Universe 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  The people were really welcoming to strangers, and would come right up to rap with us on the street. A lot of them were trying to get sponsors to come to America and make the affluence scene. My old man tried to tell them to forget that shit. In America they’d be hated and spat at. They’d have no freedom and no dignity. But they just smiled slow smiles and we could tell that their heads were into plumbing and refrigerators and cars and all the plastic crap we were trying to get away from.

  We decided we wanted to go into one of the bush villages where it was really different, where the people were really into the here and now and there were no government buildings and stores and that kind of Americanized shit.

  One dude we’re rapping with on the waterfront starts telling us about this village he was raised in. On a little peninsula, surrounded by a big lagoon . . . Sea Dog Bank . . . there were so many mangoes they were used to feed the pigs. Everyone sat in the sun, grooving together, sharing, singing, and digging each day. Wow! it really sounded like the place, a paradise!

  The little ferry that went there, twice a month, was leaving in a few days, and when it left we were on board with the boatman, a few packages and bundles, and two drunk young brothers holding an enormous bin of cucumbers.

  We started up slimy, green Bender Creek, and soon found ourselves in a shallow, twisty canal through a thick mangrove swamp. Birds we couldn’t see were screeching, fish we couldn’t see were splashing, insects we couldn’t see were biting us, and once we heard a loud “plop” and saw a small, grayish crocodile swimming alongside the boat.

  “Moonbeam, get your hands out of the water, baby!” Wow, I hate to restrict her freedom like that, but there aren’t even any clinics around here!

  The air was like a warm, wet washcloth and my old man was into a heavy number about how this was the African Queen, and he was Humphrey Bogart and I was Katherine Hepburn and we were being chased by Germans and blood-sucking leeches. No loony bins around here, either. ...

  * * * *

  “The Garden of Eden,” is what my old man started calling Sea Dog Bank, “from the oldest, campest book of all.”

  And it really was a together spot. Our friend at Bender Creek Town had told us that there wasn’t much use for bread there, but if we stocked up on some presents we would get right into the good vibes of the place ... so (on his advice) we bought some cloth, honey, cheap flashlights, rum and canned stuff and (my old man feeling like Columbus) started laying it on the brothers and sisters who came to meet the boat. Well, it like really freaked them out and they started hugging us and welcoming us, without even knowing our names. Wow, their heads were in such agiving place.

  The big, boss Mamma of the place, Miz Rose, finally shows up, and hearing that we aren’t planning to go back with the ferry, but are actually thinking to live here, she gets the most turned-on look on her face and starts ordering her daughters around in a shrill jabber that we later found out was a mixture of African, Carib Indian and English picked up from wandering ministers and a few transistor radios. “The Tower of Babel,” mumbles my old man. I really don’t know what he’s talking about half the time, but he’s been doing a lot less of that, lately.

  Miz Rose must’ve had about a million daughters, all by her shriveled little one-legged husband who hunted crocodiles and had once had to cut off his own leg with a machete when it was bitten by a poisonous snake out in the bush. Before we could even finish a joint, the daughters had led us to this neat, funky little hut whose owner had recently died. It had dirt floors and a thatch roof (full of all kinds of creepy-crawly things, but harmless and beautiful . . . not like city bugs which reflect everyone’s hate vibes). There was a straw mattress on a wooden frame, a cooking hearth, a few candles, and tin dishes, and not much else. . . . Zen as all hell. We were told that we could crash here for $5 a month.

  One of the daughters, pretty, but almost toothless, demanded all our dirty clothes and, laughing like I was a little kid when I offered to help, marched off with the bundle on her head to scrub them in the pond. Another daughter brought us a bucket of natural rain-water from the big wooden vat in which it’s collected and stored. Another one brought us a basket of fruit, and Miz Rose herself, all 250 pounds of her, jabbering orders to everyone she passed, brought us a big armadillo shell in which pieces of armadillo (tastes like chicken), fish, breadfruit, and plantain had been steamed in coconut milk.

  Outa sight! A paradise! In front of our hut were coconut palms and an immense mango tree with orchids crawling up the trunk. A little white beach led to the front lagoon where people swam and the men fished. Behind the huts were the gardens, chickens and pigs, which the women tended, and eventually, the back lagoon where the outhouses were, with hungry, shit-eating catfishes swimming underneath, and where nobody swam or fished.

  There was no garbage dump. What the people didn’t eat, the dogs and chickens ate . . . what they left the pigs ate. Anything that couldn’t be eaten was burned for fuel or reused in some way. A total, organic ecology trip . . . and Moonbeam could wander naked, up and down the village, playing and bumming food, with no cars or any other danger to rip her off.

  Wow, we were totally into grooving with the whole scene, for a while. Of course, it was hot, bitching hot, and we couldn’t swim too far out into the lagoon, because of the sharks, or sit too long in the shallow water, because of the sun . . . and the mosquitoes and sand fleas were into a heavy hostility trip . . . and in the day, it was too hot to do much more than paddle in the lagoon or sit around getting stoned. In the night it was mostly too hot to sleep, but there was nothing else to do, so we slept anyway, with roosters crowing up and down the village at daybreak to let us know when the hour or so of coolish dawn had arrived and we could move around a little. We had read all our books and most of the cheap paperbacks which the boatman had bought for us in Bender Creek Town. (For a few bucksa month, he would pick up our check, mail any dope and any store shit we wanted for ourselves, or as presents for Miz Rose and her many daughters.) And, like there was nothing much we wanted to do, and nothing much we had to do, thanks to Miz Rose . . . and, well, after a while our energy started getting low, really low. We were kind of thinking of going to a place we heard about up in the hills, where it was cooler, and really beautiful, with pine trees, and all ... a paradise . . . but it was kind of hard to get from here to there.

  One dawn morning, Miz Rose and her old man (who makes it better on one leg than most men would on three) stuck their heads into our curtained doorway and told us that the land crabs were running out in the bush, and would we like to go get us some.

  We got dressed and came out. It seemed like everyone “from six to sixty” as they say in the ads, was there with big burlap bags and long wooden tongs for picking up the crabs, and singing a little number about “crab soup.” We left Moonbeam with one of the old folks and, for the first time, walked the mile or so to where the end of the village joins the low, bushy jungle.

  There was a funky little tumbledown hut a little ways into the bush. It was leaning to one side, with mangy, sagging thatch. A sound of faint drumming came from inside, which was really a turn-on. We stopped in front of it, and Miz Rose boomed out, louder than ever, “Brother Jo, bring us something against de do-do-mon!”

  The drumming continued. “He hearing good no more,” explained Miz Rose as she sent in one of her daughters who, after a bit, came out leading what must’ve been the oldest man I have ever seen. He was stiff, mostly blind with cataracts and half-deaf, but you could tell from the smile on his face that his head was in a truly beautiful and spiritual place.

  “You get de lan’ crab, eh?” he said in a high, cracked voice. “Mind de do-do-mon don’ snatch de li’ ones!”

  Miz Rose walked up and yelled directly into his ear, “Give us someting against de do-do-mon!”

  “Eh?”

  “Someting against de do-do-mon!” she bellowed.

  He nodded and his smile got even broader. He began fumbling with some leather bags t
hat hung around his neck. Finally he selected one and handed it to Miz Rose saying, “You bring me some crab soup, hear?”

  Miz Rose assured him we would, as he tottered back in to begin drumming and singing some more. Then she began to take tiny pieces of what looked like bark out of the little bag and feed them to everyone.

  Whatever it was, it was a truly righteous gas. It had a very strong, sweet odor and we felt the flash immediately, like a joyful pop inside our heads. Then we were off on the clearest non-jittery, non-paranoid speed trip, which made cocaine seem like 7-up, but we knew it was something totally different, cause we could still smell the strong, sweet smell of it on our bodies.

  “Right-on, brother Methuselah,” grooved my old man. “You do deal in truly telepathic shit.”

  We skipped off, giggling and talking with the rest, the men slashing the undergrowth with machetes, until we came to the crab holes. The crabs were big and blue with angry eyestalks and large, pinching claws. We couldn’t manage to catch a single one . . . but everyone else soon had a big, writhing sackful, and we knew there’d be no shortage of crab soup in the village that night Besides, the main idea in our heads was to pay a little visit to Brother Jo, to dig some of his drumming and to trip out on some more of his outa-sight, mind-bending herbs.

  We mentioned this to Miz Rose on the way back and she told us that he was the bush healer, but very poor, and that he could tell us all kinds of far-out stories about the earliest people on Sea Dog Bank, and about some of the strange creatures that lived in the water and the bush. He could give you a song or a medicine for anything that was bugging you, and she was sure that if we brought a little present, he’d really dig to rap with us.

  So the next morning we set off to his hut with some canned goods and a spare daughter to help us communicate.

  It was almost completely dark inside, sour smelling and stifling, even in the early morning, with all kinds of creepy/crawly/biting things. There was a heap of sleeping straw and leaves in the corner, a lot of moldering food scraps, some wooden and deer-hide drums and some little piles of mushrooms, herbs, bark and other organic-looking goodies. “Nothing plastic and bourgeois here,” my old man murmured.

  It wasn’t all that easy to rap with him, but he did a little joy number when we laid the canned goods on him, and gave us a great big smile when our guide-daughter blasted into his ear (in a voice that would have made her mother proud) an order to tell us some songs and stories!

  He started off in an endless mixture of Spanish, African and Bible English to sing and mumble and croon and chuckle and preach . . . and like we could only dig about a third of what he was saying, and a lot of that was old-timey Christian cat-crap, but we sat there well into the afternoon, sweating and scratching, and, when the guide-daughter wasn’t looking, sampling some of the herbs and getting high, and getting sleepy, and getting the farts, and feeling our heads getting lighter and purer . . . and every now and then our heads would get into the same space-time as his, and we’d start really tripping out on some story or song.

  “De Ashi-pampi, dey li’ people. Dey come at night an’ dey eat de embers from de fire-hot, but dey no harm people. . ; . An’ dis song it cure de boils. . . . An’ de Jack-O’ Lantern, it be a big boat with many lantern. It sail into de lagoon on dark nights, but when de men go out for search in de dories, it disappear. . . . An’ dis song I hear on de docks in de war . . . Run, Kaiser William, run for your life, for if the Russians get you, they’ll surely take your wife. . . . An’ dis root make a tea for quiet you liver. . . . An’ de do-do-mon, him all cover wi’ fur and he eyes be big and green an he feet be webbed like a duck an’ he live under de bushes. Sometime him sneak into de village at night and steal de baby who have lost de parents or de wife who have lost de husband. If you eat what de do-do-mon give you, you never come back, but if you no eat den de do-do-mon him let you go. . . . Dese mushroom is what de do-do-mon favor to eat, but it be poison for regular mon....”

  The old brother pulled a few tiny, blackish dried mushrooms out of one of the little leather stash bags around his neck and showed them to us . . . they looked pretty wicked in the dim, fly-buzzing light. As he put them away one of them dropped to the floor, and my old man and me looked at each other and grinned. We knew all about those “poison” mushrooms, they usually contained the most turned-on shit . . . and one certainly couldn’t hurt, not shared between two people ... just a little “recreational dose,” dig?

  So my old man picked up the mushroom and we began to nibble on it, nice and slow, getting together with the woodsy taste....

  And the old man was droning on. “An’ de greazy mon, him crawl in de window at night and molest de woman. . . . An’ dis prayer to de Holy Mother, it be good for de toothache . . .” And the mosquitoes were biting something fierce . . . and it was hot . . . and the guide-daughter was flaked out with her mouth open, snoring slightly . . . and it was dark, too dark, we had to get into the light ... we yelled something about having to use the shithouse on the back lagoon and ran out of the hut.

  Which way? Back to the village? No, too many people there . . . might run into some rip-off vibes . . . could already tell from the feeling in our stomachs that this was going to be a heavy trip. Into the bush, then, no one there... can just groove with the trees.

  So we darted up the path along the first growth of bush grasses and tangled trees and vines, and noticed that these mushrooms grew there quite commonly . . . no trouble scoring if we want some more . . . and then our heads like, well just exploded, I mean we were in a completely different place!

  Everything was green, man, I mean like layer upon layer of swaying green. You couldn’t see a tree or a leaf, just green . . . prisms of green . . . green that was yellow . . . green that was blue or purple, or red . . . and all kinds of strange creatures were floating around in the green.

  A large frog and an egret were practicing karate chops on each other and then started hugging and kissing and going down on each other in the green. A large, bearded cockroach dressed like an elegant European movie-star strolled by and advised everyone to take the 21 day, thermal cure at Vichy. A tiny yellow female creature in a bathing suit bounced by, chanting Om and masturbating with a credit card in the green . . . a flat flounder floated by with an enormous tray of far-out, gourmet food . . . and a duck and a cow read Japanese fairy-tales ... in the green, the green, the prisms of green. . . .

  It must’ve taken several hours for us to come down . . . though it could’ve taken several years, the way our time-sense was blown. Our heads felt pretty spaced, and our eyes were hugely dilated. Everything still looked kind of greenish and our tongues and skin had that kind of fuzzy feeling like after too much rot-gut, dago-red wine . . . but you kind of expect that after a really mind-bending trip. We wandered back to the hut to explain to Brother Jo and the guide-daughter that we had done a little walk thing, and had gotten lost.

  “You mind de snakes and de do-do-mon,” scolded the daughter, and we let her shepherd us back to our hut and a big dinner of Miz Rose’s iguana-tail soup (which tastes like chicken). We were pretty wasted and let Moonbeam curl up with some of Miz Rose’s grandchildren, at her place, while we zonked out in our little hut.

  The next day was boat-day, and we lay around, feeling kind of strung-out, till after lunch when everyone went down to the little wooden pier to wait for the monthly boat from “de Big Town.”

  Our packages, this month, had mostly chocolate bars, aspirin tabs and cigarettes, which everyone really dug. And the mail . . . some of my old man’s underground papers, a letter from my mother, and a formal looking letter from the welfare folks.

  We ripped that one open right away, and it ripped us off right away, because it was a notice informing us that our social worker, Phil, had been busted (he must’ve gotten paranoid and the pigs could feel his vibes) and that our new social worker had “too heavy a case-load to be able to do the intricate paper work involved in out-of-county payments.” And, if we didn’t get our a
sses back to the City and County of San Francisco by next month, we’d be outa luck, welfare-wise. Shit... or as they say in the comics ... #$%=&’( II

  I mean like, living here was cheap, but not free, for Christ sake, we still needed a few bucks for the rent, the boatman, and all that barter shit . . . and, like, to go back would be a total, mind-blowing downer . . . the clinics, and thepollution . . . the hostility of the pigs and the landlords and the freaks and the uptight straight world. And wow, to have to wait an hour on a cold night for a bus, and make three transfers, to get somewhere that would take ten minutes by car . . . and to have Moonbeam getting her head fucked with the Pledge of Allegiance, and marching to recess in lines, and having to raise her hand if she wanted to talk, or pee . . . wow, we couldn’t go back to all that “urban-poor” crap, we just couldn’t!

  We went down into a really deep bummer that lasted all the rest of that day and night. Our auras were really dimmed-out, and our minds were low, man, really low.

  The next morning we decided that the best thing to do would be to get super-stoned, and maybe that would put our heads in a better place, so we could figure out what to do. We decided to make it into the bush and score some more of those “poison” mushrooms that Brother Jo had turned us onto.