all these cures and healings and solutions.
Why don’t we all just live, and not read into things? Make it simple, stupid. It’s easy for me to say. I seem to be wading in mud and enjoying it. I may be going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I’m enjoying the show. Something like that. What can I say that already hasn’t been said and said enough for a Roger Corman B-movie with a simple plot and one camera angle, a memorized script, no make-up, and a cast of thousands: the real world? Actors on the make in tinseltown, a la Lotusland. It’s all for free as we go through our lives in quiet desperation.
The wine is now bought, and I don’t even remember buying it. I do remember hopping or running up those steps, and asking for three bottles of white wine. It was only about twenty Euros. What’s the password? “Pass!” Old Groucho Marx used to be quite grouchy.
I love this old car, this red Visa with the good gas mileage. I never had a new car like Harris has. Nor have I had a mobile phone before now, either. I wouldn’t want to sell-out, give notice to my so-called radical friends in America sucking off the materialistic tit or red-in-the-face, with fat bellies and big garages and a new remodeling job just completed for that third bedroom that used to be a storeroom. It’s all been bootlegged, man, like, so cool.
We want to fool Uncle Sam and face the fool in the mirror, staring back at thee.
16.
WIEN NOT,
RECALLING RENDEZVOUS
Guertel, cruising along at 50kp/h when the tail lights light up. It’s rush hour, like the L.A. 5:30pm crowd, and it’s only 2:00pm on Sunday, that is, 14:00 in Austria, and a mild Stau/traffic jam, anyway. I think I’ll put on a little Dylan, maybe that “Biograph” tape, and regress, refresh my brain, light up the air waves with a little grain of sand . . . I am suddenly feeling good, I don’t know why. It’s been a good day. I don’t know how what’s next looks, but I don’t care. Life will take care of itself. If I get in the way, that’s OK, too.
There’s the flat now. How did I get to this Bezirk/district, already? Too busy living to notice the progress, movement, time passing. Time passes when you’re having fun, I guess. Now what am I doing first? It’s the second stage: I turn the key and head for the shower. I can’t wait to get under that hot shower. I must have walked farther than I thought. How could I be this messy? I throw the shirt into the dirty clothes bin. It’s really the same all over the world: Only the scenery changes. It’s all an illusion, a maya, so to speak.
Gee, that feels good. That water is nice and hot. The soapy suds wash all that dirt down the drain. My hair follows: the clean machine, the lathering hands, rub a dub dub. I drift to that woman and get a little horny for a moment. I start to lather suds over my cock and give it a few strokes as I recall that scene. Hard in a flash. It only takes a few seconds, it seems: I let out a guttural cry of release as semen is sprayed out and down the drain.
It’s only a mirage, a real-life story. Choices. It’s all choices and energy and living. It’s sweet and it’s frustrating. I was only minding my own business. I don’t want to keep wondering what-if, thus and so. I tell myself to shut up: that part that wants to have the zipless fuck, without any involvement. These aren’t the seventies, eighties, or nineties even, after all, nor is this the real Western, the cowboy-casual, laid back world of my earlier years. The California Kid returns. Native Son. Saunter on down the road, bunky, the reverb is in the back room where the hassle-free environment is replayed in time sequence.
“Timothy Leary’s dead,” went the old song, and now he is, on that extraterrestrial space teleportation, moving off Earth-base to settle onto friendlier planets or celestial bodies unknown: a great thinker and manipulator of the big myth of the normal life led with nonchalance in conformity by twentieth century man, out-of-focus and disconnected from his surroundings. He’s laughing now at those of us humming that song. The studied Harvard halls of madness, the Millbrook escapades on the white horse galloping on into cyberspace, the virtual-reality man. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” was what was needed at the time.
The word-speak, the program, the pioneer life led by running from the feds. The Texas charges of green substances:one joint, I think it was. Escaping to Algeria; the media had a circus. The white hair, effervescent energy-plus, exploring interior circuits that most of us aren’t willing to confront.
Timothy Leary is dead, but not forever . . . LSD dreams, the dead bodies in Nirvana, in Bardoland, awaiting further instructions for mortal humans to overcome the slow-consciousness mindless fuck ups of man, ready to spring forth an ex-communication from the human race, for the reformation.
No point in glorifying a drug guru, say the skeptics, asleep at the wheel, taking handouts from the wheeler-dealers on Capitol Hill, the gravitators and gawkers, rubbing noses and who-you-know in the bathrooms, snorting and sniffing, and up in smoke. The tobacco lads smuggling in Havana gold, puffing in good-old-boy parlors, with only shapely women erupting out of cakes dressed like Eve.
Tim did it for us, talked nonsense and made sense, too far ahead of normal minds to comprehend the gibberish. Got to freeze that brain, bring it back again when mankind catches up.
Oh, we tripped and hallucinated and came back and had flashbacks and then continued working, and grew old and died, and that was that. On the threshold: We saw the light, felt the vibrations, the energy, the universal oneness that normally would have passed us by, had we not been there, there on the line, marching and meditating and searching, there beside some of these fellows who felt and explored and went for more and dedicated their lives to blowing minds, carrying on with the cosmic joke. The buffoon, the fool, not just fading away.
What was this all about? The natural rhythms, the hopes and dreams, the schemes? Another day, another dollar mentality: Hop off that train.
Now we hear that 20 per cent escaped the green memes, thinking we are leaping ahead with the techno-revolutions only to be fooled by the fact that we all have to not-demonize the others and only 2 per cent, perhaps, have leapt to the second tier. Two per cent, according to Ken Wilber, have gone beyond the reconciliation and acceptance and in-house bickering about who is right and who is wrong. And the wheel of fortune keeps on spinning as we start to wake up a little.
The hobo hopped on in another era. This was fitting for the post-war, post-Eisenhower years’ blacklists, McCarthy had the magic spell, the hell-on-wheels Hoover FBI control, the ruining of lives. We read about it all.
I, Jesse, the ex-S.D.S. man, the student advocate, free speech and all the rest. What happened to all those years, fighting and chanting and smoking and singing and reflecting?
It’s come undone: an illusion, the sold-out cop out, continuing above ground on the way to achieving, busy-ness, the ideal life lived in bliss, plentifully content, at whose expense? The “Marin prosperity consciousness,” being hip, being cool, knowing all the right moves, getting an endorsement from Coke. These are the golden years, the expected results of living life to the fullest, buying into the party line, or being so independent that community is only a word in the dictionary, with the me-first and I’ll-get-mine mentality as God.
So where does this leave me, an expatriate in Vienna, looking back and forth from what-path-is-this-and-how-did-I-get-here?
I can’t believe this has all been thoughts, lost time. Oh no, stuck in Lodi again. Yes, drifting on, Jess, my man, the talking voices inside, again haunting me across the seas.
Visions of past and present reflect and reverberate across time, and now the last twenty minutes of warm water spraying on my
