by Gregory Hill
The pronghorns were a bit of a problem. The deeramid had collapsed and most of the animals were already bounding away. But, in falling, one of them had apparently fucked up its leg. As in, added an extra joint. The creature was in mid-writhe, like a sock being wrung out by invisible hands.
It were my invisible hands that done this. I swear by the beard of Jesus, if I’d’ve had any idea that my shenanigans would cripple a pretty thing like this.
I walked two miles to the nearest farmhouse and borrowed a ten-inch Everslice chef’s knife and then walked the two miles back to the pronghorn.
Having put the critter into its misery, I was, per the Law of the West, obligated to put it out of its misery. My options were plenty: stab the heart, cut the throat, lock the animal in a car with the windows up on a hot summer day. In a synchronized world, any of these would do the job. But in my asynchronous state, any one of those acts could fail—miss the heart, slice the wrong artery, fail to turn off the a/c—and I wouldn’t realize it for months.
*
I opted for the sure thing. The procedure was every bit as unsettling as you can imagine. It gave me a newfound disrespect for my hunting buddy at the House of Pronghorn. Sawing away, squatted on the dirt next to the pair of tumbleweed pompons, I gazed into the dying, dying, dying eyes of this blameless creature and got myself a slap of repressibility. I’d injured a thing and now I was killing it, all because it couldn’t run fast enough to escape me.
When the deed was finished, I cleaned the gore off the knife by wiping it on my sweatpants. Then I balanced the animal’s head back upon its neck so it would look more natural.
The setting sun glared at me. There are consequences aplenty, amigos.
I fished the half-joint out of my pocket and held it between my thumb and index finger, so my hand made an okay sign. If you’ve lost track of the journey of the joint: I got it from Axel Buster in the Palace Diner, then gave it to college-unbound Brock, and then I stole it back. If only I could light a match and actually smoke the thing.
I ate it and then I waited. Nothing happened, drug-wise or otherwise. If I wanted to get stoned, I’d need to eat more than half of a joint. Eventually, I put my head in my hands and curled up and wrinkled my chin and shivered next to the dead pronghorn until I fell asleep. When I awoke, the pronghorn’s head had slipped a half-inch sideways off the neck and blood had begun to seep. Its eyes had closed, at least.
I once read an article about a scientist who, back in the day, during the French Revolution, caught the severed head of a nobleman just as the guillotine dropped, and then leaped into his horse-drawn buggy and rushed the head to his lab where he had prepped a live cow with hoses sticking out of its neck. As fast as possible, he attached the hoses to the stump of the dead head and started the cow’s blood to flowing, whenupon our monstrous scientist shouted the name of this particular dead noble person and the head’s eyes opened up and stared and even followed the scientist’s finger around for a few moments.
Just before it turned grey and went still, the head’s mouth formed the shapes of words. The scientist couldn’t read the lips, but one gathers that the gist of it was, “Holy fucking sacré bleu, does my neck hurt.”
Point being, I felt bad about the pronghorn.
34
Next stop, Jones Compound. Tiger, outhouse, kooks, pot plants. It was the plants that tugged me the hardest. I was past due for a moment of disassociation, a change in perspective, and, with a little luck, some uncontrollable giggling.
I put on my shades, lowered my cap, and shuffled along, half depressed about the pronghorn, half giddy about knowing that Vero was, at this very moment, reading my note. And the yonder weed, promising to show me a good time.
When I reached the compound, I went directly to the old post office full of pot plants. If half a joint won’t get me high, I reckon half a plant will.
I’m no expert on marijuana, but I’ve certainly tried it before. As I mentioned previously, I’ll take a whiff at a party if someone offers, or at an outdoor concert if a joint gets passed down my row, or first thing in the morning if I find a nugget stuck to the bottom of one of my socks.
The last time I got stoned was with Vero. We were settling in for a weekday night with must-see TV and she went to her bedroom and came back with a baggie of some Strawberry Elway Diesel that she’d acquired from a friend who had a medical marijuana license. We rolled the dope and smoked it and started watching that John Wayne movie where he pretends to be Genghis Khan. We laughed our faces off for twenty minutes and then passed out.
Laughing and passing out; that’s precisely the effect I hope to enjoy today.
The plants are lined up, real neat. They’re roughly knee high and plump with sticky, hairy buds, all aglitter with crystals so they look like someone soaked them in sugar water and let them dry. Say what you will about the Joneses, they’ve got at least one green digit between them.
I snap off a mouse-sized chunk of bud and hazard a nibble. This is what they call skunk weed, as in it literally smells like a skunk. For some reason people find this appealing. The weed’s so sticky that most of it gets clogged in my rear molars as I chew. Ever the stalwart, I take another bite, and then another.
I shall chronicle the events as they undress. I’m sitting crosslegged in the middle of Route 36, reading a paperback I found on a dusty shelf in the old post office. The book is called Jesus Wins a Grammy, Jimi Wins a War: Volume Sixty-Eight of the Chronicles of Christ. Written by Artemus Miracle, published by Hellickson Press, 2004.
The book starts in 1967 when Jesus comes back to earth in the shape of a San Francisco hippie. If the book’s cover is to be trusted, the Messiah’s only concession fashion-wise to the passage of one thousand nine-hundred and thirty-four years since his death is the addition of a Hopi headband. That’s Jesus for you.
By the third chapter, Jesus has formed a psychedelic band with a posse of sloppy, heathenistic, acid-eating homeless hippy drop-outs. The group calls themselves The Technicolor Phoenix Scrimshaw Revolt.
Holy shit, the weed is working. I leave the book on the road and take a gander at the world around me.
The sun dips into the horizon and the hellfire storm tugs it back up. I am a poet.
Blood cells
White no more
Yellow forever
Unchanging
Until you change.
I’m sitting in a room, directly across from a tiger. Maybe six real-time seconds have passed since my first visit, since I gave the tiger the jerky. The creature’s face is plunged into the salty meat. I can practically see the cat purring with culinary lust. I stroke the lawn of fur on this mighty hunter. I am allergic to cats. I plunge my face into the fur and inhale. I am not allergic to tigers.
Shame on you, Jim Jones. How dare you confine a creature of infinite wisdom within an iron collar?
I must have a word with my host.
I went to the john to have a conversation with Jim and I ended up climbing down the rope ladder so I could meet Jane. I overcame my revulsion at entering an outhouse hole, embraced the pot-induced paranoia, and descended the wiggling ladder.
Lazies and genitalworms, children of all rages: at the bottom of the right hole in that two-hole outhouse there lies a mushroom farm. I don’t know why Jane would choose this moment to climb down there, what with her hubby taking a dump in the adjacent hole, but it’s clear that she’s more interested in fungi than she is in dungi.
It’s a clever setup. As I interpret it, they poo in one hole for a few months, and then switch to the other and wait for the previous hole’s poo to compost into dirt, into which they then cultivate their mushrooms. This explains the plywood partition between Hole Number One and Hole Number Two. Sanitary reasons.
How did I miss all this? It’s because, back before I understood the slow creep of time, I was all about Narwhal Slotterfield, Referee of the Universe. But my ego has since left the building, ergo non, and I can understand things without imposing myself
upon that understanding.
To wit, the canvas shopping bag on Jane’s shoulder is full of mushrooms, which she has recently harvested from a thriving colony at the edge of the mound of brown. And the mound of brown is not just poop, but a vegetable-strewn compost pit. These folks are hippies. Insane hippies, also known as preppers. Learning how to survive off the earth so they can build a gun tower and shoot down all who wish to appropriate their survivalistic goodies after civilization is destroyed by the coming global weather disaster that’ll be caused by sunspots.
The weed I ate is really kicking in. Right now, at this moment, I’m totally cool with these wackos. We could be friends.
I extract a single mushroom from Jane’s satchel, pat her on the shoulder, and climb out. I still find it odd that she’s wearing a bikini top down there.
*
I feel much better about Jim and Jane. Don’t get me wrong; they’re freaky. It’s just that they’re more than just psychopaths. They’re psychedelic psychopaths. Psychepsychos.
In the main living quarters, on the kitchen table, right next to The Confederate States of Southern North America, there’s a well-loved copy of Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts. Not to mention a copy of The Humanure Handbook, which, upon perusal, explains the motivation behind the unconventional outhouse/fungus farm.
Rounding out the library is a print-on-demand typo-ridden how-to tome called Mellow Jello: Enhancing and Preserving the Psychedelic Experience, written by a guy named Magic Randy. This softbound gem explains how to extract psilocybin from magic mushrooms via a “revolutionary steamheat prosess” and how to then convert the hallucinogenic component into a powder, which can be added to their “Propriatery Jellatin Preservation Recipe.” The final product, many examples of which I found stacked into a pyramid inside Jim and Jane’s refrigerator, is completely undistinguishable from those little ramekin cups full of Jello shots that you have to endure at parties hosted by overly ambitious hosts.
Not one to jump blindly into hallucinogenic drug desserts as concocted by tiger-owning neoconfederate preppers, I opt to begin the augmentation of my marijuana mind-journey with one of Jane’s humble mushrooms. I know it isn’t poisonous because I looked it up in Jim’s copy of The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.
I gobble down the ’shroom, which tastes like something you’d scrape off a decaying body, and I return to my spot in the middle of the road and dive back into Jesus Wins a Grammy, Jimi Wins a War: Volume Sixty-Eight of the Chronicles of Christ.
Reading on drugs is wonderful. I’m led into the world of the living, of motion. Like, as I read this Jesus book, I enter it and walk amongst the people and, Oh, Aldous can you hear me now?
By chapter thirteen—this thing is a quick read—The Technicolor Phoenix Scrimshaw Revolt have overcome several moments of self-doubt, as well as one unplanned pregnancy, long enough to release their first single, “Peace in the Alley (Pax Divers Culpa).” A few pages later, the song shoots to number eight on the singles chart. Although the power trio’s ensemble vocals are delivered with richly intonated competence, the real strength of the piece lies in the extraordinary evocations of Jesus’s free-form wah-wah guitar solo, which takes up the latter third of the song.
The solo is so amazingly extraordinarily gut-wrenchingly powerful that upon hearing it, Jimi Hendrix, who was in London at the time riding high on the release of his debut album, decides to quit the music biz. Check it out, man, in the space of fifty-seven mind-boggling seconds, Jesus has said everything there could ever be said electric guitar-wise. Jimi abandons the sessions that would have been Axis: Bold as Love and returns to the States to re-enlist in the U.S. Army’s 101st Screaming Eagles Airborne Division, from which he had been honorably discharged a few years earlier after pretending to suffer a back injury.
Upon re-entering the army, Jimi gets shipped directly to ‘Nam. With a parachute on his back, an M16 in one hand, and an American flag in the other, he leads the United States to comprehensive victory.
The book concludes at the 1968 Grammy ceremony in which Hendrix is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and then The Technicolor Phoenix Scrimshaw Revolt are awarded the award for Best Rock Single. After accepting the trophy from LBJ, Jesus thanks his father and ascends to heaven.
I’d rate Jesus Wins a Grammy, Jimi Wins a War: Volume Sixty-Eight of the Chronicles of Christ up there with the finest novels I’ve ever read. Far better than On the Road, which, technically, I’ve only partially read, and very nearly as good as The Road.
35
Thank you, funk-flavored mushroom, for this gift. At the moment, my brain violins are playing that Steve Miller song about time ticking into the future.
The three-dimensionality of my vision is greatly enhanced. Distances are things, not just concepts. Look down. The painted lines on the highway are taller than the asphalt. Look around. The prairie grasses on either side of the road where I’m sitting cross-legged are waving in a wind that blows only in my mind. Each blade of grass is distinct. Gaze inward. The colors of the world.
I have to get something to eat.
I stole beef jerky from a tiger, Vero. I am faster than a tiger. Fastman. And I am brave. I will open the fridge. Done. I will upend two, three, four ramekins and slurp the cold Jello out with my tongue. Done. The sugar masks the decay. I hope there’s no such thing as a lethal dose of mushrooms.
Outdoors, well off the road, I find a pair of rattlesnakes making love under a sagebrush. I lift them to the sky and shape them into two intertwining rings, each snake with its own tail stuffed into its mouth.
I call the work “Matrimonial Snakes Vomiting Their Own Bodies.”
I will recline upon this warm, sandy earth. To my right is a yucca, to my left, a yucca. To my east is Veronica. Oh, Vero, what are you up to? What strange thoughts creep thru your slowed-down brain?
I close my eyes. I’m in your skull now, sweetheart. I’m a loinclothed Tarzan swinging amongst the stringy branches of dendrites and axons within the humid jungle of your cerebral cortex. Thru the tangle, a sluggish flash of lighting, like the one I saw in the Henry Fonda cloud at the cusp of Last Chance. It glows and jumps the gap between synapses and then fades. More flashes, all around.
I wriggle thru a web of dendrites toward a massive bundle of excitable synapses; wet purple mushrooms, bursting with orbic faeries that glow and retreat. I plunge my head into the midst of the mushrooms and am treated to a first-person trip within one of your memories.
Watching thru your eyes. You’re walking next to me on a Colfax sidewalk, just a few blocks from the capitol building. It’s a windy day, dry leaves rattle on the tree branches.
I remember this. It happened just a few weeks ago, on an afternoon. I turn to you and I say, “Would you describe me as swarthy?”
You say, “More like not quite white.”
End of conversation, we keep walking.
Your hand reaches forth and rests on my shoulder. Your fingers brush my ear. I remember that moment, loving this person who would choose to touch my ear on a pointless promenade.
We pass by Jerry’s Record Exchange and your eyes glance at the shop window and see themselves in the reflection. Your eyes are alive and moving, your face content with a casual, unquantifiable grace. But when you see yourself, your face makes a quick adjustment, like when you’re reading a good book and someone walks into the room and says, “Catchin’ flies?” And you realize that in your literary reverie you’ve become so content that your cheeks are drooping and your mouth has gone slack. You’ve lost your self, lost your ego, lost muscle control.
The spell is over, you bring your cheeks up, your lips flatten, you are dignified.
I bow to your bundles of thoughts and exit your mind.
Why have you forsaken me, cruel world? The universe is a squatting mule. I must tug its harness, tickle its ear, convince it to carry on with its march up the canyon.
Ye gods! I demand that you bestow upon me
a genuine hallucinatory vision with the theme of: Will I ever again hear the voice of Veronica Vasquez?
36
And so it came to pass that from a varmint hole in the ground there did arise a harmony of light and sound. The harmony swirled about in a dizzying fashion and then coalesced into the hovering form of a shortish human female clad in white linen.
She floated before me, eyes closed. The color of her skin fluctuated like a cuttlefish. The flesh was dark like moist earth, and then it lost all color and resembled wet tissue paper and, even thru her robe, I could see her heart pump blood into her veins and I could see her muscles expand and contract with her breaths, and then her skin gained color until it went as black as a moonless sky and then faint stars, millions of miles away, twinkled. And then her skin went brown again and stayed that way, which didst please me because it was far less distracting.
Toes floating inches above the dirt, the human female spread her arms wide, very Christ-like, and took several more deep breaths. My respirations became synchronized with her respirations.
A sound emitted from her face. A low, quiet hum, resembling the noise a fluorescent light makes in a library. Her mouth opened wide and the sound grew louder and higher, a winter wind thru a chain link fence. Then the sound stopped altogether and I was overcome with coldness. I feared she would draw in her breath, and with it my soul.
She did not consume my soul. Instead, she opened her eyes, two glowing orbs that broadcast light and warmth and comfort all upon my being, and then, in a voice like a buttercup, the human female spake unto me.
Hear me, Narwhal Slotterfield. I bring to you a message of wonder and hope.
Once upon a time, millions of long miles from the sun, on a teeny sphere known as the former planet known as Pluto, a race of intelligent beings did evolve. It’s awfully cold on Pluto; the sun is a teeny little pinprick, not much brighter than the rest of the stars. But still, a hardy bunch of critters evolved and survived by eating the iron flakes that were plentiful in their planetoid’s soil due to the nature of its gravi-meteoroidal genesis. The critters, who called themselves Plutons, were not, as a rule, happy, it being so cold and dark all the time. They spent most of their lives underground, huddled together like frightened kittens.
