With all of my other senses satisfied;
I found the final drug to be the respect and admiration of my peers. Though it is a needy drug, I possessed the tools to support it. This side of Glory, I know little other ‘low-maintenance’ joy. Pride is the constant foe of this ‘rush’, insidiously seeking demolition of the foundation.
The kill or be killed sub-culture, has its cult following in every significant society. It recruits their young by pointing out hypocrisy in their ruling philosophy. It is as if; Darwin’s elaborate joke, met a friend in Nihilism and its second cousin twice removed, Despair.
Before I had peers, I thought that the end was in Art. The mélange of mushrooms, weed, red wine and sensory overload or strictly; sleep depravation, sub-contracting to organized-crime and maintaining a constant seven+ distraction field,… still lacked on the ‘key to completion scale.’ A rude skeleton key for the job,.. found cross-legged in my defensible corner, on a burgundy Persian rug, was the joy of AIR-BRUSH art. In end, I found all other distractions to be tools of necessity in search of truth. Yet, opiates, Swiss chocolate and I, had only a loose familiarity, not as yet formally introduced.
So, finding myself as an invited guest inside something that I didn’t understand, at least offered peace of the moment in purpose. In all other cases, the madding truth of revelation had left me hollow, walking or running away, muttering or yelling, respectively, “Bullshit.” I inspired myself with the old whips; “Get it up once more for the Queen!” & “Who knows, this time could be real.”
When all eyes awaited my troubled discourse, “Time is not constant,” I heard the voice in my throat say, just before one of the old guys assistant shrieked, “Heresy!”
The old guy in question, raised his hand, showing the back of it to the noise maker, keeping a steady, friendly gaze on me the speaker. The sadness that I had experienced earlier, had turned to joy. I was addressing the group of old guys that met in my sub-basement, for the first time.
∞
I called it ‘my’ sub-basement, strictly because it is mostly beneath the basement of the house, complete with mineral-rights, that we had purchased from some other old guy, who has now ceased to be.
My first encounter with the sub-basement had been accidental, as no mention of it was made on the property deed. Which incidentally had been surrendered to us for 1/3 of the asking price,.. exactly the amount that we could afford without hardship or mortgage. The house itself, was Victorian-cottage, built in the early teens of the last century. I had seen houses, not far away, built from the same blue-print. They were all renovated to fit more comfortably into their changing environments. Some had new siding, window holes, walled in, or were camouflaged by hedges and old growth trees. The ‘seen’ of ‘I had seen’, was elusive in my mind. The images seemed two dimensional panning, as if noticed by my subconscious while I was making an odd trip to a store or accidentally taking a strange route to a familiar place.
I had gone into the basement, a horrible dank place, accessed by a hatch in the kitchen floor, to investigate why, water did not flood it. There hadn’t been a lot of ‘old guy stuff’, which I found moderately disappointing. I was passively looking for clues as to what, if anything, I had signed on for.
The base-price for the property, that we had accepted, had been premised on a technicality of perpetuation. For tax purposes, the land belonged to a mendicant order that couldn’t be sourced by name.
To enjoy the benefits of this arrangement, I had to take a blood oath of servitude as the ‘Parson of this Parish outlet.’ It had no parishioners, and as I would find out, had even less in my dreams. But, a good dream lately, was constituted by a nightmare in which, the other participants were more paranoid than I was.
Assured firmly, that I would not be inconvenienced by this, the lawyer, theirs, as I didn’t bring one, had only two demands and one suggestion. The blood oath, seemed more clinical than religious. ∞ The lawyers office, which I doubt that I could find again if I had too, was a basement room, bookshelves in carved cheaper exotic woods, arched into the centre of the ceiling, only interrupted by a tall French window kept sparkling to observe the old brick wall across a narrow walk path and a door. ∞The door? There must be a door, I wasn’t always here.
“What was this about a blood oath?” The lawyer examined my left thumb for size and form. Leaving me at the tit-high counter, he extracted a box of glass slides from a pigeon hole at his private desk. The tile floor on that side of the counter was two feet higher than this.
It was a nice illusion to prevent the size-bigoted from noticing that, the lawyer’s working world, was a miniature. A slide snapped into my mind followed by a flutter of other stills. These were the postcards from my nightmares or movie posters from my other reality. It gave me the calmness to cope with the little man returning with a glass microscope slide and an instrument of blood-letting.
The slide that he presented had a basin like a desert spoon. The instrument of blood-letting, was less spectacular. It was a ¼ inch nickel spike with a hilt on a silver inlay ivory handle. Its girth at the hilt was threatening. I said as much, and with his reply, in a witty oldschool bedside way he said, “Now you know how the women must have felt.”, plunging the spike into the pulse in my thumb. We exchanged evil smirks, then he precisely wobbled the damned thing, clenching at hilt with thumb and forefinger, pinky aloft and index finger the devil of rotation.
With a ‘ready-steady’ eyebrow gesture, he extracted the instrument and a warm layer of goo formed between the glass basin and my thumb. “Ehhx-ccelll-lent”, was his focused response , clapping a thin glass slide cover over the specimen, like this was the first time that this procedure had gone this well.
He scurried away, leaving me to deal with the leaking thumb issue. The hole wasn’t spurting so much as gushering in rhythmic throbs. I chose to put it in my pocket and pinch the hole onto the two ply of jeans and pocket material with my index finger. I tried not to make too much of a fuss about it and he tried not to notice the 4 inch puddle stain on my jean pocket, under the offended hand.
Next he produced from up his sleeve, a piece of fine white paper folded into an envelope. Catching my eye, he set it between us for a few moments, before deftly making a show of unwrapping the contents. His hands moved like a carnie dealing a hand of three card Monty.
All in one movement, the left side of his jaw clenched, the right open in a eye-tooth snarl-smirk , he showed me the dark powder in the crease of the unfolded paper, bragged “ground black spider” and blew it in my face.
I took a half step back, brought my hands to a combination of two yoga form positions. Aghast or a gaffe, I thought to name my hand position as ‘half, choke a gorilla, half surf the poppy’s petal’. My next big decision, was whether or not to ‘take a knee’ as they say in football.
As the kaleidoscopes emerged from the purple side of the pink clouds, he suggested, “Do no renovations that you first don’t dream.”
I searched for him in the center but the center was busy. I caught a glimpse of him walking away in the peripheral of the outer paisley. I thought that I heard him say “Thanx man, its been a trip!”
∞
As is normal, with older houses, our property was an obvious 2 feet lower than our adjacent neighbors. These neighbors, friendly over the fence, occasionally mentioned water coming into their structures and did I have such issues. I had in fact checked after each mention to oddly find the damn thing dry, for no reason clear to vision.
In the dim light provided by a single 60watt incandescent bulb, I would hang my head and shoulders gingerly into the hatch hole in the kitchen floor with fear of spooky-crawly things and look around. Invariably, my mental synopsis on the situation consisted of; ancient broken porous cement, crumbing in some places, repeated bad floor leveling efforts shaling-off and disadherent one to the other, moderately relevant weather tolerant articles in long-term storage and fully functioning furnace and water heater,… no problems here. It must be all of the old-growth trees in the yard whose roots must be blocking all water entrances to the basement,.. hhmmm, yeah, that’s gotta be it. Then, I would extract my head, turn off the light, close the hatch, and not look again for another three weeks.
It wasn’t until mid-summer one year, about 11am, the one neighbor had looked incredulously at me on my ‘trees’ response to the 4 inches of water that he had and I none, I took action. Entirely forgetting that I had been grazing on an ounce bag of mushrooms for the past ten days or so, with no end in sight, I smoked the prerequisite 12 cigarettes and drank the 4 mugs of espresso necessary to focus on a coup of this magnitude.
I never really felt good until 3pm, so; the focal group, 12 cigarettes, the espresso and me, would invariably bring me closer to that destination. I felt as though I was dressed okay for the activity.
Not wishing to risk my eternal place in Valhalla, I stood up purposefully, as I always do after a smoke break and moved towards the destination. Flipping ON the light and drawing open the hatch, I descended down the stairs as though done a thousand times before, but in this case, it was my first time, not counting those recurring nightmares.
At the bottom of the stairs, standing on passable solid ground, when my eyes adjusted, I noticed that there was bugger-all for headroom and someone really should vacuum down here. Mortared-in root-cellar or not, this was disgusting.
Granted I was employing a military tactic against my own squeamishness, in that, articulation of the extent of futility, goes a long way to motivate men to happily go along to certain death. It creates room in the mind of any ‘serial-volunteer’, for notions of a greater good or a yet-to-be-divulged master-plan, or amongst the seriously stupid, the issue, that ‘the overseer’, cares whether we rot or burn. I was in the last category.
No time now to contemplate what percentage of my DNA was actually ‘Squeamish’,( a radical splinter group of the Amish who accept the use of power-tools.) I stepped boldly off the semi-stable platform at the bottom of the stairs on to a not dissimilar surface of shaling concrete of inferior grade.
I first examined the remarkably dust free breaker-box and moved on to the ‘while I’m down here’ checking of the furnace filter. Impeccable. Not really sure of what I was looking for, I thought that I would mutter around doing useful things in hopes of tripping over the truth of the matter.
As Taoist as this sounds, I was lost for a better plan to assuage my culpability in not being a co-victim of weather, with my seemingly agitated neighbor. It seemed potentially damaging to our relationship to suggest to him that his karma wasn’t worth a shit and that he should look to his own motivations and not my basement, which at this moment, I felt fully in charge of.
I new from past experience, that that was the sort of thing that, if I had to explain it,.. there was no point in talking about it. It may have been that moment of vengeful disappropriate proprietariousness that led me to the truth at the center of the thing.
A still ‘plumbed-in’ disused, cast-iron softwater looking thing, seemed to be less firmly affixed than one might expect, considering all localized corrosion, guck accumulation and such other indescribable master-pieces of nature and time.
Striking my lighter to have a closer look, under the false mandate of ‘seeing if anything needed to be done’, I forgot what I was really there for. 3:10pm and all was well, by my watch.
As the profundity of the lime build-up formations began to enthrall me, I remembered ‘the mushrooms’ and pulled up to regain my dignity. It wasn’t that I was tripping, but rather that it was time for more. Peak and plane, peak and plane.. just to maintain altitude and a proper sense of normalisy. The illusion that this artifact wasn’t central to all occurrences of moderate to extreme weirdness, was fully buttressed.
Never before, had I seen an article so cleverly disguised as irrelevant and so obviously displayed as pointless to remove or otherwise molest. I backed away ghostishly, not unfixing my stare incrementally in retreat, but implying a shift of purpose that sequestered my attention by gradient urgence.
Being always ready to respond to things before they happen, I knew that I should probably be upstairs 4 minutes from now. I nodded respectfully to the thing in efforts to conceal my intentions from it and turned to mount the stairs into the light.
I was chewing the second last cracker in the series of 8, each spread with Cheez-Whiz & an eighth gram of ‘shrooms’, topped with alfalfa sprouts when, the privacy screen in the kitchen door spoke in my neighbors’ voice and vernacular. “Ya,” I said and let him in.
I gestured to the last cracker like he could have it, but he condescended to it as I assumed he did to all vegetables. It was the neighbor with the four inches.
Could he borrow a pipe-wrench for his sewer cap, and did I want to smoke a joint?
I started to tell him “No, to the weed,.. because I had some things to get done,” but in my preverbal rehearsal, it sounded like I was disrespecting his dope, so I nodded politely and handed to him the better of the antique pipe wrenches displayed above the sink.
Not really used to sharing joints with other people, not since high school, I tried to remember protocol. Oh yeah, tuff, tuff, hold,.. don’t Bogart. Then make conversation without exhaling.
“I think its sprinkled with heroin,” he offered last toke.
“Yeh,” accepted I, “I can taste it,.. just what I needed for today.”
“So what were you doing before I so rudely interrupted?” He smiled stonedishly at me.
“Oh, I was looking at the fucked-up concrete full of tree roots in the basement,” I offered as a viable reality overlay for what I was doing.
“You should cut-‘em-down,” his solution to everything.
“What, so I can have water in my basement too?” said I hoping not to sound too sarcastic.
Remembering what he had come for, he gestured thanx with the wrench, politely smiled still holding in the last of it and returned to his place. I watched his will to cut down every tree over 4 feet tall, go with him. At some point, I mused, there is no dealing with these people.
The weed was nothing special, but the opiate nicely clipped the ‘zoomer’ peak so that I could go back to work. I put the last cracker in a sandwich bag and into the fridge to keep the alfalfa sprouts fresh, reassessed the ‘done in here’ aspect of the kitchen, and sat down at the edge of the breakfast nook to smoke and drink my now cold coffee.
“How the hell am I supposed to get anything done, with all these fucking interruptions?” I muttered, actually only just realizing my rage at ‘his’, Mr. 4 inches’ aggression to my trees.
“Now, I won’t hug a tree, unless it is a very special tree,” (going back down the stairs), “…and that, that tree has to make eye contact.” Standing now in front of the soft water thing, “… I mean, no means no, I’m not just going to rush up on a tree,… and forcibly ‘hug’ it.” I said putting my hand forward, onto a less cruddy spot on the thing and pushed. It moved a whole ¼ inch and the sump hole that I hadn’t notice before, got 4 inches deeper with a hiss.
When I knelt and put may hand on the bottom of the hole to check its integrity, the whole thing swung off to the side. The new bottom was only 4 feet down and was not completely dark. In head first as always, the bottom was found to be a ledge. Squatting now on this ledge in passable light, my feet over the edge found ground.
At first it was a disused cistern carved out of rock. Now maybe it was a small cavern with beams of light coming out of, what would later prove to be 4 and 6 inch drill holes, nickel plated, for some ancient ‘fiber-optic’ effect.
Looking around for clues to my purpose here, benches, tables and chairs were carved into the walls. These benches, tables and chairs, were not empty. I thought I had entered a congress of dissimilar rodents and marsupials. I found a chair and sat back politely. The one, now a man, as they all were men, waited until I was settled and continued to speak.
“The salient point is obvious. Any law, starting with the phrase, ‘possession of..’ is a direct contradiction of the ‘presumed innocent’ doctrine. Being that, no thing in itself, can be declared ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with any legitimacy, to forbid ownership of any article must be rooted in deception.
If I for instance, as a law maker, say that no man nor beast shall be found in possession of an apple, on penalty of death. Leaving the imagination to loom over the possible greater punishment for manufacturing, propagation or distribution of such said apples, is the act of a tyrant.
When all are convinced that an apple is an evil thing on the merits of existing law of such severity, do we then issue permits of possession for a select few? Will these permit-holders now be sneered at and demonized by both citizen and constabulary, until they themselves wonder the value of the permit, discard it and return to purchasing apples on the black-market, perpetuating the myth that apples are bad?
Completely overlooked is the fact of the obvious contradiction. A sane man would tell the lawmaker that, “Lawmakers in general have now forfeited the right to speak on the subject of apples.”
The logic is simple; If an apple can not be declared good or bad, the prohibition of its possession, hinges on the premise that the possessor will do something bad with the apple.
This, motherfuckers, is the presumption of guilt, the assumption of ill intent. The entire legal system crumbles on this point, yet remains to stand, mummified in red tape.
Who the fuck let these sons of bitches pick up a writing instrument in the first place? Was everybody on sabbatical to the Himalayas, out of human contact? My fucking Christ, half of the people who are incarcerated today, are there for owning something.
In a free market capitalist society, one group of assholes, who have forsaken their immortal souls in quest for power, have become drunk with the power to tell another group of assholes, which necessity of life they may or may not have.
Now just because it is relevant, it is illegal to say the words ‘BLACK-MARKET’. It is a hate crime, punishable by 25 years in prison, yet, lawmakers persist. The origin of the word comes out of segregation. The undocumented transactions of a group of people considered illegitimate, due to their racial origins. White people barter: Niggers engage in black-market activities. Fuck this word!
The simple action of not informing an official every time I get my johnson sucked doesn’t make me a member of the mafia. Not that I consider any aspect of their society as inherently wrong, he caveated. Did those politically correct cocksuckers not notice this atrocity or was it a deliberate act to perpetuate a stereo type?
In my neighborhood, it would be called the beige market. A people not accepted by either of their races of origin, kept so poor, they could not survive without non-documented transactions.” The period at the end of his words, hung in the air like a dinner-bell.
Everyone got up and shuffled off to the dark orifices that they were comfortable with. I didn’t know what to do, I got up and went out by the hole that I had entered by.
I stood looking back down the hole until a small man, a near transparent head floating over a colourless paper suit, leaned in and looked up at me saying “giggle it.”
“What?” I queried.
“Giggle it back and forth, the thing that you pushed to get in,.. giggle it.”
“Okay”, I did as he asked and all was as before.
∞
Back at the breakfast nook, it was 10:30am, 10:35 when Tina appeared. “It happened again” I said to her back.
She was stirring condiments into whatever she was drinking, and took what I said as an invitation to sit. She never spoke to me unless I posed a direct question, either directly or indirectly.
She hadn’t left since the night that she came home with me under the pretext of sex. I wasn’t even really sure of which part of the house that she lived in.
It bothered me, the first couple of times that I woke up with her coarse yellow hair lightly flogging my hips and stomach while her hands and face did what was necessary for her to get what she needed when she turned and mounted reverse cowgirl.
That stopped bothering me and my altruistic sense of morality and commitment to my happy marriage when, looking at her back, she was translucent.
Several times later, thinking it a boyish dream, I took presence of mind to grasp her hips and add ‘power-assist’ to her linear motion. My hands found no substance in her translucence, entering her visually represented space. Yet, her actions, her physical mass and movement in relation to mine continued to exist.
“Stop, that tickles” was all she said, not altering her purpose or movements.
My first thoughts on these occurrences were vague. I assumed that what was happening, had nothing to do with me.
In any cautioned practical discussions of dreams with my most enlightened contemporaries, it all got binary. Dreams are relevant, or they are not. Dreams are prophetic, or they are not. Dreams are entertaining, or and strictly or, they are a reassessing or reformulising of fragments of information that we have lost track of being in possession of.
This chapter is continued as True Fiction Chapter 3b
