Trip Guide: H.P. Lovecraft
Driving up Highway 101, through the Redwood Forests. It is beautiful, but the long silences between Amy and I give me a lot of time to think. Dan Bern drones on and on through the car stereo, singing songs of George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden paling around in Texas together after Bin Laden faked his own death... I just bought a terrible, unnaturally red slushie from a gas station called "Tiger Blood" that tasted like Pina Colada and throw up. What more could you expect from a drink named after Charlie Sheen's media meltdown? And like the televised freakout of its namesake- the one that immortalized him for 15 minutes before he withered away into 90 pounds of unemployable, coke-emaciated obscurity- it too seemed like a good idea at the time. The poor bastard. I blame marketing.
Maybe... And maybe I could blame the fact that I was breastfed until I was about 3 years old and coddled by mommy well into my 20s for some of my unhealthy dependency issues with women. Time to cut the fucking chord. Katherine was a crutch, a blank screen for my projections. What did I see? My own shadow. How could she have ever been anything else? She wanted a father, the one that died when she was 8 years old. I wanted a woman to coddle me and build my ego with shallow, insincere compliments. Many Freudian undertones to that whole situation you could hardly even call undertones: She called me "pappy" during sex frequently it began to sound normal.... And other thoughts I wrestle with, as we wind our way through forests of trees taller than any I've ever seen in the mountains of Northern California.
We stopped somewhere along the coast in the forest. Amy hopped out of the car and frolicked through the trees, running back and forth and jumping. It was adorable. She looked like a fairy. A tinge of some vaguely recognizable feeling emerged from deep within my body, and I quickly stifled it. "That's quite enough out of you."
We picked up two quintessentially smelly hippy hitchhikers, somewhere back in a small town called Garbersville. Nice enough fellows- the girl, Tiana, and her boyfriend Philip. They are hitching a ride with us into Portland. All of the lights turn yellow as we pass through them.
The boy has dreadlocks and looks a bit like a rasta. As soon as we stopped to pick them up, my first question before introducing myself was "Do you have any acid?" He told me as a matter of fact, he did, and he sold me his last two hits of blotter. Which was either a really good or a really bad idea, depending upon how the next 2 to 3 hours on the road pan out. "White fluff", he called it. "It's for sure good, clean acid." I'm sure. It tastes like an amphetamine analog. Beggars can't be choosers. I'll take it. I handed him a 20 and we started back on highway 101.
Conversation took a nasty swerve to far left of center when talk came around to the National Defense Authorization Act.
"The laws they passed, man" he said. "Now, kids are being snatched up in white vans by feds and taken off to mental hospitals. It already happened to me once. After a show, they took me after I had a bad trip and they locked me in a hospital. They doped me up on fucking seroquel and left me there to go crazy, man! One of our friends, he was in the woods at a gathering and he just disappeared flat out. Kids are just vanishing from the woods in Rainbow country.... They're trying to lock us all up... Or worse!"
"Jesus," I mumbled.
I envisioned a room full of Federal agents in a mental hospital behind a two way mirror, laughing as they tested awful memories extracted from hanged felons by snuff film pornographers on the sensitized young cells of junkies, and selling the photos developed from their brains on the black market.... The acid had begun to do its work.
I asked him if he had ever heard of Bohemian Grove, and chuckled.
"No. Why?"
"Furthur got paid to pay there once. Bob Weir and Phil Lesh. The Grovers are a rich group of corrupt politicians, bankers and fuckups, generally. They burn a big stone owl effigy, a bit like burning man. Every year. Nixon went there once, called it the 'faggiest goddamned thing he'd ever seen'."
"Heavy." The conversation had begun to feel tense.
"Fuck you, pay me," I said.
"The system wants to KILL us," he told me. "The Rainbow Family is the most dangerous enemy to the establishment."
"Eh? Rainbow Family? What makes them so dangerous? What exactly IS it that they do?"
"We camp out in the woods and make music."
"Oh."
"Really," he continued, "any traveling kid can just be yanked and black bagged by the government now. Most people wouldn't know they were even gone. Jacked in broad daylight, and that's a wrap."
"For playing music in a drum circle?"
I imagined all the half-dead, stricken with warts, homeless and psychotic heroin addicts in the tenderloin left to die in public parks. Why hadn't they been detained yet?
I smiled. "Something tells me if the hipsters were to be put into a camp, most of them would go on their own, voluntarily. You know. To be ironic."
Silence.
The sweet, younger girl in the back strummed innocently away at a mandolin as we pulled through a McDonald's- they wanted to go through the drive thru there rather than eat our organic apples with us. In the car, our whole vibe was a lot like the Manson family. The irony was not lost on me, however, when I started to peak on the LSD while waiting in line for soylent green burgers.
The advertisement seemed plastic and tawdry, the food looked unreal and smelled like burning plastic...
The next hour was a horror show. The kids in the back seat popped in a random mystery CD that they had found. It sounded like it came from another dimension. Backwards noises and guitar effects, weird chanting in some tribal language and crescendos that sent electrical chills through my spine. The car was full of hashish smoke as the we flew around the curves of highway 101. I looked at the highway, and it seemed to be a single stretch of road, no more than a mile, repeating itself endlessly. "The Chariot," a voice said to me, and it echoed inside of my head. I felt trapped in an infinity loop. "I AM ELECTRON!" I thought to myself. "I AM AN ELECTRON!" The lost highway. We were stuck inside of a fucking mobius strip! Until.... Until what? Death? Or was death merely the point where the alpha and omega overlapped to complete the circle.... Deeper, and deeper into the woods. Lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song randomly flashed in kinetic typography across my brain: "And we'll read from precious bibles/that are bound in blood and skin/that the wilderness is gathering all its children back again...."
"Let go. Love. Trust. Do you trust?"
It was a voice, but it wasn't my own. And it wasn't audible. It seemed to me to be coming from Amy's brain.
The events of earlier that morning flashed in front of my eyes.
I had realized I too was a liar, an adrenaline junkie, and an insincere person. How much of what I saw in Katherine that I hated was really just my own shadow? I had walked around the Tenderloin all morning and finally had copped a bag of brown powder. My hands were shaking as I hit in the bathroom of Carl's Jr.
On the ride back on the L, I thought to myself "Why are you still doing this? You are killing yourself to live, and it's not going to stop until you wise up. You held her accountable for everything she did to wrong you, but do you realize she did those things for the same reason you continue to do this to yourself? What of your friends? They have no idea you are doing this to yourself, why do you hide from them? Are you ashamed? Did it ever occur to you that maybe others operate on this level in different circumstances? That rush of adrenaline that you get when you know you are doing something that is not good for you. Where do you suppose that comes from? Why do you run from your own shadow?"
I didn't tell Amy and Pete on the ride out of San Fran that I was high on smack. I kept it to myself, as I nodded out silently in the passenger seat.
"It's not going to stop until you forgive her, forgive yourself, and wise up."
But it's a good deal easier to hate others for the things you have not yet come to accept about yourself than it is to change those things and to forgive.
We pulled up to a large sign post with a map and a picture of a huge redwood tree on it. The air felt so thick I could have cut it with a knife. Just then, it occurred to me that David Lynch was narrating my thoughts, which at the time seemed to be a sort of a mathematical equation involving Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page sitting on each others faces as a means of explaining the cyclical duplicity of the cosmos.
"The map, Phil... The map... It's like, veins. VEINS."
"Yes, my friend. Veins. Veins. VEEEIINNNSSSS....."
Inside of my body, I could feel the collapsed veins and junk damaged cells struggling to rebuild themselves, and I recognized the damage in my body as being a microcosmic and holographic representation of the damage man himself has done to the seas, and to the land and to the air. Amy turned towards me and said, "The U.S military has been killing off the whales. It is a genocide, and no one cares. Not even me. Not even you."
Satan was buttfucking the Virgin Mary with a greased up strapon inside of my head when we finally pulled up to the spot where we decided to camp. Amy and Tiana jammed on fiddle and mandolin and it sounded somehow strangely discordant. Wild and frantic. The acid was creeping up the spine again, filling my brain with sharp and hideous clarity. Every nerve in my body felt aware of its own structure simultaneously. My brain started firing random fragments of thoughts at me, but for some reason they were coming out in Sumerian. Or Lovecraftian?
IA! IA! DAGON! IA! CTHULHU FHATAGN!
I sprawled out under the stars. My lungs hurt, and I was coughing up badly. The sky stretched and expanded and warped and contracted. A voice from deep inside of me murmured "Nature will have its revenge." But where were the voices coming from?
The stars... the night sky was clear as crystal and pretty as a picture, and they stretched out as far as I could see.
"Just think of all those galaxies out there," I said, to nobody in particular.
Amy and I slept in the car together that night. I rolled around for hours, trying to make myself comfortable, but I could not.
Before she fell asleep in the driver's seat next to me, Amy began to suck, bite and chew on an apple ravenously, making succulent and animalistic noises.
"You wanna bite?" she said to me, and smiled so sweetly.
"Amy, when strange women randomly ask me to share an apple with them, I am accustomed to saying 'no'."
She laughed, smiled at me so mischieviously. "You sure?"
And my God, I wanted her then and there more than anything. There was something so perversely innocent about Amy. She was naturally flirtatious, and a tom boy. She had a sort of a penis envy about her, and was more vocal about aggressive kink than just about any man I had ever met. She was a chaotic neutral, somehow balanced through the process of her art, which was her life.
("Heretic!", she cried out. "Cast forth the stones from your mouth!")
I felt tense then, and the maddeningly visceral waves of acid frenzy lit my genitalia aflame and sent long, pulsating torrents of electrical currents through my body. The celibacy of traveling for days on the road was torturing me.
And yet- No way. Couldn't happen.
"Do you feel tense?" I asked.
"Not really, just sleepy."
I tossed and turned. The hitchhikers' dog behind us was keeping me awake, and I told Amy that his noises and heavy breathing were periodically freaking me out.
"Try to think of the 'outside' of the car. The 'not car'."
Of course.... The outside. The outside of what? Outside of....
How huge was it? It was all so vastly alien, so foreign. I was such a small, small particle among particles in the body of a universe that seemed horrifically, and yet beautifully foreign to me then. Something outside of the car, the "not car", the "not self", was beckoning. Something outside of... What?
The smell of the car by the time we reached Oregon the next morning was making me sick to my stomach. The dog had vomited. The four of us smelled like half dead roadkill hippies rotting in the summer afternoon, old fast food and rotten apple corps.
The acid had kept me up all night, gibbering to myself in some half-forgotten Lovecraftian dialect, and my nerves were raw. I began drinking around 11 AM to soothe those deadened nerves, remnants of the razor sharp shards of revelations appearing and disappearing into the Redwood Forests that night, leaving my senses reeling under the night sky. My muscles were tense. The sky was overcast and drizzling off and on and on. Amy asked if she could sleep with her head on my shoulder, and I said yes. We rested.
And in the morning after the night, I fell in love with the light.
Meanwhile, as I write this, we pull to a stop at a fill up point a few hours south of Portland. Tiana and Philip play violin and ukelele, and we harmonize effortlessly with them on a very unconventional rendition of "Friend of the Devil" by the Dead as I have realization that I am both synthetic and organic, spontaneous and predetermined, mechanical and natural. Somewhere, far off, flowers are blooming, a dog rummages through a garbage can, a fallen angel regains its wings, and a butterfly flaps and causes a bilious cough in a grandmother halfway around the world in Shaftsbury. Prometheus shrugged.
They popped another mystery CD into the car stereo, and it was the Leonard Cohen record I had been thinking about the night before.
"Nobody could really hear him, the night so thick and green.... I'D LIKE TO TELL MY STORY NOW, SAID ONE OF THEM SO BOLD...."
I looked over at Amy, and half to her, half to myself said: "We all have an orbit to be on, and when we get off course, we CRASH."
She smiled.
"Yes. It is lucky for us that we have the gravity of others."
I first met Amy in New York city. I knew her boyfriend, Howard, whom I had vague memories of working with in the past. At least, I thought I did.
She wrote to me randomly one night and told me she knew of me through Howard. She explained that she was sorry, but, she had fallen asleep with her phone under her pillow the night before, and dreamt that I had called her and she had agreed to come pick me up in Philadelphia where I was living at the time and that we hit the road together. What a strange response to have to a dream like that, what a strange thing to apologize to me for, and stranger still that months later we did exactly that.
We are told these things happen for a reason.
We arrived in Portland around 4 in the afternoon that day, and I was half drunk and I fell into a deep sleep.
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