.  Each time you turn up the heat it will feel better, like you were really all-out ripping your festering wounds open with your fingernails, but without the painful itching and scratching that an attack of the fingernails would cause.  When the water is too hot, get out.  Do not scratch your skin with your fingers or your towel.  This lasts 24 hours for me; I only have to do it once a day, but then I don’t get large outbreaks anymore because I also learned how to make poison oak go away immediately besides not ever scratching it, and that is, as soon as you get one itchy bump that you can tell is poison oak by the feet of the itch, you break it open with your fingernail and put calamine lotion on it to dry it out, then you wash your hands.  That’s all you have to do.  Although Judas is immune to poison oak, he suggests that a sufferer should do the same thing I do, but with sandpaper and gasoline.  I’ve never tried his method, since my remedies work if you don’t scratch the affected areas; if you find it impossible to not scratch the itch, or if you’re more sensitive to the toxin than me, my remedies could be dangerous for you to try.

So here I am living in an empty hotel that also happens to be a historical landmark, and I have nothing to do but wash dishes, breathe, and stand in a hot shower and let hot water dump all over my body which itches completely from head to toe.  All this was quite pleasurable, but I sensed that there was more.  I sensed that I was not making enough money to live on; in fact, I sensed that I was making no money whatsoever.  And even worse, when I had been a naive 21-year old pretending to be a freshman in college, a dorm-mate, the son of the president of Bangladesh, who happened to be going to school there, had informed me that the local stereo shop had a loan officer camped out in their store passing out loans for stereos to just about anyone who wanted one, so I hurried on over and picked up the best stereo I could imagine owning and moved out of the dorm, into Joybroth’s house, so I could listen to it.  This was undoubtedly about a week after coming off my big-deal four months of abstinence from marijuana.  Now here I was feeling guilty a few years later, ready to go get a job and pay off that loan company, which had probably been bankrupted by my infidelity long ago, but I would find them, by Golly, and force them to take my money.  I announced my decision to the clan, and none were surprised since Leonard had just moved onto the property for the first time in the years that he’d owned it, and those of us who were now expected to work even more for nothing than we had been expected to do for nothing when he hadn’t been there, were headed for the towns and cities of America where people could expect to be paid for their work.

You see, Leonard made his living by hanging out with millionaires, not by involving himself with losers who could not take the initiative to have a successful relationship with him.  He was the master of the cold shoulder, the empty stare, and the ignored appointment.  I was his opposite.  Merely to stand in his presence froze every word I knew in a place within my brain where I could not reach them.  He was just a little guy with real short hair and no expression in his voice or face.  He could say the most outrageous things in a monotone, and you could hear a pin drop while he mumbled his pronouncements, his latest rules, and while he conducted musical chairs with the lives of people who needed a place to live.

 

Word is just in that Donovan West, the guru shitkicker who died in Judas’s arms back at Rivendell, has finally adjusted to being in heaven—meaning that since he got kicked out of the last bar in heaven he’s gotten bored with his post-Earthbound freedom and has gone in search of some new kind of trouble to get into—and here I was at that exact same time running around down on the Planet, idolizing him because he’s the exact opposite of my Daddy Whose Fault It All Was.  I named him Spunko Deddles in my novel, It Fell from Heaven.  I drew pictures of him and generally made him my role model.  Judas told me one time he thought I shouldn’t have role models.  Then he thought for a second and changed his mind.  One day I dreamed that I tried to telephone Donovan West up in heaven and boy was I shocked and thrilled when he actually picked up the phone.  But he spoke with a soft weariness, as if the phone had woken him from an unfinished nap: I don’t want to talk with you right now, son.  Another time I dreamed he and I were in the shallow water near the beach and he was all lit up with joy and glowingly healthy, grinning, tossing me up in the air and catching me.  I used  to have a whole category of people I used to seek out and study, based on him as the mold: people who said what was on their mind and always had something to say, tending to lecture and inform and tell you everything you ever didn’t want to know about their little ways of thinking or of doing things.  My yearning to be like Donovan came complete with elaborate fantasies in which an inner transformational force I call the Miruvorning Vroombelleration causes a quantum leap in the system that guides me through the parallel universes, and all of the sudden all the buttons pop off my shirt like the Hulk, and I look like Donovan did in the pictures I saw of him before he got sick.

Anyway, the result of my wanting to be just like him was like bees to honey: when Donovan West woke up with a hellish hangover out back of the last bar in heaven and wandered off to look for something exciting to do, he naturally homed right in on the psychic scent of my post-adolescent hero worship of my mental image of him, by finding himself in the general vicinity of those personal shacks we all have up there in heaven, wherein our departed loved ones may congregate to laugh at our antics as they watch us fumble our way through to the finish line.  The reasons for hanging out in the shacks range from entertainment, such as placing bets on what the Earthbound subject will do next, to attempting to influence action with one’s thoughts, to actually appearing to the person as a ghost, angel, fairy, alien, or spirit guide, in an attempt to frighten or otherwise shock the person out of the rote human stupor.  The only rule is that once a dead spirit sends a part of himself into one of those shacks to “help out down below,” that aspect of the spirit is not accessible outside of the shack till the Earthbound subject dies or completes his Task, whichever comes first.  Fortunately the spirit is not bound by time, so what I mean by a part of himself is that he can be in more than one place at a time depending on his abilities, and what I mean by that is that if he doesn’t realize once he’s dead that he is no longer bound by physical laws such as time and space, then he deserves to rot in front of a TV for 40 or 50 Earth years waiting for his friend to “die.”

Donovan West finds himself at a crossroads, where a sign pointing to the right reads “Eternal Bliss,” whilst the sign pointing to the left reads “More Trouble.”  He immediately takes a left under a broken-down neon archway that once glowed with the words No Trespassing.  Once inside the walled-in city of alleyways lined with shacks and huts and little cottages and ramshackle outhouses and outbuildings of every description and from every culture on Earth and from every period of time in history, Donovan can’t help but wonder what kind of serious trouble he could get in now that he is dead.  He thinks it might be some sort of meddling in somebody else’s affairs, and next thing you know he’s standing in front of the little cabin, my funky miner’s shack in the corner of Gloryland, reading a note on the door and laughing his ass off.  The note says simply, “ I was your last hope, and now your are mine.”  He tries the doorknob, and finding it locked, he kicks the door down and enters the building.  “Where’s the hostage?” he cries.

Grandpa Zdaemon, who jumped behind the sofa when the front door came flying his direction, peeks up and says, Excuse me?

Batanwa Jim hollers around a mouth full of popcorn, He said, Where’s the hostage?

Grandpa points at the screen on the wall.  Donovan walks up to the big picture window muttering something like, Don’t that beat the shit out of me, and stands directly in front of the screen and stares as my antics are displayed for all to see; all except Grandma Wrathburn, who is still howling in the basement.  Hey, get out of the way, Old-timer, hollers Batanwa Jim from the back row of chairs.  Donovan turns around slowly: Oh my, sew my soul to the ceiling, I’m standing in someone’s way!

He might do something, Batanwa Jim explains.  “He hasn’t done anything in a month except to breathe.”  Donovan saunters up to Batanwa Jim, who has his feet propped up on the seat in front of him.

Who’s that little squirt shivering behind the sofa?  And for that matter, who the fuck are you? and he slaps Batanwa Jim on the shoulder so hard that Batanwa Jim falls out of his chair and lands on his head and starts singing, Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens, Heaven . . .

Everyone eventually introduces themselves all around, and Grandpa Zdaemon comes out from behind the sofa.  Batanwa Jim and Donovan West sit down in front of the screen and make wagers, as cars fly past me—about once every fifteen minutes, a car flies by—where I walk next to a two-lane highway in the mountains of Northern California, trying to hitchhike to Portland from Campbell Hot Springs.  I walk every bit of the 20-mile length of Lake Almanor with my duffel bag hanging from one arm and my guitar hanging from the other.  I am in an altered state of consciousness provoked by the unceasing effort, which to me is more interesting, because of its piercing intensity, than the experience of standing by the side of the road with my thumb out when there are only fours car going by per hour.  Finally it starts to rain, and Donovan bets that I will soon get a ride, whereas Batanwa Jim and Grandpa Zdaemon continue to bet against me.  Sure enough, someone plucks me out of the clean scrubbed air as soon as the rain stops and takes me to my next frustration zone, ever closer to my newest life in Portland.  (Let it be recorded that nobody picks up hitchhikers in the rain.)  While Donovan feels that I will get a job and pay off my stereo, the others are convinced that I will never amount to anything.  Donovan becomes annoyed with their attitude, and punishes them by entertaining them with random portions of his life story.

Actually, on the last bet, Grandpa Zdaemon chooses not to participate; he silently goes about re-hanging the front door on the little miner’s shack while Batanwa Jim and Donovan laugh and carry on and insult each other.

 

The first night I slept in Portland, Mt. Saint Helens suddenly became much shorter and the next day everything in Portland was covered half an inch deep in volcanic ash.  I attended the Rose parade downtown, since Portland is the “Rose City” and the parade was a big event.  The only thing I remember about the parade is the gray ash in the streets, and the police harassing a street vendor who had no license.

I had permission to stay with my Daddy and Marleen for a few days while I looked for work.  My Daddy’s every word betrayed his lack of confidence that I would actually go out and find a job and a place to live before demolishing his new life.  Just to piss him off on my first day in town I went to the Employment Office, but I found absolutely nothing of interest, and about the time I headed for the door one job listing that I’d read three times kept popping into my mind, and I realized I’d purposely avoided the listing not because the job didn’t sound interesting, but because I was afraid I’d get the job if I asked for it.  Finally I forced myself to go in and get a referral to the job, and I got back on the bus and went home and told my Daddy that I was going to be a book mender for the public library.  He thought it might have been a good idea if I would have applied for more than just one job, so I informed him that it was the only job I needed to apply for because there was not any possible way anyone else was going to get it, since I had taught myself how to bind books at the age of 11, and I had a feeling that the job had been placed there specifically for me.

I was interviewed by my boss-to-be, a white-haired 62-year-old trade bookbinder from the Old School Of Productivity, who relentlessly verbalized in his obsession that work and other good old-fashioned American ideals, such as fearing other forms of government, were of utmost importance in defining character.  While we sat in his glass office in a library facility on the other side of town, I watched the other workers, two women about my age, and another woman who was somewhat older.  There was a young woman with long, wavy golden hair and dark eyebrows was dressed in T-shirt and blue jeans and no makeup, and when she looked through the glass straight into my eyeballs and smiled—not politely or warmly, but out of curiosity—I knew that this Earthy beauty would be my next girlfriend, and as it turned out, the job was mine and so was Rose Stranghardt.

It started out as a stormy friendship at work, because Rose Stranghardt liked to bait me into a battle of words to help pass the time while we sat at our desks shoving glue down the spines of books all day as fast as we could—and sitting on a hard wooden chair all day was for me nothing but an invitation to a bout with excruciating sciatic pain—but I had a fear of arguing that grew out of the suspicion that if I ever got caught doing it I could be stripped naked and whipped publicly with a wire hanger.  Therefore I would eventually get pissed at Rose Stranghardt for egging me on and trying to get a rise out of me.  She says that one day I actually called her an asshole.

Once we got that part of the friendship over with, I started telling her more about myself so she would know how smart and desirable I was, although I didn’t know for sure why I bothered.  She talked a lot about her artist boyfriend Al Margin, who she said she was addicted to—her boddhisattva, she claimed, a realized being who only comes to Earth to help his inferiors—and about her father who she hated, as well as her strict Catholic upbringing at the dairy farm on the coast, which she blamed for all her emotional hang-ups.  Her mother was some sort of non-functional, and her father was the sort of Catholic disciplinarianist who would shove food down his child’s throat to make her eat it, or cut all her hair off if she sassed him.  Because of her twisted childhood, she was now an artist, a rebel.  She lived in a tiny moldy house with Al Margin where she spent her spare time pouring her “puddles,” which were beautiful spillings of multiple colors of immiscible paints onto large pieces of heavy paper, and cutting them out and arranging them on a wall painted black for background.

My Scorpio friend Boss had introduced me to the music of Devo when we smoked pot together in his bank president Daddy’s basement while his Daddy kept coming up and down the stairs to report game scores to him, with nary a comment on the foul-smelling weed that no teenager’s parents could hope to overlook.  Prunesquallor had introduced me to the Talking Heads.  Rose Stranghardt conveyed to me that her boyfriend Al Margin was seriously attached to these two bands, and she invited me to attend a Devo concert with the two of them.  For weeks we talked about how excited we were that the de-evolutionary spudboys were coming to town, and between that and the strike the library workers were planning, Rose Stranghardt and I were starting to get cozy and friendly in our conversation.

Finally there we were, standing in line outside the big theater where the “Are We Not Men” spudboys would be performing in just a few minutes.  Rose Stranghardt was sitting on the sidewalk reading The Second Ring of Power by Carlos Castaneda and smoking clove cigarettes, and Al Margin and I were talking about our drug experiences.  Rose Stranghardt was a year younger than me and Al Margin was about three years younger than me, but in this group the youngest was instantly recognizable as the leader.  He was wiry and athletic-looking, with curly red hair, sizzling with an inner storehouse of unexpendable energy and superior intellect betrayed by the trace of an omniscient smirk; his body language and tendency to remove his shirt at any given moment gave away a readiness to jump in, participate, excel—as in blow everybody out of the water—and then dissolve like a specter into the twilight before anybody could ask his name; a grown-up Bart Simpson endowed with the wisdom of vast experience and the ability to use words in many ways without having to sit there and think about what he wanted to say.  Not a writer; he could actually talk.  His gaze conveyed total and perfect comprehension of any situation in its entirety; as a Leo with Scorpio Rising he had no need to hear the details, didn’t have the time and couldn’t concentrate that long anyway, as he could apprehend all the information he needed at a glance.  No Scorpio I ever got to know has ever been found to be lacking in this characteristic.

During the Devo concert my new friend Al Margin pulled out a little marijuana pipe and after just a couple puffs I was lost in fantasyland, since I hadn’t smoked in months.  I became convinced that Devo was the next Beatles, the next social revolution through music.  I went home and proceeded to start jonesing for some acid, a steady source of pot, anything.  By now I was in my own apartment, since my Daddy had told me he had a life insurance savings account in my name that I could cash in to get an apartment if I wanted to since it was “mine.”  In other words, he needed me out of his wife’s house.  So here I was in my studio apartment a few days after the concert, on the second floor of a big old brick apartment building, contemplating and once again talking myself into the desirability of all-out war on whatever is the glue that holds my teeny-tiny little psyche together, by means of mass quantities of LSD which I could obtain somehow, now that I had a job and could pay for it anytime I was able to come up with a connection.  I was seriously depressed because I was bored and lonely and starting to drink beer for company, which made me feel scared and guilty.  I mean I was up to a quart of beer each night, for christsakes, and it was really bothering me. I hated being bottled up in this tiny little apartment full of light and noise from the street.  I was no longer impressed with my accomplishment as a creative intellectual; all I did to play that part was to spend all my spare change at the fine arts movie house down the street, flattering myself that every movie I saw was great, or else why would the likes of me be sitting there watching it?  But the appeal was wearing off and I always came home alone to those infernal cigarettes which sapped my strength and took the edge off my enthusiasm.

So there I was fuming in bed in my apartment because I couldn’t sleep, shortly after I had forced the penny-pinching landlord to fumigate the building by spending literally all of my rent money on three cases of bug foggers and then hauling the cases of foggers to the apartment manager’s door in my arms, instead of a rent check.  The bug people were called out the very next day and I had to carry the foggers a mile back to the store for a refund, vindicated but working hard for it.  The glow of my victory over the evil landlord and his evil cockroaches had worn off and life was boring again.  It was extremely boring.  In fact it was so boring that it had to be a plot.  That’s it, the whole world is stupid and hateful and nobody appreciates me.  This is not the place for me and I am going to go where it feels good all the time.  I am going to find me some acid, and this time I am going to go all the way.  I eventually drifted off to sleep in one of the worst depressions of recent years.

About 5 a.m. I woke up because I thought a mouse was chewing on my ear.  It turned out to be a strange sound accompanied by an even stranger smell, and before you know it I finally figured out that there were people running in the hall, someone was banging on my door, the building was full of smoke, the fire alarm was blaring right outside my door, and it was necessary that I motivate myself without delay.  I jumped out of bed and literally ran in circles in the dark trying to get my pants on, and trying to figure out what to take.  I finally settled on my money and my cigarettes, and headed out the door and down the stairs and outside and across the street, where I watched in complete hysterical enjoyment as my whole side of the building burnt to a crisp except for my apartment which never saw a lick of flame.  In fact, the firemen used my window to go in and out because it was the only safe way in.  Although the floors did not burn out, all the front apartments burned except mine.

The Red Cross brought us Egg McMuffins and a city bus to lounge around in while we were kept out of the building.  Hours passed and finally we were allowed to go back in, but just to get our stuff, since the front side of the building had to be rebuilt before anyone could live in it.  The Red Cross would put us in hotels that night and give us money to get new apartments.  So after a half night’s sleep in a swanky hotel downtown, I was back in the apartment working on my second quart of beer, packing what few possessions I had, and having the time of my life.  The fire had washed my sins away, had absolved me, had entertained me and added drama to my life.  I was also a bit goofy from lack of sleep.  The beer high was perfect, and I had to sit down because my head was buzzing.  I was gazing outside at a wisp of steam coming out of the window of the apartment next to mine, when I realized that there should be no steam or anything that looked like steam coming out of an unoccupied apartment that was supposedly not on fire.  I also realized that the buzzing in my head was only in my head because it was coming in through my ears; it was the smoke detector in the apartment next door.  The landlord had paid several men to quickly install smoke detectors in every apartment between the time the firemen said we could go back in and the time that the insurance inspectors got there.  I ran out into the hall and opened the door into the apartment next to mine, and sure enough, the couch in the middle of the room was ablaze.

I pulled the fire alarm out in the hall and called 911 from my apartment.  This time I took my money, my cigarettes, and my guitar, and calmly left the building while the few others who were in it ran out the door past me.  Once again we stood across the street while the whole entire front side of the building burned, except that my apartment was neither burned nor singed.

I mention this strange ominous double coincidence of inexplicable good luck because for me it marked the last time I ever considered destroying my mind with drugs.  From that point forward, it never occurred to me to escape reality by chemically and irreversibly shattering my ability to perceive it the way I had been taught.  Ironically, the world of psychedelics opened up to me because pleasure became simpler when it was no longer associated with suicide, and because Al Margin turned out to be a good source for frequent visits to Dr. Feelgood.

The first time I was invited to Al Margin and Rose’s house, Al Margin smoked a bowl of hashish with me and then disappeared around the corner to a neighbor lady’s house for a haircut, and Rose Stranghardt proceeded to inform me that he was actually getting laid, with Rose’s permission but not her happy blessing.  I told Rose Stranghardt the whole entire story of my relationship with Leanne, and she hung on my every word.  When I was finally ready to go home, she followed me outside and hugged me under the stars, pushing her chest against me and generally making me wonder why I was leaving, except for the fact that I suspected that Al Margin should not come home and find me still there gazing into his girlfriend’s eyes.  It was just an intuitive sense.

It wasn’t long before Rose Stranghardt forced me to become intimately involved with her on all levels, and after Al Margin called me a baby to establish the hierarchy in our little group, he was OK with it and we became a trio.  Al Margin slept with Rose Stranghardt when the two of them were getting along, and I slept with her when they weren’t.  She spent many evenings and nights with me at my apartment, and she loved the great outdoors.  Al Margin augmented my diet with LSD and magic mushrooms regularly—not to mention food.

When my 90-day evaluation came around at work, my boss wanted to know why I wasn’t mending more books than Rose Stranghardt and Lydia, I reminded him that he had me helping him with binding projects besides the stuff Rose Stranghardt and Lydia and I were doing all the time, but still he insisted that—based on his “Average Boy” Principle—that the Average Boy will out-produce the Average Girl in a job of this sort.  Those were his actual words.  So I reminded him that Rose Stranghardt and Lydia had trained me, and had more experience than I, but he went on to inform me that there are ways to “work smarter” which the Average Boy is more apt to discover than the Average Girl.  I thanked him for his time and that night I scoured downtown Portland for some pot to spend my last $15 on, and then sat in front of my big gas heater in my new basement apartment for the next week smoking pot and working up a serviceable case of mania-in-reserve for the day I would quit my job.

I found myself making loud remarks about Average Boys and Average Girls while sitting at my desk at work shoving glue down the spines of books—now as slowly as I could.

During this waning era of my five-month stint as a book mender, the assistant bookbinder Maria, whose subservient and bosswardly sympathetic personality enabled her to work in close proximity with our supervisor, informed me that she had been listening to all my talk of wanting to build a car to run on air, and after due consideration and her husband’s permission, she thought she should mention that her husband—George Heaton—was an experienced builder of air powered cars.  She invited Rose Stranghardt and I over to their house for her famous spaghetti dinner on Halloween, complete with her special sauce which she always simmered for three days, and she promised that her husband would be willing to impart some of his knowledge to me.

When the fateful day of Halloween 1980 finally arrived, I made a big ugly mask out of bread dough and we all went to Lydia’s Halloween party where I wandered around with a loaf of bread on my face announcing to everyone individually upon multiple occasions, “I’m just the Average Boy!” in a proud voice.  Soon we had to leave for Maria’s dinner, which was OK with me since for some reason no one at the party would speak to me and I was beginning to feel self-conscious.

At Maria’s house I left my mask in the car, though I still wore my lawn-green short-sleeved jumpsuit with the embroidered Chinese dragon on the back and my long-sleeved shirt under it with the red and blue and white stripes.  I dropped the stupid jerk act in hopes that George would be willing to speak to me.  Maria had warned me against pushing for information before George was ready to share it, and promised me I would not be disappointed if I waited patiently for him to start talking.

Finally, sometime after dinner, George Heaton took me into his study and started talking.  He told me that back around 1949 he and a friend had built several cars and a motorcycle that ran on compressed air.  He said they’d converted the existing gas engines to run on air.

The most remarkable thing he revealed to me was that these cars kept their own tanks full—in his words, “They acted like perpetual motion machines, even though they were not.”  He explained that there is a way to put air into a tank that is less energy-intensive than other ways, making it possible to put low pressure air into a high pressure tank.  He was hopelessly vague as to the details, claiming loss of memory, and both he and Maria avoided further discussion of his experiences.

This conversation, taking place a year into my air car research, switched me over from suction to compressed air, and began the search for the Magic Valve: the kind of technology that would allow you—for example—to fill a tire by puffing through a plastic straw into a special filling valve.

Shortly after this I failed to show up at work because I was busy at home writing a ten page letter about the wrongness of my supervisor to expect more from me because of my gender.  Rose Stranghardt was pissed at me for a couple days, and Maria never spoke to me again because of her bossward loyalty.  But I had a lot more time to take acid with Al Margin, and I soon found myself writing songs constantly.  Many songs from my Lost Wave Music portfolio sprang from this lycergicized time zone.  Songs like “Food for Assassins,” which I excerpt forthwith:

 

Sometime after the first explosion,

having somehow survived its disastrous effects,

I look up, wipe the ashes off my face;

I’m not yet ready for immediate extinction,

so I might as well take out time

while I still have time to spend,

and smoke another cigarette—achieve masturbation!

Watch another TV show—achieve masturbation!

Make sure my nose is clean—achieve masturbation!

Put a tiger in my tank—achieve masturbation!

There went another one—achieving masturbation,

etc.

 

 

Another fine example of Lost Wave Music, in its entirety:

 

Broken Wind

 

What’s that?  What’s that?  What’s that?  What’s that? 

What’s what?  What’s what?  What’s what?  What’s what? 

That?  Oh that?  Oh that?  Oh that?

That’s air!  That’s air!  That’s air!  That’s air!

Is it real?  Is it real?  Is it real?  Is it real?

Does it feel?  Does it feel?  Does it feel?  Does it feel?

What does it feel?  What does it feel?  What does it feel?  What does it feel? 

Whatchacall!  Whatchacall!  Whatchacall!  Whatchacall!

Can you touch it, can you stroke it, can you fear it, can you know it,

or are you just another American consumer on stampede?

Atmosphere, that’s what I fear, it’s a suicide dance.

 

Whatcha gonna do when the air comes down,

up to your knees with your head in the ground,

buried in the sand with your legs floppin’ ‘round,

whatcha gonna do when the air comes down?

You can think about it, read about it,

dream about it, sneeze about it,

spew it, spout it, mouth it, laugh it right outta the picture,

but you just can’t make it go away!

Atmosphere, that’s what I fear, it’s a suicide dance.

 

It’s a dance, it’s a dance, it’s a suicide dance.

We guzzle on and on and on and on our funeral path.

How do ya know, how do ya tell,

how do ya know you’re not in hell,

how do ya smell the roses on the way?

Atmosphere, that’s what I fear, it’s a suicide dance.

 

Whatcha gonna do with the poison that you’ve pumped?

There’s nothing pending but the ending;

it’s a plan in which you’re stuck.

You’ll never break this commitment,

not with your kind of luck.

Whatcha gonna do when you’ve already jumped?

So get your gas mask!

Get your seeing eye dog!

This is serious!

Don’t send your kids out there!

We’ll be buying breathing air

from the boys that brought us smog;

there’s got to be a change of personnel!

Atmosphere, that’s what I fear, it’s a suicide dance.

 

 

And there’s always that endearing favorite, “Secure Mellow Rapture,” from which I quote:

 

Head on my shoulders is whispering in my ear:

“You know we get more sophisticated every year;

it’s too dang bad we don’t get any less stupider.”

 . . . so I gotta getta move on, or I’ll be late to work—

I am a dime store manager!

It’s hard to make a living in the land of the berserk,

but you gotta look smart while the Planet’s still turning.

etc.

 

All were performed in the most outrageous variety of freak-show National Enquirer vocal caricatures sure to stop any conversation and even drive an occasional dignity from the room.

Well, out of a job and full of hallucinogens, I had to have something to do.

It was the voices that came out of me that taught me to sing.  No more self-conscious efforts to push my voice out to sound like Cat Stevens or Hoyt Axton; these new songs came with their own voices, which I heard inside the song, obeyed and conveyed: the screeching, whining, haranguing, miserable, self-pitying, knee-jerk, and downright wrong tones of the human voices that had become lodged in my head during my short life, without which I would have no neurosis, no personality and no songs.

Meanwhile I somehow managed to make ends meet while working a little for two piano stores, one of which got rid of me by sweet-talking me into giving my in-store tuning job to a blind guy and transferring me to workshop in another town so I’d have to live in a seedy hotel with nothing to do five nights a week, only to return to my city home on weekends with no money left to spend.  The other store fired me for charging them to double-tune a piano that had somehow gotten to the customer’s living room without ever having been tuned once.  When I showed up at the store to find out why I wasn’t being paid, the manager told me to leave before he and his buddy beat the shit out of me.  It was sort of like the piano Mafia, and both guys looked the part.

It was actually on the very day of my initial firing from this job that my old buddy Judas showed up at my house in Portland, headed back to Campbell Hot Springs after several months in Hawaii where he’d sharpened up his carpentry skills building outhouses.  I talked him into looking for a job in Portland, since I had no way to pay rent, but he made me accompany him on his job search, implying that he would not do it if I didn’t more or less make him.  He had no interest in living in a city.  He hung out with Al Margin and Rose Stranghardt and me, we all took acid together at the beach, I played my songs and even had a religious experience wherein I caught the wave of a thing called funny, and rode it for hours.  I knew timing, I had everyone in the palm of my hand.  I made it all up as I went along, and I knew when to give up the stage so as to not wear out my audience, then deliver more sneak attack humor awhile later when everyone wanted it.  I demonstrated how to make shorts quickly, how to wear them, even into battle; I did cartwheels in the sand as my Kaptain Klutz persona. The laughter of others bubbled in my veins and whether anything I did was really funny or not, I couldn’t help but notice that everyone liked it, and I obviously needed the attention.

Once again, psychedelics were helping me attempt to re-formulate the contents of my empty shell.  I had spent weeks or more filling huge pieces of paper with patterns of numbers, in a research project hoping to prove my new system of numerology based on the relative frequency of occurrence of the sounds of the English language.  I eventually proved to myself that all systems of numerology work about the same.  I was ready to educate the world about the sorcerers’ realm that I was hoping to melt into, by means of a mimeograph machine I had bought with grocery money.  If not for the hallucinogens and Al Margin’s and Judas’s and Rose’s knack for supplying food, I would have gotten nervous and gotten a job, but as it turned out, because of the bad taste Judas and I both had in our mouths after the afternoon-long job hunt, we found it necessary to close down shop in Portland and head back to Campbell Hot Springs.

One really bad thing happened while I was trying to decide whether or not to move, that has always haunted me.  I had taken two hits of good acid and was sitting on the floor with Rose Stranghardt at her moldy little house.  She was going on with her usual negative rap about whether or not it would be right for her to bring children into this world where nuclear war was always right around the next bend.  It never took but one beer to convince her that the Russians were coming, and it was a downhill conversation after that, complete with reproachments from Al Margin about her “indulging.”  She’d driven Al Margin away this time, and now here I was on acid trying to take his place.  The moral of the story is that I fell into what you might call an exceedingly arrogant headspace, from which I proceeded to tongue-lash my innocent and troubled friend, because I was sick of her depression, which was always brought on by the smallest quantity of alcohol.  I informed my beautiful Rose Stranghardt that I would not listen to her whining as her partner from now on, because we were through.  Later on she claimed it had just been a fling anyway, not an easy thing for me to hear since the day after I discarded her I wanted her back.

But by far one of the worst things I have ever done was that night when I condescended to throw Rose Stranghardt in the trash because she was ruining my acid trip.  I have been haunted by guilt and strange dreams of longing for her company ever since.  I still hear the self-righteous contempt in my voice.  I had spent many weeks re-forming the contents of my empty shell through the use of hallucinogens, and it all comes to this:  I get a big fat head about my assumed level of psychedelic advancement and do something ugly and stupid, laughing in the face of a goddess.  Rose Stranghardt was too good to lose.

One day early in our relationship we were walking downtown on a wide sidewalk packed with people who all had one thing in common: they were all completely ignorant of air cars and the magic that compressed air could do for our society and our home Planet.  Then I noticed a long, thin, withered hand extended into the crowd of passing bodies.  I stopped at a bench where an old man stood, long white hair and beard, long cloak of many colors, and he stared blindly into the crowd.  He just kept his long arm outstretched and let the passersby pass on by, all the while sing-songing, “I’m an old blind man and I can’t see you . . . Take a flyer, either one . . . please take one, just take one . . . I’m an old blind man . . . ”  In his outstretched hand he held two little pieces of paper, each about the size of a playing card.  At first I passed on by, but something about the man’s presence made me go back and get a flyer from him.  I caught back up with Rose Stranghardt and started to inspect the poor-quality shrunken-down multi-generation photocopy of some sort of hand-drawn political poster.  Apparently this guy Bill Sherwood considered himself some sort of patriot or prophet or something and had a little to say—in arcane slogans that filled the page incomprehensibly—about a lot of things.  Including compressed air.  Something about “Compressed air is God’s gift to humanity.”

Why I failed to transport myself immediately to the address on Bill Sherwood’s flyer, I will leave to the historical or even archaeological psychologists of the future, for I am certain that no one of my time will want to know how someone so obsessed with air cars could fail to follow a lead only because there would be human contact involved.  Years later I finally drove to that address, and it was a vacant lot in an upper-middle-class neighborhood.  Bill Sherwood must have moved on.

This incident lit a fire under me, so I obtained an old suction motor from a vacuum cleaner, built a little wooden chassis for it and for an air powered motor that came out of a player piano, found some little rubber tires at the junk store, some hoses, and had everything I needed except axles, and it was 3 p.m. on Sunday and the only hardware store within range was set to close in less than an hour.  I declared my absolutely irrepressible intention to finish this air car on this very day, and quickly ascertained from the bus schedule that my only possible chance for getting to the hardware store in time would be to sprint at least half a mile to intercept the only bus going that way late on Sunday afternoon.

I bolted out the door with my wallet and my little rubber wheels, and Rose Stranghardt raced after me.  After blocks of all-out sprinting, she started to lag behind and wanted to know how far we had to run.  I told her we were only halfway there and we couldn’t slow down or we’d never catch the bus.  Somehow we managed to catch the bus, and later that evening I plugged my first air car into the wall and it darted across the floor and smacked into the other wall across the room.  It had lots of extra power for hauling a load.

Rose Stranghardt wasn’t the sit-at-home type; she liked to go places, and if not for my own shortsightedness she might have gone places with me.

But alas, that were not meant to be, for, likely as not, I ended up back at Campbell Hot Springs with Judas where we reconnected with Judas’s old friends—for he had spent much longer living there that I—Nick the Unpredictable, Bob the Jaw, and the Zach Attack.

Leonard was not there when we arrived and it turned out Judas’s friend Cam was squatting in Cabin Two, so we squatted there with her and with whoever else showed up needing un-negotiated housing.  We immediately got to work on the plumbing to the waterless lodge, digging up ancient asphalt water pipes all the way to the spring at the top end of the meadow, and repairing all the leaky joints with inner tube rubber and bailing wire.

This took several weeks, which is almost a lifetime when you’re 24, and as fate would have it, Judas eventually ended up moving to Grass Valley and living with a friend of Yvonne, the general manager of Campbells.  We were only three-quarters of the way done with the water supply pipe to the main lodge when he split for Grass Valley, where Yvonne also owned property.  Now I was out there digging up water pipes in the heat all alone, and because the nature of the work required me to squat on my haunches while trying to perform the most intricate maneuvers with inner tubes and bailing wire, I soon developed Severe Pain in my butt-most regions where I was often to experience pain off and on over the years.  Sciatica is the sort of pain where you’re OK unless you try to move.  So I was forced to go to the meeting and enlist helpers the way Judas would have done, and before long the project was done, the lodge had a drinking water supply for the first time in months, and the people who finished the job were stars for the moment.

Before Judas left, Maureen and Debo visited from post-Rivendell Santa Cruz, and we had a big hoe-down in the cabin now known as the Squatters’ Cabin, complete with old Rivvies Maureen and Debo, and several other Campbells residents including 60-year old gray-haired Leah Dell, who along with her husband and her son, helped Yvonne run Campbells between their rodeo performances.  Now of course everybody liked my music, ageless and timeless that it is, and out of the blue Leah Dell had pushed me down the very moment the guitar was out of my hands, and sat her besotted self down directly upon none other than me, whereupon this normally sedate psychologist/rebirther/rodeo mom proceeded to bounce up and down on me where I lay helpless with my guitar by my side, and she bounced her fully clothed private parts against my fully clothed private parts for a few goofy seconds that seemed like a long time to me, hollering yippee and hollering nice things about me while everybody laughed and acted stupid and had a good time.

Leah Dell obviously liked my music, as well as Maureen and Debo and the others, although no one else bounced on me.

By now Leonard had shown up back at Campbells, which meant that of course I would have to negotiate for my shelter.  My food was covered because Judas and I had forked over our whole supply of food stamps to Barbara in the kitchen, as soon as we arrived, and I continued to wash every dish on the property on a daily basis.

Leonard yanked the Squatters’ Cabin concept the very first thing, and put me in charge of cleaning Cabin Six so I could live in it briefly while getting my life together to pay rent.  Sunny was back too, and she and I got hooked into trying to help Leonard get his mailing lists and newsletters together.  When Leonard found out I could be relied on to complete a serious project using a photocopy machine, he sent Sunny and I to Reno to try out some new photocopy machines at the Xerox dealership.  Apparently a photocopy machine salesgirl had had the ugly misfortune of picking Leonard as a potential customer, and she’d even implied to Leonard that maybe she’d be able to arrange things so just maybe he could drop by sometime to test the machines by making some copies of his stuff, in order to decide which photocopy machine to buy.  Of course Leonard had no intention of buying anything, so he sent me and Sunny to collect on the part of the bargain that was worth something to him, which he imagined to be 100 copies of a 100-page book that he had pasted together.

The poor girl was kept busy for a few hours undoing paper jams, trying to keep us from putting every machine in the showroom out of commission, and most of my time was spent trying to figure out how to keep Sunny occupied without letting her break any more machines that we’d already broken.  Finally the gods smiled on me and the poor salesgirl informed us that her boss was planning to fire her if we didn’t leave immediately, and I was only too happy to get out of her way, embarrassed as I was to be stuck playing out Leonard’s scam for him.  Forty-five paper jams and four or five downed machines had only managed to produce about a dozen incomplete copies of Leonard’s latest masturpiece, Physical Immortality.

At our next big meeting Leonard went around the room confronting everybody who had been working for him, paying everybody part of what he owed them for their work and then demanding most of it back to pay their rent.  When it came my turn, I was unpayable for some reason, and rather than argue with Leonard, I decided to start thinking about my next home, wherever that might be.

Sunny’s thought on the matter was that I should try again to get put on disability, and she was convinced that all I needed to do was to get arrested for a minor disturbance in public, then get transferred to the nuthouse from jail, and I would have it made for the rest of my life.  Since she had been getting a disability check her whole adult life, I figured she must know what she’s talking about, and besides that, she was in her 30s for christsake, and she was cosmopolitan for crying out loud, so I filed her advice in my high priority box and waited for an opportunity to get to a place where I would feel safe acting up in public.

Before Judas left I performed my songs at a talent show with two of the Campbells residents backing me up on vocals and Judas banging on a coffee can with a wooden spoon.  I wore only my over-sized Hawaiian swimming trunks and a headband with wings on the sides, and my hair was standing on end, plus I put in a surprise entry.  While Judas, Patti, and Mary were in the bathroom waiting to come out after we were announced—Luther Limberluck and the Last Stand Band—I was hiding in the kitchen doing extreme breathing to overcome my body’s natural desire to freeze up.  I made them wait a few seconds and then came roaring out of the kitchen with my guitar hanging around my neck and ran barefoot up through the audience from behind.  The Last Stand Band came out of the bathroom and joined me on stage where we proceeded to bang out a hypermanic rendition of three or four selections of Lost Wave Music.  That one girl Kari sure looked good out in the audience.  Afterwards everybody did some new age dancing around in a circle and chanting and stuff, but that was boring so I got everybody started jumping up and down as high as we could while going round; I was blamed the next day for everybody’s sore legs.

The next night everybody was in the basement of the lounge which Leonard had bought a liquor license for so he could make some money off these New Agers coming up here to meditate for free.  I found another excuse to play some songs—which was probably that people were insisting that I do so—and afterwards I walked right up to that girl Kari—nineteen years old with a two-year-old daughter—and having walked right up to her, I now did not know what to do, for I had no plan.

This wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d had a plan.

So there I was a mere eleven inches from a beautiful angel, staring into her blue eyes, and naturally I said, There are black holes on Earth—the pupils of your eyes.  But she knew what I was really trying to say so she proceeded to inform me that Leonard had her staying at the historic Globe Hotel in town and her room had bedbugs or something and she had no car and she needed to get her two-year-old out of the Globe—just for a few days till her ride outta here could come get her—

—to which I naturally responded that she and her little girl could sure stay with me in Cabin Six if they wanted to, so thus began a little Fairytale Few Days of my life—like the days I spent with Camille back in Santa Cruz, except Camille still owes me twenty bucks—but meanwhile Leonard’s presence on the property made me next in line to gaze skedaddlewards once Kari’s husband came and got her and took her back to Arizona.

It turned out that Sunny and Barbara were planning to drive to Colorado for a Rebirthing seminar, and I figured since I was basically going to be starving soon, I might as well go along with Sunny’s plan for me to get arrested in order to get put in the nuthouse so I could get disability.   So I had a week to get good and depressed or at least unmotivated enough that I wouldn’t change my mind about this particularly serious life decision, then I would let Sunny haul me part way to Kansas where I had always been comfortable behaving like a jackass.

In the meantime, there was Julie: dark brown hair, freckles, just the right size, shy and intellectual but not too much of either, she felt safe sitting next to me on the sofa in the lodge for extended periods of time, and I thought that was just great.  Then she found that she liked to kiss me and hold me.  Then one night, she told me she needed to get her birth control situation together.

The next day, because of the separate conversation I’d been having with Sunny about how I could get on disability if only I could get arrested, I was long gone.

My punishment for disappearing just when I’d found the perfect woman was to be stuck with Sunny’s presence in my life on and off, more or less forever.  But there’s plenty of time for that long and wretched tale.

You see, Julie was the woman of my dreams, but I was not worthy of the woman of my dreams, and I knew it.

Here then, to Julie, I dedicate my song:

 

Content With Boredom

 

Do the right thing and don’t do the wrong thing.

Oh boy, what a plan!

What you need to make you happy:

Mama never said you could have that.

You want permission to be happy?

Wanna try real hard to get there?

Beat your head against the wall?

Go ahead, that’s what it’s there for.

Feel like hell, what’s there to lose?

Blame your hopeless situation

on the morning news.

 

Whatever justifiability my fears think

they can claim for their existence,

still their absence would make life boring so I

chase my tail to keep my eyes bright.

And make for greener pastures,

and wind up in a ditch there,

badmouthing everything that happens:

“Oh what an awful life!

You can’t depend on nothing!

Guess I should be content with boredom.”

 

But say, what’s this?

It’s a fight in my insides,

it’s getting way out of hand now.

My heart’s in my gut and my head’s up my butt,

and I can’t get them out.

Little bit of chitter-chatter plugging up my brain;

I can’t get it all figured out.

My life and my mind are in the same cardboard box;

it’s all just something to talk about.

 

Then I see a bright light before me;

the mists of time have burned away.

The rules were made just to be broken,

so get off your ass, its time to play.

You want a medal for being unhappy?

You sadomasochistic whiner,

trying to say you’re not having fun.

Don’t just sit there with a hard-on;

get a grip: it’s not too big.

To prove that life is not a nightmare,

don’t be such a pig, don’t count what you give,

start with where you live.