CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

In which I explore the further reaches of incompetence

 

Three states further down the road in Colorado, I happily disembarked Sunny’s vehicle, after pissing Barbara off with my practical need to be as depressed and mute as possible throughout the long ride, and I began to hitchhike toward Lawrence, Kansas where I planned to either stay with Old Yeller or get arrested, whichever way I should happen to find the welcome signs pointing.  Of course once in Lawrence there were no welcome signs anywhere since I was basically bucking the natural flow of things to try and live out Sunny’s fantasy for my life.  I was starting to think about a book by Carlos Castaneda called Tales of Power wherein Carlos’ final act in the book was to jump into a mighty chasm and then use his skills as a sorcerer to reassemble a new reality before hitting bottom, thereby continuing to live one parallel universe over, where the chasm-related death incident never occurred.  Back when I first read Castaneda’s books, I was only 19, and Batanwa Jim had insisted I read them if I wanted to learn how to hallucinate without drugs, so I read them.  The books completely confused me and I was irritated with the way the last one (at that time Tales of Power) ended with an inconceivable event, which meant to me, in 1975, that Castaneda had bamboozled me into reading his books; if he had to make the ending up, then obviously the whole thing was a big joke and my time had been wasted by another wealthy author.

But lately—back to the summer of 1981—a faint hope had blossomed in me that a disappearance from this reality and entrance into a different one might be the actual effect if one were to make the jump when there are no witnesses to hold you in this one.

But alas, I was presently unable to carry out such an interesting experiment in self-improvement due to the fact that I’d promised myself I’d get thrown in jail so I could get a monthly disability check if I played my cards right, and besides that neither Old Yeller nor his new roommates were being very nice to me.  By now I was experienced enough to know when someone didn’t want me hanging around, so I vacated Old Yeller’s dining room hide-a-bed after only one night, and headed straight over to the Pizza Hut where I intended to create some real trouble for myself on purpose.

I was plenty aware that the world of work held no place for me, but the world of disability payment application processors obviously needed proof of my disability, so I went over to the grocery store to work up my appetite for what I was about to do, waiting for Pizza Hut to open.

I stared long and hard at all the yummy-looking food on the shelves, trying to defeat my nervous stomach and get hungry, and finally when Pizza Hut opened I went over there and ordered up a medium combo and two glasses of dark beer.  With not a cent to my name, I was already committed to my project, and I could feel one foot wedged in the nuthouse door already.  While I ate my pizza with gusto I thought about all the things a person can buy with a Supplemental Security Income check.  As soon as the beer and pizza were completely consumed, I went to the bathroom and washed my hands and made sure my hair was good and messed up, then came back out to my table where I sat down, put the dirty dishes to the side, and removed from my backpack a large note I had written earlier and which I now placed on the table where anyone passing my table could easily read it.  Then I put my head down on the table on my arms and closed my eyes and waited.

The note read, “Starting now, I will never again speak or move.”  I could hear people tiptoeing by to read the note, then tiptoeing away as quickly as possible.  Nobody said a word except one smart-ass kid at the next table over who said, He is too moving—he’s breathing!

It wasn’t more than ten minutes of dead silence and stifled giggles later that the Lawrence Police Department showed up and hauled me out of there, much to my relief, as I was beginning to feel downright conspicuous, but it would obviously have been even more embarrassing to change my mind in the middle and walk out instead of staying the course and making the cops drag me out.  Once outside a policeman frisked me while another went through my backpack, reporting that it contained nothing but poetry.  He added that some of it was pretty good.

Then a younger cop twisted my handcuffs and pushed me into the front seat of his cop car, and he proceeded to drive me away, telling me I was an asshole punk and I deserved to have the shit kicked out of me.  He asked me if this was a college prank or a research project for a psychology class, but I wouldn’t answer.  He called me all kinds of names like weirdo, pinko, hippie, asked me again if I was a college student, and generally exhibited toward me the kind of behavior that I’d been taught to never indulge in.  He promised to let me out on the next corner if I would tell him my name so he could run my ID.  He wanted me to think he didn’t want to get involved in reporting this event.  I kept my mouth shut.  When the policeman got me inside the walls of the County Jail Police Car Parking Basement, he twisted my handcuffs till they bit into my wrists, tightening every time I moved, and then slammed me real hard against the brick wall.  Obviously this policeman could not be trusted, so I was glad I hadn’t told him my name.

They put me in a cell all by myself where the lights were on 24 hours a day, so all night the little light-loving moths would huddle up at the big fluorescent light fixture and drop dead all over my semi-asleep self, till by morning there was a half-inch-thick layer of little dead moths on the floor under the lights.  I slept with the little so-called blanket over my head, even though that meant my feet stuck out of the other end, to keep the light and moths out of my face.

I must confess, my tender siblings, that this environment stimulated absolutely no tendency in me to think that I might have done the right thing by getting myself thrown in jail.  The first part of the experience was the most fun: while they were still trying to figure out who I was.  They tried sending a female police officer to my cell with pizza to weasel my name out of me, but I never looked up for that dim trick, and they eventually took the pizza away since I was attempting a hunger strike on the first day.  On her second attempt to squeeze information out of me, I told the big blonde cop lady that my name was Lucifer.  In the end; they got me to reveal my true identity by threatening to put me back out on the street as unarrestable since I had no name.

A court date was set, and my Mama and my sister Mo showed up to carry on with the commitment proceedings, during which the judge himself threatened to throw me out on the street for having nothing to say.  So I spoke up and informed that black-robed overpaid bully that if he did throw me out on the street I would go do exactly the same thing that I had just done until somebody put me in the nuthouse and left me there, and he seemed relieved that he now knew what to do, and sent me to the nuthouse forthwith.  The jail returned my personal jumpsuit to me and they took back their own.  I had done nothing but lay on my cot for seven day and nights and I was no longer interested in confinement within any institution, so harrowing it had been to watch one intensely boring moment after another dribble by with the maximum slowness allowed by law, for seven continuous 24-hour fluorescently lit days and nights.  The move to Topeka State Hospital was quite a disappointment, for the Great Dr. Brainbowl had retired or died and half the wards had been shut down by Reagonomics, and my new psychiatrist was an in-and-out kind of guy when it came to dealing with seeming functionals like me; he seemed to have a lot on his mind the first time I met him as he let me know we’d talk more soon to make plans for getting me a way out of there.

The ward was filled to capacity and the new breed of trainee aides was begging me to get out quick because the space was needed for really sick people who really couldn’t function anywhere else.

Mrs. Clara Friend was happy to see me but like the others, she did not encourage me to stake a claim on my present accommodations.  Things had changed and nobody could get in unless it was an emergency.  And right they all were: there was no one on the whole ward who was able to hold a lucid conversation or play a game of cards.  I felt stupid for being there and ended up acting as competent as I could, like when I was in a piano tuning customer’s home, or applying for a job, and everybody was impressed with my perfect behavior and wanted to know what I was doing there.

Pretty soon after about six days of total boredom around these catatonics and nonstop tongue waggers and TV watchers who could never amount to anything, the doctor called me into his office where the first thing I noticed was that his usual twitchy movements were even more pronouncedly frantic now, and it was obvious to me as I first entered the room that the man was in a hurry to be doing something more urgent.  He scanned my chart from my earlier visits to the asylum under the care of the Great Dr. Brainbowl—umm—let’s see—depression, anger—

And that’s enough time wasted looking at the past as he skates up to date in seconds and jumps ahead to “my plan for getting out of here,” just barely glossing over the concept that something might have got me here to begin with, by mentioning that all that stuff was irrelevant anyway because they had no room for me anyway, so—let’s get down to it—next time we met I was supposed to have a plan for getting out.  Apparently it had something to do with putting together an odd assortment of piano jobs or whatever.  That was all the time he had, and I could see that this guy was not interested in helping me get proven to be crazy, so I gave up and lost my last little bit of interest in being locked up in that place; since I was now on voluntary status I could leave anytime by giving three days’ notice.  But at this time it would actually have taken six days because we were facing the three-day weekend know as Labor Day.

I already had grounds privileges so I got ready to go out the next day by putting on a T-shirt and cutoff shorts underneath my lawn-green jumpsuit with the embroidered dragon on the back that I always wore and that none of these people had ever seen me outside of.  As soon as I got behind the next building I took off across the street to the gas station where I went in the bathroom and took off the jumpsuit and stuffed it in the trash can, and walked out of there looking like an ordinary dude in T-shirt and cutoffs.  I walked down side streets and back alleys like a regular person till I came to the freeway, then I followed the streets and ditches next to the freeway through every imaginable part of town, even crawling next to the ground through the bushes from time to time so as to not be seen from the freeway, until finally I arrived at the ramp across town where I could hitchhike down the two-lane road leading directly to Lawrence, where I intended to catch up with Joybroth somehow.  I stood at the bottom of the on-ramp, outside of Topeka, a few cars going by, no houses or buildings, and sang out loud at the uppermost top of my voice:

 

This is All I Ask

by Gordon Jenkins

 

As I approach the prime of my life,

I find I have the time of my life,

learning to enjoy at my leisure

all the simple pleasures,

and so I happily concede:

this is all I ask; this is all I need.

Beautiful girls, walk a little slower

when you walk by me.

Lingering sunsets, stay a little longer

with a lovely scene.

Children everywhere, when you shoot at bad men,

shoot at me.

Take me to that strange enchanted land

grownups seldom understand;

wandering rainbow, leave a bit of color

for my heart to own.

Stars in the sky, make my wish come true

before the night has flown,

and let the music play as long

as there’s a song to sing,

and I will stay younger than spring.

 

 

As soon as I got to Joybroth’s dormitory room, one of Old Yeller’s new roommates showed up and I grabbed a guitar and tried to rouse them out of their mid-western stupor by playing a couple of my songs with complete ecstatic fervor.  The other guy quickly left and I proceeded to explain to Joybroth that I’d learned my lesson about getting arrested as a stepping stone toward my loftier goal of an early retirement, and by Golly after seven days in jail I was ready to actually get a job.  He gave me some pointers on grooming and mentioned that Shade Further had announced her willingness to be of assistance in my need for housing.

So I walked over to Shade Further’s house and presented myself as her next potential roommate, and she told me they wouldn’t refuse me assistance of some kind at the welfare office if I told them what I would do if they didn’t give it to me, all of which led up to the unique idea that I was expected to pay rent immediately.  So I walked over to the welfare office and let them see me at my most depressed and unmotivated and told them like I meant it that if they didn’t help me out with a way to pay rent I was going back to Pizza Hut to get arrested again.  It was determined rather quickly that I would be promised a monthly check and some kind of work at the university to pay back the government for its hard-earned money.

My job turned out to be working for the anthropology museum where I was welcome because they got me for free, and after they found out I could run errands in the van and generally show up to work, they had me unload all these artifacts that were numbered and sitting in drawers, and then re-varnish the drawers inside and out, and put the artifacts back in them.

That pretty much burned me out on that job, so I sat around Shade Further’s house smoking pot, reading Carlos Castaneda’s books again for the first time, and planning to jump off a cliff, while putting together some photocopy art and original cartoons I decided to call “Molecule Deli” after a phrase that had popped into my mind once when Rose Stranghardt and I were tripping on acid at the top of the Portland Rose Gardens with our heads pushed together so as to increase the complexity of our purportedly mutual hallucinations.

Shade Further, meanwhile, had taken to staying in her room so I was both amazed and elated to find another paycheck from the government despite my lack of showing up to work.  I paid my rent again and tried going to work, and it was explained to me that no one had wanted to report me missing because they were hoping I’d come back.  Which I did but only for a few days, distracted by the bag of marijuana I was also able to buy after my rent was once more paid by my welfare check.

The marijuana briefly drew Shade Further out of her room but I still couldn’t go to work—since I had pot—so it became my habit to not go, and the pot helped me not worry about it.  Then when I ran out of pot I was too depressed to go to work and I for sure was bent on finishing those Castaneda books which were drawing me in.  Especially the part at the end where he jumps into the chasm and just finds himself walking down the road or waking up in a motel or something.

The absolute inability I had to truly commit myself to the chasm procedure was evidenced by the ridiculous events that followed.  As the month wore on and no reason still existed for me to expect another check from the government, Shade Further had taken first to staying in her room, then to cutting off her social life, then finally one morning, to sitting in the bathtub crying before breakfast.  I could only assume that something must be wrong, but since I didn’t want to know what it was, I didn’t ask.  Finally she came right out and told me that I apparently didn’t plan to stay with her any longer since I’d done nothing to generate any rent money, and she asked me when I planned to be out by, so I showed her that my bags were packed, which I’d taken care of while she was in the bathtub for an hour sobbing, and she said, No, you don’t have to go that fast.  But I knew what I had to do and I was ready to do it.

So here I was in the middle of a November rainstorm, standing out on the freeway trying to hitchhike to Colorado where I intended to find a lonely cliff to jump off of, where there would be no witnesses and I would find another kind of existence, except as you all well know, nobody picks up hitchhikers when it’s raining.  After hours in the freezing rain I decided I now qualified for residence at the Topeka State Hospital, so there I headed, straight in to the admissions lobby where I found I was unwilling to admit that I wanted back in, so I put my wet pack on the floor next to me, in the same lobby where I had once escaped from two security guards and then returned before they knew I was gone, but now I was feeling completely uninterested in doing what it would take to get a warm bed out of these people tonight.  So I left.  I’ve never been back to those people or anybody like them.

Back in the rain, I was headed back to Lawrence where I was ready to take Shade’s friend Cheryl up on her previously ignored offer of a free place to stay anytime Shade Further got tired of me.  A nice man who had worked at the state hospital for many years picked me up right away and took me to his house in Topeka and dried my clothes and wanted to play with my pee-pee, permanently if possible, but I accepted his Plan B instead, which was for him to buy me a bus ticket to Lawrence.  Thank goodness he wasted no time sending me in that direction, for the moment I stepped off the bus, I ran into the bus depot men’s room and puked my guts out.  Then I crawled over to Cheryl’s house the best I could, and when she and her new boyfriend, Fred, got home later that evening, they found me sleeping in the back bedroom of her house, sick as a dog, their new house guest.

For a week or two I lingered at death’s door with the flu, then proceeded to smoke so much pot and tobacco that I got re-sick with a horrible cold, and eventually quit smoking everything altogether for awhile so I could placate my body’s demands while formulating my next plan.

It was during this sober moment that I remembered that Cheryl had mentioned seeing an air-powered car inventor in a People Magazine recently, so I found the article at the library and photocopied it, then got the inventor’s phone number from the phone company, and called him up.  His name was Terry Miller.

Hello, I said, my name is Maxwell Zdaemon and I’m interested in air cars.

Well, he drawled back in a big smooth Oklahoma accent just like Hoyt Axton’s, “How interested in air cars are you?  ‘Cause if you’re real interested, I mean real interested, I’ll send you a whole big 50-page book for $5 that’ll tell you everything you need to know on how to build an air car just like mine.”

That sounded just dandy so I got his address in Crestline, Kansas and when I told Cheryl what happened she offered me the $5 to purchase the book.  I held my breath for a week till the book came, then I checked it out for a few days, sampling and savoring this cornucopia of just what the doctor ordered, and by then it was nearly Spring, so I took the hint when Cheryl’s boyfriend asked me how long I intended to stay with them, and formulated a plan to go get back together with Rose Stranghardt in Portland, and look for a job.  Thus did I foolishly flee my new human air car connection—only because I feared that Terry Miller of Crestline, Kansas might reject me if I suggested that I move in with him to become his new live-in air car assistant—and I proceeded to get the heck out of Kansas before it should become November again.

I don’t remember how I got to Portland that spring of 1981—maybe another of those pesky welfare checks came in the mail.  Anyhow I ended up at Rose Stranghardt’s moldy little house madly back in love with her for the first time, and since she and Al Margin were bickering constantly—I mean so constantly that one might assume that they were being paid to bicker—I thought it would be wise to hang around long enough for Rose Stranghardt to fall back in love with me for the first time too, but since she was purposely overplaying the detached platonic role I tried to stay out of the house as much as possible during the day; ostensibly pretending to look for a job, I more or less ended up most of the time down at the library, and since I had no money or ambition, but plenty of fear and anxiety about what that could lead to, and since Al Margin and Rose Stranghardt’s beer personalities had taken over to the point that they tolerated my presence but never stopped insulting each other long enough to pay any attention to me, I thought I’d better freak out, so I waited for Al Margin and Rose Stranghardt there in the kitchen to volley one more pair of insults back and forth, and then—

BANG!  I kicked the open kitchen door real loud.  They stopped and stared at me.  That first kick felt real good, after listening to them bicker non-stop for days, so I let go with another bang on the door with my foot, and Al Margin rared back and his long leg shot out and precisely pushed me back three feet.  Everything Al Margin did, he did with precision.

And then it was finally time to pay attention to Luther as the three of us sat around the kitchen table for the next few hours and I had to hear everything that Al Margin and Rose Stranghardt had to say to me that they’d never been able to say before.  For Al Margin that was easy—all he had to say was that I was a baby who expected special treatment and I should be glad he hadn’t kicked my ass and thrown my stuff out in the street when I kicked the door.  Then he guided Rose Stranghardt through an intricate discussion of my faults over the next few hours, and all I can remember is that it turned out she thought I was a useless suck who thought all he had to do to get free food and drugs and sex all the time was to act cute.  Her opinion may have had something to do with the way I’d treated her, and although I could see the connection between reality and what she was saying, it was too hard for me to swallow, when we all knew that the real problem was Al Margin and Rose Stranghardt were bickering all the time but nonetheless were not making any moves toward splitting up so I could get Rose back.

It turned out that I had a little piece of paper in my wallet with Judas’s phone number on it, so I made a quick phone call and off I went to Grass Valley, California on the bus where I was promptly met by a car full of hippies including Judas.  The first street sign I saw after we got underway was “Luther Road,” so I knew I was in the right place.

Here begins the saga of Porsche Doer and Darshan and Jaia and all the others who figured prominently in making the next nine months in Grass Valley the first shining moment in this whole dreary chapter of my life.

In the car were Monte and Lynne, a pair of my new roommates at Darshan’s house—which we called Sky Ranch after a sign that hung in the kitchen—Judas, myself, and Darshan.  Darshan was an artist and sign-painter who, like many in Grass Valley, had come to the area 20 years earlier because of the local meditation community, and stayed to play out the business leads he’d developed over the years of meditating.  I liked Darshan.  I watched him, a forty-year-old Jewish artist from Los Angeles, quit smoking Pall Malls cold turkey on January 1, 1982, and never light up again.  That I had to respect.

I soon met a couple from Ohio who’d just moved to the area to try selling a line of multi-level marketing foodlike substances.  Porsche Doer and Grave Darn introduced themselves as diet consultants because of their products, but really they were homeless car-less hippies with two teenage daughters and were staying at Yvonne’s home—remember Yvonne, general manager of Campbell Hot Springs?  Darshan knew her too.  One day he’d gone up to Campbells to share an evening with Yvonne, and it turned out that Judas, who resided at Campbells at the time, had also had his sights set on spending the evening with Yvonne, so before all was said and done, Judas and Darshan shared the evening with each other, becoming reasonably good friends.  And now Porsche Doer and Grave Darn were coming around whenever they needed a ride out to Yvonne’s house in the country, and Darshan and Judas didn’t pay much attention to them, but I borrowed Darshan’s truck every time they came around and happily took them everywhere they wanted to go, buying a kind of friendship with Darshan’s gas.  Eventually when they got their own place in town, Judas and I would often stop there to share their hospitality.  They let Judas help them in their garden and all was happy and prosperous for a time.

My first act at Sky Ranch was to read Terry Miller’s book, Air Powered Cars, over and over till I understood it and knew a thousand times more about air cars than I had before reading it.  I wrote my own first essay on air cars regarding the relative disadvantageousness of the various alternatives to compressed air autos.  The technical information in Terry Miller’s book was the kind of thing I needed to know in order to proceed with my research without blindly stumbling and groping and failing to learn as I had done up to then.

Darshan drew concepts of air car bodies and often stayed up with me brainstorming till 2:00 a.m. about what kinds of junk machinery could be converted into bona-fide air car components.  When he received an inheritance he gave me a thousand dollars to buy an old air motor and compressor and pay some bills, even talking the man at the salvage yard down on his price for the air motor I wanted to buy.  Haggling over prices was an inconceivable act to me, but Darshan was a top notch salesman.  Everything Darshan did was top-notch, as long as it didn’t involve his chronically poor use of time, money and women.  But his ability to sell signs and his tendency to do it constantly, wherever he was, gave me enough work in his sign shop to pay my share of the rent plus a little more; it gave Darshan about the same plus enough left over to get drunk and laid several times a week.

Monte and his brother had a country rock band called the Ghostriders, and he was a jeweler and an alcoholic multiple personality like his old man.  He had a big reel-to-reel tape recorder so we used to set up his equipment in the living room and record my songs.  I ended up playing Lost Wave Music for my new family of friends almost daily for some time until Darshan—man about town that he was—got a DJ from the local community radio station to call me up and hound me till I agreed to play my songs on the radio.

Monte prepared me for the big scary event by getting his brother to come over and play his songs for me, songs containing lines such as, “making the scene with a magazine,” and “cunt hair and wine in my ear.”  My favorite was where he turned “ewemoway”—from “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—into “my wiener’s wet.”  Try it now,  boys and girls, while we’re thinking about it: “My wiener’s wet, my wiener’s wet, my wiener’s wet, my wiener’s wet . . . “  Now wasn’t that fun for everybody?  Monte’s brother was a pill addict who lived in his Mama’s basement, and his songs made my Lost Wave Music sound downright introspective.

When the big night came to play on the radio, I was so nervous that I had refused to smoke any marijuana whatsoever all day long, and while the group that performed before me was finishing up, I stretched and breathed continuously in order to prevent my mind and body from confusing their roles.  As I finally launched into the 90-minute interview and performance I knew I had done the right thing by keeping all the emphasis on my body while using every opportunity to quell absolutely any of the crap that my mind was liable to try and serve up at a critical moment like this one.  As I cranked out song after song, it was as if my body was playing both the guitar and the voice while the words remembered themselves, and the mind stayed out of it so completely that it was as if the music happened by the act of my listening to it, and the better I listened, the better it came out.  Only once—while I momentarily started going mental during ”Bare-Assed Me”—did I make even the smallest mistake.  Judas, Darshan, Monte and Lynne were there in the studio with me to cheer me on.  I enjoyed so much the feeling of that performance being not only over but not even botched, that I stopped playing for my friends and generally became bored with music for many years.

 

Bare-Assed Me

 

Standing in a circle with the others,

looking for something to do with my hands,

playing hide and seek with a storm of eyes,

hiding in the woodwork between gazes,

hiding in the spaces between faces,

while I wonder what they’re thinking about me,

wonder why they act like they like me;

hope I didn’t say something stupid.

 

I - I’m embarrassed to exist.

I - I’m embarrassed to exist.

I’m embarrassed to be noticed doing nothing.

I’m embarrassed to be noticed doing anything.

I’m embarrassed to be noticed at all.

etc.

 

This one has a real catchy tune, the sort of thing you can get stuck singing to yourself all day.

It just so happened that I met a former “Christy Minstrel” named Sadashiv at Sky Ranch the winter that I was there.  This took place when Sadashiv and his young children needed a place to crash on account of being snowed out of Sadashiv’s teepee up on the Ridge.  We had just had a household meeting in which one agenda item that keenly interested me was to limit the number of Darshan’s friends who could stop by unannounced to sleep on our floor.  So here it was the worst snowstorm of the season and I sent Sadashiv and his kids sliding down the highway in his big van, unwelcome to stay due to a house full of Luther’s Opinion, and I stood there at the front door and watched them slide into the ditch one house down from us, then I went in the house while the others ran out to help push Sadashiv out of the ditch.  I call this my assertiveness period; standing up for myself held the place of Primary Consideration, up to the occasional extreme of being the Actual Right Honorable and Only Consideration.  Needless to say, I still feel bad about the way I turned out, and I cannot fully explain my lack of rapport with the human race.

Fortunately my constant companion Judas was there to goad me mercilessly.  My assertiveness training period came just after me and Judas’s sadomasochism period, when he verbally insulted me constantly for his own entertainment, and I whined and made funny noises in response.  This behavior was so bizarre that I find it hard to explain, but right there in the sign shop with Darshan painting a sign two feet away from us, Judas would be badgering and lambasting me and I just made funny noises and whimpered while we worked.

This funny noise business had gotten out of hand way back in Portland when I was trying to keep up with Al Margin’s continuous star-burst of highly vocabulous intellectual superiority and sarcastic clowning.  As for Judas’s sadistic behavior, he was growing more and more practical-minded as he acquired carpentry skills, and my need to follow him around acting like a basket case making weird noises annoyed him just enough to make him treat me like the scumbag that I was.  Thus was spawned my assertiveness period.

Then along came Sadashiv wanting me to come on his radio show—he was a late night DJ on the local community radio station—to talk about air cars.  I eventually condescended to grace the air waves with my presence once again, and my little air car cult was born.  I was in my Terry Miller phase at that time.  A friend of Sadashiv called the show from another town and invited me to his home, where I went and gave a whole lecture on Terry Miller’s air car for several people.

Porsche Doer and Darshan were so hot on the air car project that I was forced to devise a plan of my own based on the best knowledge I could put together from my research, and as a trio ready to become a corporation, we hired a man out of the classified section to come “evaluate and help design and build” my invention.

This guy was spooky.  In fact, that was his name: Mr. Spooky.  He was a big tall husky guy with black hair and goatee, and dressed all in black: black shoes, black vest, black shirt, everything.  I faultily remember him in a black cape lined with scarlet; this cannot be; it must be a fabrication of my fairly useless memory which is not to be trusted.

Mr. Spooky listened to me briefly explain my air car plans but stopped me way short of the best details, to explain to us with a sort of know-better laughing-down reproachfulness that, in spite of any truth there might be to any of the assertions that I was no doubt eager and ready to make about the superiority of my air car idea over the prevalent nonsense substituting for transportation, the government would never let us do it despite its obvious safety advantages, and not only that but the ammunition that the government propagandists would use to stop us would be safety concerns built on people’s natural but unreasonable fear of pressurized tanks.

As Mr. Spooky confirmed, air tanks almost never break, explode, wear out, or fly through the air like unguided missiles, but a vision of fearsome consequences could easily be planted somewhere within the bureaucratic thought process to make it nearly impossible to put an actual air car on the market.

After expounding these points and others at some length, Mr. Spooky finally stopped shooting off his mouth and looked at Darshan, Porsche Doer, and myself, each in turn.  To Darshan and Porsche Doer he said that he felt he had gotten through; to me he remarked that I showed no signs of letting go of the air car project.  He thanked us for calling him, announced that he could not charge us for his services on this evening, nor would he be available to our project in the future, and he slipped into the night with his black briefcase.

Darshan and Porsche Doer eventually recovered and we continued to keep one eye open for an engineering consultant who was not afraid of doing a good thing in spite of status quo opinion based on ignorance and paranoia.

Meanwhile, I’d taken on the task of re-organizing Signs by Darshan into a profit-making business.  Darshan’s way of taking care of everybody but himself had led to a situation where there was nothing left for him after the expenses and wages had been paid so I proposed to take over the business aspects of the business, performing such useful and necessary tasks as screening phone calls to keep Darshan selling and painting signs instead of, for example, spending 45 minutes on the phone with a potential twenty dollar customer.

First I cleaned and re-organized the whole shop and sorted all the screws by size and type, built lumber racks and took useless junk to its final resting place.  I got Darshan to take the necessary steps to prevent the sales tax board from throwing him in jail  I started a bookkeeping system to keep track of the income and expenses.

Then I changed Darshan’s generous policy of paying his friends and roommates by the hour for their work.  Instead, Darshan was to decide up front how much each part of the sign-making and installation process was worth, and we all—including Darshan—would be paid accordingly, by the job, not the hour.  Darshan’s punk-rock next door neighbor who had been working full time in the sign shop for two years became decidedly belligerent at this point, although he had liked the other changes I’d made, except to pay myself 10% of the profit from each sign—or was it 10% of the gross?  He screamed in my face, he wheedled, he whined, he begged me to change back to hourly wages, but to no avail.  I was cool as a cucumber and because my fellow Sky Ranchers were there, my quiet obstinence in the face of furious bluster failed to get me beaten to a pulp.  He quit his job and the business became profitable at that very moment.

Now that my name was on the business checking account and Darshan didn’t have to pick up the phone every time it rang, we were cranking out signs faster and spending money slower and Darshan wasn’t allowed to spend a deposit for a sign job on anything but the parts for that job, and I did all the shopping anyway, so the point being, Darshan soon became completely miserable without his normal Last Minute Charlie approach.  There was nothing for him to do but sell, design and letter signs; all the carpentry, priming and background painting, masking, wiring and installation was now being done by Judas and Monte.  Darshan hated this feeling of efficiency and imagined he was not being paid enough.  I told him he had to add 20% to each and every bid above and beyond what he wanted to charge, because he was out there selling signs for wholesale prices and then paying a staff of amateurs to do most of the work.

No matter what else we tried, Darshan always ended up working long nights for little pay, working slower and looking glummer, bringing home uglier and stupider women, till finally one day I realized I must step down as general manager and let Darshan tough it out his own way.  I continued to do only enough office work to make my rent and buy candy bars, and it wasn’t long before Judas followed suit, cutting back on his hours so he just made enough to pay his rent and buy candy bars too, and that way Darshan could spend as much time chasing women as he wanted.

Actually the change back to a nearly one-man operation inspired Darshan to seek wifely material, and after a few preliminary stabs into this great dark void, he came to me one night to thank me for giving him his freedom back.  He said it had unleashed his inner creativity to the point that he had gone out and found the perfect woman, and he wanted to show her to me and he also needed someone there to hold his hand when he went over to her place of work to ask her out for the first time.

So we went over to Misty Mountain Hot Tubs and Things where his target female was working as a part-time masseuse and juice bar girl.  Jaia was a beautiful and outspoken five-foot-tall woman with long frizzy blonde hair, who always wore a long dress.  She was older than me and younger that Darshan.  He succeeded in asking her out and we went home, he much happier than I.  Something about being brought along specifically to watch another guy snag the perfect female was slightly irritating to me.

It was no time at all before Jaia had moved in with Darshan and painted the extra room purple to be used as a massage room.  To be the new girlfriend of the charismatic, dashing and popular Darshan, Jaia seemed fairly well pleased.  She was on-point and full of very businesslike and serious chitter-chatter about the way things should be, who she was, why she felt the way she felt, etc., and it wasn’t too awfully long before everybody was talking about her behind her back, complaining that she was the most opinionated, high-strung, over-focused, too-serious little woman who had ever been given a set of vocal cords to abuse non-stop.  It soon became obvious that nothing ever stimulated her innate need to be silent, and before I knew it I had been elected—because of my vast experience as general manager of Signs by Darshan—to inform Jaia that she would be far less obnoxious if she would either shut up from time to time or just go away altogether.

Since this was my assertiveness period, I was only too happy to do other people’s dirty communicating for them.  I calmly explained to Jaia that since she never stopped talking about herself and her opinions, I personally had taken a dislike to her and was struggling with wishing she were not there.  Of course my other roommates, who had elected me to represent them, jumped the fence to defend her, claiming that I was being mean.

Since she valued sincerity over all other traits, this signaled the beginning of our friendship, which I still value over all others, and which I value more every year; it’s not often I meet someone who feels driven to tell me truthfully what my problem appears to be, without the intent to insult or belittle me at the same time.  However, during these months at Sky Ranch I proved twitchily resistant to Jaia’s non-casual approach to every single detail and I became more aloof in my room where I became deeply engrossed in a heavy-duty study of Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan.

This book impressed me as Castaneda’s most specific in terms of instructing a knucklehead like me how to restructure his personality so as to strengthen him to the point of being able to withstand, without loss of consciousness, the shift from the waking to the dreaming mind.  So I indexed the entire book, as an alternative to actually carrying out Castaneda’s exotic suggestions; exotic in a mundane yet tantalizing way that begged me to try them but scared me away because of the massive effort that would be required.

I did, however, realize one day as I looked in the yard for a place to hide while I smoked my cigarette—so people wouldn’t think of me as a cigarette smoker, thereby nailing me to that post in life—that I routinely took the approach with people that they must obviously be wrong because there could be no way that I could be wrong.  I recognized that I had the tendency in a new job or situation, once I overcame my initial awkward need to be spoon-fed instructions on exactly how to act, to go straight to the opposite extreme and suddenly exude a self-confidence completely out of proportion to the demands of the situation, arrogating a level of authoritativeness both out of place and distractingly center-stage.

To get straight to the point, this was the first time that I learned to recognize the little voice within that is always there to nag us softly when we are just plain undeniable wrong.  Since discovering the voice, I’ve learned many new ways to keep it from becoming the center of my life.  However it cannot be a bad thing that a part of me—however critically ignored—still exists to warn me of my own stupid mistakes as they are about to happen to me.

Hooray for that lonely little voice.

As an adjunct to this new suspicion that I was not beyond criticism, it became more than obvious to me that it was none other than my own never-ending conversation with myself about how others were out to wrong and offend me that kept me from being able to hear the soft voice within that actually knows what’s gong on.  In order to try and eliminate the constant name-calling siege that the parts of me were wont to carry out against each other within my empty shell, I instituted a new policy of continuously repeating to myself a mantra I’d been given in a vision.  The aim was to replace the so-called “normal” internal dialog—most of which exists mainly to reinforce the current wretched system of coping mechanisms—with a few meaningless and harmless syllables.  The mantra grabbed hold and still reverberates through my mental meandering twenty years later, an established part of my psychic undercurrent, but while the relative empty-headedness that this routine affords me has no doubt kept me from getting myself murdered any number of times, by keeping me relatively opinion-free, it has done for my general level of enlightenment what changing your underwear does for your need to take a shower.

It’s all in the mind.

The mind is the only karma we have.

It seemed to me that there should be a shortcut to becoming a Master of Reality, similar to jumping off a cliff in order to access a parallel reality, but different.  Not so scary.  I settled on starvation in the forest as my path to 30-day enlightenment.  As long as no one saw me starving to death, I would eventually just slide right into a parallel reality where food wouldn’t be necessary to me.  I decided to walk through the mountains from Campbell Hot Springs to Grass Valley with no food, and I expected to be some sort of psychic superman by the time I arrived at the end of the journey of 100 miles through the High Sierras.

The consolation prize was that if I just starved to death normally, I wouldn’t have to stay behind to clean up my mess; I would just be a pile of unclaimed bones under a tree somewhere.  No muss, no fuss.

So I packed about forty pounds of books, papers and my ceramic sculpture of the Black Beast Elsie, which I had made in art class at Topeka State Hospital—have I mentioned that I was at one time a so-called “mental patient?”—and headed for the forest near Campbells with a small canteen of water and a piece of licorice root to chew on as a substitute for food, tobacco, and pot.  I expected it to take approximately a month to either attain the Miruvorning Vroombelleration and slip into another world or starve to death, whichever came first.

After hiking up a beautiful mountain trail all day long with my heavy duffel bag dangling from one shoulder or the other, I was already achieving an altered state and I could tell this enlightenment business was going to be a lot easier than I had thought.  The whole way up the mountain I’d encountered running water and beautiful scenery—forest glades with sunbeams poking down through moss-draped ancient trees—and I intended to come back to explore these misty areas dappled with their secret ancient powers, at some later date, if there turned out to be any.

Having no food to eat made me tend to want to keep moving while I still could, plus it gave me the sense that my enlightenment would be speeded up by the combination of foodlessness and prolonged pointless effort.  Besides that, the moon was full, so I could see just fine and continued down an unusually long, straight forest road for hours, entering a very weird mental state wherein I wasn’t sure I hadn’t already stumbled into a parallel universe.

Finally the long straight road led past a little side road that just led off to a big clearing and stopped.  I hauled out my sleeping bag and was eventually able to get to sleep.  That night I dreamed that a big bear came to the edge of the clearing across from where I slept, and stood up on its hind legs looking at me.

The following morning I tried to locate my position on the maps I’d brought and failed.  I couldn’t find the long straight road on the map, so I packed up my duffel bag, got out my licorice root and went back from the cul-de-sac where I’d slept, and by Golly, that long straight road did not exist.  It wasn’t there.

By looking at the map and with the aid of my compass, which I didn’t know how to use, I was able to more than augment my growing confusion, and accompanied by the steady gurgles of a grumbling stomach that I had somehow failed to summarily disown, it became obvious to me that since I had no idea how to get to Grass Valley from wherever I was, I should just try to find my way back to the highway so I could hitchhike back home for a bite to eat.

This decided, I set off in the opposite direction to the one that I imagined I could have been traveling on the long, straight, flat road that didn’t exist.  The walk was completely uneventful, especially as regards the occurrence of water-collection sites, except that one fairly friendly Forest Ranger drove by in his jeep and stopped to ask me twelve times if I was OK.  Since I didn’t want to embarrass myself by admitting to this uniformed man that I was extremely thirsty and completely lost, I assured him I was just fine; I was just going for a walk in the woods.  He kept eyeing my huge duffel hag, but finally left me where I was, wherever that was, and I continued on my way unsure whether I had ever done a better job of ending a conversation before anything of relevance had a chance to get said.

Hours later I still pretty much felt the same way as I trudged along the dirty little windy steep forest roads looking for that one long, flat, smooth, straight road from the night before.  Finally in desperation I forced the road I was on to take a steep downhill bend, and after traveling downhill for some time I heard the trickle of water, and looked up to see the woods full of bright green moss and lily pads.

After drinking several gallons of water I realized that traveling straight downhill was the only intelligent thing I could do at this point, and since the creek I’d found had pretty much the same idea, I just followed along with it, never actually losing sight of it, till in just a short time I landed back at the highway with my thumb out, ready for dinner.  I walked to Sierraville and ate an apple off a tree, and let me assure you, this apple was the first apple I’d really tasted in as long as I could remember.

Meanwhile I continued to float along in an altered state of consciousness, having had no food, tobacco or marijuana for over 48 hours, and I was not at all disappointed that I had failed to starve myself to death, because I was quite happy to be alive and not lost in the woods without water, and this combined with a lack of chemicals in my system plus serious hours of prolonged walking had left me in a state of mind with which I was formerly quite unfamiliar.

When I got back to Sky Ranch, I smoked about 1-1/2 puffs of marijuana and went out into Judas’s huge garden where I sat down next to a long bed of tall zinnias topped with huge round flowers of assorted colors.  I was just hanging out staring into space when I went into the same state I had gone into when I’d seen that one guy’s aura, and the field of flowers at my eye level and stretching into my peripheral vision in both directions became a field of anything I wanted it to be.  My visual field dissolved into a sort of white noise of proto-light which I could rearrange at will into anything I wanted to see.  Of course having this ability came with a profound feeling of euphoria.  This ability lasted far into the evening.  When Judas and I went over to Porsche Doer and Grave Darn’s house to smoke pot and watch TV, I was encouraged to not smoke very much, since I had done nothing for hours but to stare incessantly at an area somewhere in front of me that had become bona-fide reality putty.  I didn’t waste this opportunity to properly hallucinate.

Sky Ranch was next door to Ma and Pa Partridge’s two-acre parcel.  Ma Partridge had a gift shop, since we were out on the two-lane highway a few miles from town, and she’d open it up for anyone who wanted to see, but the last time she had purchased new stock for her shop was in the 1950s.  Therefore her shop was a true time warp; nothing in there was used, it was all new stuff 30 years old.  Judas met the Partridges when he bought a Buck Rogers Super Sparker Space Zap Gun from her, and in the process discovered that Pa Partridge—known up till then only for his habit of shaking his cane at the school kids who walked along the highway past his house—was a retired chicken, egg and rabbit rancher, and before you know it Judas had me under those big old broken down rabbit hutches with him, whole buildings of them, scooping up large quantities of well-aged rabbit and chicken poop for his fantasy garden which up to now had been mostly confined to Porsche Doer and Grave Darn’s yard in town; Sky Ranch had almost no sun or space for a garden.

Just then little old Pa Partridge appeared looming above us, and without looking down at us where we crouched in little balls in the dusty old manure bins under the big rabbit cages, he just started talking, as if we’d had an appointment for this conversation, and this is what he said.

You can put your garden there, and you can put your garden there, and over there where those chicken coops fell down, you can put your garden there after you burn up all that old wood, and don’t eat Mrs. Partridge’s peaches but you can have all the plums off those cherry plum trees, and you can have all the apples too.  And stay out of the barn because it’s full of DDT.

So pretty soon Judas’s first new sprouts were coming up, and he got Porsche Doer and Grave Darn to sleep over at our house so we could all go out at 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. to kill the cutworms that were eating his baby plants faster than he could plant them.  Pretty soon everything settled down and what lived lived and Judas had his usual bigger garden than he could care for himself, so he could, as always, browbeat his numerous roommates, house guests, neighbors and miscellaneous friends and hangers-on into helping grow all this free food that they were always happy to help eat.

It was most assuredly the summer of 1982 by this time, and I had finally, after seven or eight long months of hard living in Grass Valley, developed a hankering to branch out from the limited social life within the confines of Sky Ranch, and since I had no intention of going into my own community to look for new friends, I somehow ended up visiting Campbell Hot Springs where my old acquaintance Sunny now resided at the historic Globe Hotel.  I believe it was basically hunger—for food—that drove me to do what I did next, and if there is such a thing as karma, then this single act must have generated one huge, stinking pile of karma.  I had to force the issue.  Couldn’t leave well enough alone, go with the flow; once I made up my mind that Sunny needed to move to Grass Valley—whether it was to keep me better fed or whatever my twisted logic had come up with—I pushed and I pushed until finally I was forced to at least try to have sex with her, after which, predictably enough, she suddenly changed her tune and wanted to move into Sky Ranch right away.

Jaia was kind enough to allow Sunny the use of her purple room for 30 days, and after I spent two days cleaning Sunny’s car and room and verbally thrashing her for being the most disgusting slob ever born, we piled into her car and headed for Grass Valley, where I would eventually be punished a thousand times over for my mishandling of having awoke with a morning stiffie in a platonically shared double bed at the historic Globe Hotel with my old friend Sunny, who just happened to have a mad crush on me.

From that point forward, Sunny followed me everywhere while I tried to ignore her, hoping she’d give up on me and try to blend with the household.  One night we sat on the carpet in my bedroom.  I sat down first, then she sat down in front of me, facing me, foot away from me.  I felt her sticky psychic feelers friskily reaching and groping inside my empty shell for something she felt missing from her own empty shell, so I turned to my left to avoid the sensation of being violated.  She scooted over to land facing me again, all five-foot-two, eyes of blue, older freckled dark-haired Jew of you, all 175 pounds of helpless blobby slobby blubber.  I informed my assailant that she was pursuing someone whose romantic interest in her was stuck permanently at absolute zero, and I further explained to her that she was using all my time and becoming a drain on my energy, so why didn’t she just go to town and meet some nice new friends and get started on having a life in Grass Valley.

Which she eventually ended up doing, since she stayed in Grass Valley many years longer than I did, but at this juncture she felt that her only alternative as a lovelorn manic-depressive on disability was to retire to the purple room that Jaia was letting her use temporarily, where she proceeded to lay on her mat on the floor surrounded by piles of candy bar wrappers and shopping bags and empty pill bottles and both clean and dirty clothes, sulking or sleeping or whatever she did in her bed for 20 hours a day.  We figured she was on the depressed end of the manic-depressive cycle, and waited for her to come out.  A month later, she was still spending all her time in bed and I meanwhile had grown once again quite certain that this of all possible times was the perfect moment to seek 30-day enlightenment, since by avoiding the sign shop completely I had failed to earn my rent.

I secretly intended to achieve total enlightenment by playing Annie Sullivan “miracle worker” to Sunny’s Helen Keller “wild child.”  To her I presented it as if I were already enlightened and had a whole barrelful of horrendously important teachings to cram down her throat.  It was also a threat: her 30 days at Sky Ranch was more than up and she hadn’t even looked for another place to lounge around while she spent her disability check, so I told her I wouldn’t allow her to live at Sky Ranch any longer unless she went to the woods with me for a 30-day intensive on the basics of personality transmutation for the purpose of re-channeling her unused energy into the endless pursuit of freedom that all fluid warriors must undergo.  In other words, go camping with me for a month and do every crazy thing I tell you, or get out of my life.  Unable to discipline myself, I hoped to at least be able to discipline someone else.

Unfortunately the idea of a camping trip with me playing the autocratic father figure was just what Dr. Goldstein ordered, and before you know it, Darshan was dropping me and Sunny off at Bridgeport, a stretch of swimming beaches along the Yuba River.  The plan was to eat only sprouts and granola for a week, then taper off and eventually fast the last week or so.  I was pretty good at growing sprouts, or so I thought, so we headed up into the woods just above the river with our canteens full of water and our little plastic baggies full of seeds and nuts and granola and sprouting beans.  No pot, no tobacco, no socializing at the river, just straight spiritual practices as improvised by me, to impart my spiritual wisdom to Sunny or at least smear some of it on her face.

The first assignment was to create a natural-looking barricade around our campsite so people would tend to walk around, not through, where we planned to live for the next month, undetected.  I made Sunny carry all the wood, since she needed the exercise, and showed her where to place the dead branches and bushes to efficiently block off every natural, easy pathway and line of sight into our camp area.  Of course there was a lesson to be learned by this exercise: it was on how to separate yourself from the rest of the world, which I was convinced Sunny needed to learn, since she had no sense of self and could not function purposefully in the absence of other people and their good advice, which she would seek voraciously and then ignore tenaciously, or hopelessly complicate with a thousand ruinatious questions and concerns.

I had some 3 x 5 cards containing statements like “spontaneous enthusiasm” for her to contemplate while performing mind-emptying and body-honing exercise like walking through the woods stepping only on rocks.  She had a hundred questions about everything and complained incessantly that she didn’t see how she could possibly get anything out of all this, like the night in Grass Valley when I had kept scaring her, despite her pleas that I not, by turning off the light in the room and then not making a sound, till she was in a complete panic.  She wouldn’t move to go find the light, and I wouldn’t do anything for her.  Finally after I had crept to the opposite side of the room so slowly that she couldn’t hear me, she eventually managed to force herself to crawl over to the wall and find the light switch without my permission, and not finding me sitting where she expected me to be, she thought I had dematerialized.  The purpose of that exercise had been purportedly to take her out of her usual framework, to shock her system into being ready to experience something new; in reality I just did it because it was the only kind of thing I could do that made Sunny’s company interesting for me, and I could only eat so much fast food, no matter who paid for it.  So after that night Sunny always considered me unpredictable and was sure I was just trying to scare her.  But it didn’t keep her away.

Meanwhile, back at the river, Sunny’s obstinate refusal to shut up and do the exercises without endless questioning had gotten me pretty frustrated, and I had a lot riding on this whole thing—Sunny also had to pay my rent for the month—so this had to succeed.  Towards the end of the long first day I took her for a walk along the river down past the more populated beaches to where it became necessary to climb over boulders and hop from rock to rock to continue going.  She was terrified but I wouldn’t hold her hand.

Finally we came to a place where Sunny flat-out refused to attempt continuing onward.  It was just a little stretch-and-straddle while rotating 180º to get over this one boulder, but she calmly informed me, as if she’d had her speech planned from the beginning, that she was not going to get past that boulder and would not waste her time trying.  She told me to go on and have my little hike without her, and she’d wait right here till I came back.

I told her she was going to get over the rock, and reminded her that she had yet to even attempt the feat, so how could she know whether or not it was impossible?  She tried for a few seconds and gave up, to prove she couldn’t do it, but I wouldn’t accept that.  I showed her how I did it; I hurdled the boulder over and over; I did it fast, slow, smooth and sloppy, to show her how easy and safe it was.  As I applied more and more pressure, she began to grow quite irritated and was about ready to start crying, not that she had tried and failed, for she had as yet failed to try.  We went back and forth like that for long minutes, then I sat down and told her I would just wait for her to do it, while I watched some naked young women playing in the river over yonder.  Which I did until the women swam away, at which point I became irate and insisted that I had no more time to waste on Sunny’s stupid, lazy, attention-seeking helpless act.

She hollered at me to shut up and get out of the way, then hopped right over the rock like it wasn’t there, and let me assure you, brothers and sisters, that to this very day, Sunny denies ever going over that rock.  She sidestepped it somehow in her mind; it cannot enter her awareness that she climbed over that boulder just like that.  It never happened.  She doesn’t consider it strange that she somehow got to the other side.

Next we had to cross the river carrying our clothes over our heads so as to keep them dry.  This was to illustrate a basic concept known to all veteran hitchhikers: don’t get your clothes wet.

Then we had to climb to the top of the hill on the other side of the river.  It was a small, round little hill scattered with occasional outcrops of boulders and clumps of bushes, but mostly sandy soil going up at a steep slope.  At the bottom of the hill, just above the river and the rocky beach, the bushes grew very close together.  After she crawled most of the way to the top and we were on the way back down, Sunny couldn’t pick her feet up in the sandy soil without being overcome by the fear of falling, so she tried to slide down on her butt.  It was no more than 50 feet above the lower bushy strata that Sunny got her mind stuck on what would happen if she were to suddenly start sliding too fast down the hill.  I assured her that the loose sand would stop her in a few feet, and I demonstrated by trying to slide down the hill with all my might, but the sand always stopped me.  She wouldn’t pick up her feet because of what might happen if she rolled down the hill, so I pointed out to her the bushes growing closely together above the big rocks lining the river.  Even if the bushes didn’t stop her completely, they would slow her down enough so that the rocks would certainly stop her, and even if she bounced over the rocks and plopped right into the river, she knew how to swim, plus she floats like a blob of grease anyway, so what did she have to worry about?

About then Sunny began to lose it completely.  This was my first experience of watching someone go into a true visceral panic—not one of those “panic attacks” where you just put a paper bag over someone’s head to keep them from hyperventilating; she wasn’t just screaming: she was trying to scream open-mouthed and couldn’t; she wasn’t just crying: the tears and snot were literally pouring like a river from every hole in her face.

I was quite concerned that something bad would happen and I would be blamed for it, or for example, Sunny would break her leg and I would have to float her across the river and drag her back to the bridge, bumpity-bump over the boulders.  In a rare moment of knowing exactly what to do, I asked her what she thought I should do, and she told me to leave her there and she would crawl back to the top of the hill and either sleep in the woods or find her way back to the bridge on her own side of the river.  There was little time for discussion, because it was getting dark fast—this was to have been a short excursion, and my explanation to Sunny had been, Well, this is a short hill—so I agreed to leave Sunny’s life in her own hands, as she seemed to vehemently prefer at this particular moment.

I ran down the hill and swam across the river, hurried to put my clothes on and had just started running toward the bridge so I could cross over and run back on the trail to meet up with her on her side of the river, and lead her back, when I heard my name being called.  I stopped running and peered through the deepening gloom at a portly figure right across the river from me.  She waved her arms and hollered at me again.  She had already found her own way down.  She crossed the river and we headed back to camp.

All in all I was very dissatisfied with the way things were going, although Sunny was just starting to have fun, but she begged me not to make her do any more scary stuff.  My mood could have had something to do with a shortage of food; my sprout farm had already turned into a fermenting glop.  I announced that the following day’s exercise would be to fast from speaking.  All other forms of communication were also prohibited; it was to be a totally no-contact day of lounging around camp practicing being without comment.  Sunny hated the idea, but I had bought four hits of LSD with some money that Sunny had given me to buy it with, and there were three left, and by Golly I was going to take the day off, eat a hit of acid, and hang out by myself.

That’s pretty much what happened, except Sunny kept annoying me by taking off all her clothes every time she wanted to go swimming.  It seemed to me that the good lord had invented skinny-dipping for skinny people or he obviously would have called it fat-dipping, but other than that my day went OK except that I was furious with Sunny and couldn’t figure out why.  It ruined my acid trip, and that ticked me off even more.

The next morning I woke up first and there I was laying on the ground with nothing to eat resembling pizza, and 27 more days of this hell to endure so that I could—tricky me—get Sunny to pay my $75 rent.

The solution seemed obvious.  I would take more acid and fling myself off a cliff, and either I’d be happily dead or I’d find myself walking down a road in some parallel universe somewhere, Castaneda vindicated and I born again from the ashes of this cruel existence.  I got into Sunny’s backpack while she slept, and took my remaining hit of acid, plus her hit too for good measure, and set off for the bridge where I crossed over and headed upriver on the left bank.

Silly me, I had assumed it was going to be easy to find a cliff to jump off of, but after less than five minutes of easy boulder hopping next to the river, the boulders disappeared and there was nothing to walk on next to the river, nothing next to the river except vertical rock walls and other impossible slopes that impeded horizontal progress yet failed to qualify as “cliffs,” so I had to scale the rock walls horizontally in order to keep going upriver without getting way up above the river where I definitely didn’t want to be.  For some reason, on what was supposed to be my final walk in this particular parallel universe, and despite the mild-yet-comforting presence of LSD in my bloodstream which was already saturated with leftover LSD from the previous day, and despite the maximal proximity of the best swimming holes on Earth, I failed to make of this jaunt the pleasant little outing that it could have been.  It was after a few more episodes of getting around entire bends of the river without benefit of anything to walk on bigger than a toehold that my supposed interest in jumping off a cliff spontaneously dissolved into the obvious need to be careful in order to remain undamaged, and I channeled my driving need for intensity into a slightly different but potentially suicidal activity: I would walk from here to the next bridge at Highway 49 by traveling along the river.

Since I didn’t know if this hike would amount to two miles or twenty, I was filled with dread throughout the journey that I would be forced to sleep sitting on a cliff ledge somewhere; the further I went, the more wild and steep the river canyon became.  It was hard to stay low, down close to the water where I felt safer; when scaling cliffs horizontally, it’s sometimes necessary, because of a lack of handholds and toeholds, to partially climb a cliff to a height I would never ascend for fun, always hoping not to have to turn back and re-trace horrific experiences for lack of toeholds in a positive direction.

Finally at the crest of a magnificent vertical cliff, having scrambled up a steep and sandy slope that was unattired with anything to hold onto except—you guessed it—sand, I forced myself to edge closer and closer to the cliff’s edge.  I just wanted to stand where I would have stood if I was really going to “do it.”  The little slope down to the cliff’s edge seemed to pull on me: I could imagine my feet rolling right out from under me on the sand-strewn rocks leading to the actual precipice.  Once at the cliff’s edge, I forced myself to look down and imagine, from start to finish, the act of jumping and falling onto the jagged rocks and into the raging white-water a long ways below.  I found no part of this little exercise appealing and without turning around except to check on my footing, I inched backwards away from the cliff, until I was far enough away from it to safely turn my back on it, without it reaching up, grabbing me from behind, and flinging me over itself, cackling all the while: Fluid warrior my ass!  You’re just scared of your own ridiculous shadow!  I started looking for a gradual way back down to the river ahead, where it looked like the sheer canyon walls would end and I could go back to boulder hopping.

But first I had to get down there.  It took concentration made possible by fear to go in a generally downward direction over steep, rocky slopes almost barren of vegetation and very crumbly as a place to stand.  Of course part of going in a generally downward direction is that you’re forced to go uphill a little from time to time.  For example, once I had to climb and crawl up a crumbly little gully just barely less vertical than the cliff face it interrupted, in order to get up above the last impossible cliff.  Three-quarters of the way to the top of the long steep slope I was trying to scramble up, I completely ran out of any handholds and toeholds whatsoever, so I had to grab hold of a little poison oak bush growing out of the cliff and haul myself up the rest of the way by hanging from a very small but fortunately tough little plant that I normally would have avoided at all cost, and then digging my fingers into the sand as best I could to get up to where a teeny little lizard trail ran along the top of the last cliff in town.  This was the scariest part, till a few minutes later when I got back to the river.  And let me not forget to mention that I did not show any trace of poison oak infestation, which proves that altered states (e.g. the state induced by and immediately following the split decision to go ahead and hang momentarily with the full weight of the body from a poisonous little bush growing from a crack in a sheer rock wall 100 feet above a crazy river gushing through a boulder patch) affect the body’s immune abilities to a miraculous degree.  Sort of like hypnosis, but scarier.

Finally safe back down at the river’s rocky shore, I boulder-hopped upriver through lush forests next to incredible rapids and finally to a wider spot in the river where I felt compelled to cross, since I’d seen the highway, way up and off in the distance, and when I saw it I was looking across the river, so naturally I was itching to cross the river and make a beeline for that sighting.  Of course I’d failed to consider the fact that since the highway and river crossed each other anyway, I could get to either side of the highway from either side of the river.

But anyway, I could see that the water at this wide spot in the river was shallower and smoother-looking than anything I’d seen in a long time, so I took my shoes off, tied the laces together and hung them around my neck, and stepped into the water.

For some reason that I failed to give due consideration, the shallow water acted like it wanted to knock me over and carry me downstream.  This didn’t compute; like the swimming holes back at Bridgeport where the water smoothed out, this spot should be easy to wade right through.  A few more steps into the icy water and I couldn’t help but think that perhaps I was dealing with a strong current.  Five minutes later I’d only gotten a few more feet into it, because the current of the two-foot-deep water was so strong I felt I had to move with extreme care in order to not be knocked down and dragged away out of control.  It eventually occurred to me that the strength of the current has as much to do with the slope of the riverbed as it does the depth of the water, and I was starting to get cold, scared, and tired.

It came to a point where I had to consider going back to the bank where I’d started, because I was going to run out of fortitude before long and then it would be too late to turn back.  I thought about the past eight hours of nearly constant panic and decided it would be a dirty rotten shame to have to quit on something now after all I’d just been through.

So I continued on toward the middle of the river, where the water was only four or five feet deep.  Although it was now only crotch deep, I could barely move my legs without being snatched by the current.  I found that by holding on to large rocks I could move along a little faster.  Still, each step was a deliberate game of trial and error, a complex of risky decisions.  Finally as I headed into the deeper water, I found to my horror that if I grabbed a large rock—say a boulder the same size as myself—the surface area of my body and the surface area of the rock would combine to add up to enough surface area that, when multiplied by the pressure of the falling water, would grab the rock and pick it right up off the river-bottom; then I was hugging a flying boulder that was using me as an underwater sail.  So I stood in one place, unable to move, shivering violently, water up to my sternum, knowing with my whole body that I not only didn’t want to die—I actually sort of wanted to live—when my calves started to cramp up.  I knew that I had less than one minute to get out of the river or I would be dog meat on its way to the sea.  It had taken over 20 minutes to get less than halfway, so what the heck, why not swim.  If I had to die, I didn’t want to do it for standing in one place too long.  I took the shoes off from around my neck and untied them from each other, and flung them one at a time toward the far shore.  They both landed in the water because I had no strength left.  This is not a good sign, I figured; I am going to die today.

That decided, I plunged forward and felt the current grab me without the slightest hesitation.  I tried to keep my feet pointed downstream, so I could use them to bounce off boulders with instead of using my head for that purpose.  I had to be careful to breathe only air, no water; I had to relax enough to keep from panicking; and I had to paddle with my hands and kick with my cramped-up legs to try and have as much effect as possible in getting closer to the farther shore.

As complicated as all that sounds, it was over in less than half a minute and I was crawling onto the riverbank, shoeless but alive and undamaged.

I carried the one shoe I was able to find, and walked quickly on my numb feet, on nice trails made by humans, till after a short time I reached a sort of permanent picnic whose inhabitants wanted to know where the hell I’d come from.  Bridgeport, I said, and they all went -oooh- and told me that, in order to get up to the highway, it would be necessary to go back across the river.  I suddenly felt like crying, till one of them pointed further up the trail and I saw the curious rope-and-stick contraption crossing the river in mid-air, and it turned out to be a footbridge.  I continued along on my bare feet, crossed the footbridge and climbed a wide trail to the highway, where I stood, shoe in left hand, right thumb out, till a nice man came along in his old pickup truck and took me to Grass Valley.  He informed me that I’d only walked/climbed/crawled a total of about five miles; he’d made that trip himself a number of times, just for fun.

He dropped me off at a certain intersection not close to my home, and as I stepped down onto the pavement in my bare feet, Judas just happened to drive by in Sunny’s car.  He stopped and asked me why the hell I was carrying one shoe around with me, so I tossed my only remaining shoe into the weeds and got in the car.

We went home to Sky Ranch and looked through a big garbage bag full of marijuana leaves that someone had given Darshan, till we found enough buds to roll a small joint, then I went to my room and sat on my bed propped up against the wall, staring into space.  The effect of the LSD had been beaten out of me hours ago, but the shock of finding myself at home safe and sound, plus the marijuana, rekindled the LSD just enough that I was able to conjure up one hallucination—one that never really went away.

Somewhere in front of my eyes, floating in the dark, a small circle formed drawn with a fine black line.  Then alternating circles of light and dark grew from a common center, and the whole thing started to spin slowly.

Up to this day, I can lay down and close my eyes, and make the spiral lines appear.  If I imagine myself moving toward them, the circles get bigger than me and I enter them to find myself in a cavernous corridor or mine shaft which, if I can stay lucid to the end, opens once again into a—

—into a series of parallel universes called the dream world, where the rules of the solid world do not hold true.