I bent to look at Billy through the space between the rangetop and the cabinets. It was clear he had no idea what the Ambassador was talking about.
“R.”
“No doubt.” Dengue heaved himself up and turned to face the industrial shelving unit lining the wall. He ran his hands over a dozen alphabet racers, reading the giant letterforms glued to each vehicle like b-boy braille, and stopped when he found R.
“I’ll take . . .” The Ambassador’s fingers fluttered. “A.” He placed the two cars on the ground and switched them on, then located their remote controls and tossed one at the couch.
“First one clockwise around the room wins. See if you can beat the blind man. Your son can’t.”
Billy picked up the controller, fisted the lever, and pushed it forward. The R car’s monster tires spun against the carpet and took off. Dengue’s truck pursued. The Ambassador navigated by sound; the vehicles had a particular pitch when they were stuck, another while cruising close to the baseboards or the furniture, a third when they were marooned out in the middle of the floor.
Billy’s face brightened with attention and delight as his racer careened around the room, slamming against Dengue’s machine and dodging obstacles. For a minute, the two of them were twelve again. Younger, actually, since at twelve their playthings had already been giant steel monsters.
The A sideswiped the R, knocking it over, and Dengue, cackling, cruised to victory. I deposited three glasses on the coffeetable, which was a sheet of fiberglass laser-cut into the jagged shape of the wildstyle piece painted on it, and supported by three sawed-off portions of a parking meter leg. These things had once sold for mid-four figures, during the ’90s graffiti-design renaissance—or had been on sale for that amount, anyway; who knows if anybody ever bought one. Dengue had traded for his. Owning it constituted legal proof of blindness.
The Ambassador splashed rum into and around the glasses. The toast went unspoken. We drank. Billy’s eyes roved over Dengue’s floor-to-ceiling collection of art, junk, ephemera. I wondered what he thought of it all, but that was low on the list of things I wondered.
Looking at Billy was like watching a steak thaw. I realized I should’ve brought him here right off the bat. It was Dengue who’d seen my father off, after all, not Karen. Served me right for being a fucking romantic.
I balanced a Les McCann album on my knees—I have perhaps failed to mention that Dengue was once known as DJ Fever Funk, and thus long winding snakes of LPs buttressed the stereo cabinet, with Count Machuki leaning against Count Basie and the Lafayette Afro Rock Band rubbing up on Millie Jackson—and began breaking apart a nugget of Blueberry Clusterfuck. Dengue sniffed the air and nodded approvingly, then turned to Billy.
“I want the whole story,” he said. “Everything, from the time you stepped out of my van to when you walked in here just now.”
Billy rolled his glass between his palms. He’d only nipped at the rum. “There’s a lot I don’t remember. I sent some letters, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” I said. “At first. You were working your way south. Said you wanted to get to the Amazon and see the rainforests. Last letter I’m aware of, you’d gotten there and you said the plants were sentient beings, and you were going to learn how to cure diseases and shit by communicating with their ‘higher energetic selves.’”
Billy nodded. “Their spirits.”
The way he said it, I knew sarcasm wasn’t the appropriate response. But it was all I had. I grew up with my mother.
“How’d that work out?”
Billy placed his drink on the table. “It almost killed me. I thought it had. But . . . it was amazing.”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out the travel-pouch I’d cut off him at Patrick’s, rolled thin. He unfurled it, dumped six of those cut-glass vials on the table, opened each and smelled the contents. Five went back into the pouch. The last he handed to me.
“Drip half on there. As evenly as possible.”
“Drip what where? In case y’all forgot, I don’t see so goddamn good.”
“I can fix that,” Billy said.
“What, you learn optometry too?”
“I just need the right plants.”
“No shit?”
“Billy,” I said, “what am I dripping on the joint, and why?”
“It’s an entheogenic resin made from the essences of four different plants cooked together. Plus my blood, and ash from burnt pieces of my hair. The recipe was given to me by a shaman who received it from a very wise tree called El Purga.”
Entheogenic is a word you probably don’t know, but I do because the shit is Greek, which is not to say that I’m smarter than you. En meaning in, theo meaning God. The god within. The ancients used it to compliment writers and artists so dope they seemed divinely inspired, like my boy Homer. We use it to mean a substance on which you will trip balls.
“And why?”
“Because I can’t remember everything important, but the resin can. It will show you.”
You recall a few chapters back when I was popping all that junk about skepticism is an admirable trait, but so is asking yourself if you’re really such a fucking Master of the Universe that things might not be happening blah blah blah, something about the duckbilled platypus? Well, that shit is difficult to put into practice when your father’s talking about getting psychedelic cooking tips from a tree, even if you found his ass atop a magical staircase and consider yourself willing to entertain whatever.
I’m taking the time to acknowledge this out of respect for you, the reader, because I hate stories with fuzzy internal logic. Kids who’ve grown up on Harry Potter don’t know any better, poor schmucks: the people in those books are constantly doing things that were impossible five minutes earlier. In a few years, you’ll see. The Rowling generation’s going to be the most fucked up yet. Whereas you could break into George Lucas’s house right now, traipse into his study, and say, “Hey George, what exactly is a parsec?” and as soon as he finished taking his bong hit, he’d be able to explain. Probably before security arrived. Or take Tolkien: not only could J.R.R. have told you why they didn’t just ride those giant fucking eagles straight into the heart of Mordor instead of walking, he’d have done so in High Elvish, or the Tongue of the Woodland Realm, your choice.
I opened the vial and let the green-brown resin ooze onto the cannabis in a thin, honeylike trail. Twisted up a bone and offered it to Billy. He shook his head.
“It’s for the two of you.”
“Ambassador?”
Dengue made a peace sign, and I lodged the joint between his fingers. He brought it to his lips, sucked when he heard the flick-whoosh of the lighter, then leaned back and puffed until smoke encircled his dome like clouds around some bulbous mountaintop.
You had to be vigilant, blazing with Dengue. He hit a spliff until you stopped him or his fingers burned—got lost in the experience, forgot the protocols. This time, though, his head lolled after the third hit, one palm covering his eyes and the other resting on his rising-falling stomach, joint forgotten between two knuckles and a trail still twirling from the tip.
I leaned over and extracted it, then mean-mugged Billy.
“You and me,” I said, “after this, we’ve got some shit to sort out.”
I’d been going for don’t think you’re off the hook, but I failed to tough up the inflection, and instead it came out more like you’re gonna call me, right?
“Travel willingly and well,” my father said, and made one of those palms-pressed-together prayer-bows, which I fucking hate. Corny on old white yoga dudes, peace-and-blessings-type Negroes, and everybody else who buys weed from me.
“I’ll try,” I said, and took a wicked draw.
The smoke hit the back of my throat, and right away I knew this was different from any drug I’d ever fucked with. I
pulled again and felt as if every organ and muscle, every molecule in my body, wanted to simultaneously shit and puke and come.
Just so you know, I did plenty of research in anticipation of committing these events to paper, went so far as to email my former Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We’s A Comin’ Academy faculty road dog, David “D-Fine” Feingold, and read every drug book he recommended: Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson on himself, even old A-Hux strolling through the doors of perception. I was hoping I could jack somebody’s approach.
But first of all, with all due respect to the 1960s and LSD and ether and mescaline and Timothy Leary, none of that synthesized domestic product can carry the jockstrap of a single vial Billy brought back from the rainforest. With acid and MDMA, the chemicals sort of drape themselves over your consciousness, and you peer through them at the world. This was another thing entirely—world-obliterating, world-creating—and it was coming at me fast.
And second of all, I don’t get what’s supposed to be so great about Hunter Thompson. His shtick gets old about fifty pages in, if you ask me. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was better, but it didn’t give me anything I could steal, since a) it’s pretty clear that Tom is sticking to what they taught him in journalism school, i.e. “get as close to your subject as possible by listening and talking and observing, but under no circumstances zonk out together in a Day-Glo school bus crawling with venereal diseases, no matter how tempting it may be,” and b) as expressive and zeitgeisty as his punctuation is, it’s not the kind of thing you can bite without looking like a biter. Only one person per grammatical system is allowed to express psychotropic euphoria by writing shit like psycho::::::tropic!!!!freaking::::::eu—pho—ri:::::: a::::a::::a!!!!, and it kind of reads like a cheerleading routine even when he does it.
I went shuddery and weak and closed my eyes, trying to go with the feeling, get beyond it, breathe deep and steady. I don’t know how long I did that, but it seemed like forever, and when I opened my eyes again the sensation had passed and everything was pitch black. All around me was a huge vibrating sound, a constant hum that if you listened to carefully you began to understand was made up of the rustling of plants in the breeze and the rush of the breeze through the air and the syncopated drip-splash-evaporation of water droplets and the buzz of insects and the call of parrots and the dart of lizards and the decomposition of dead leaves and the growth of trees. And yet it was all one web of sound, so harmonious that if you didn’t concentrate on listening it disappeared, became like silence.
I listened for maybe half an hour, isolating and digging on different parts the way you might check out the drums, then the bass, then the piano. Light started to suffuse the world, a little at a time, as if the sun was rising, but I knew it was midday and my vision was coming back. I saw what I’d heard—and heard so well that seeing it was no surprise. That made me trust the resin, whose choice it must have been for me to listen before I looked.
First were the trees, so lush and massive they canopied the sky. Then great shafts of mottled light, beaming through them like reverse searchlights and playing over the fluorescent, spongy moss and loamy earth. And finally the countless layers and levels of green that lay between, intertwined and restless and alive: with birds, with bugs, with monkeys I heard but could not see, and most of all alive with itself, as if Life were—I don’t know, maybe this sounds stupid, but as if Life were this string of energy extending from each plant and animal and connecting each of them to all the others in a pattern so complex it formed a web like the web of sound. To be somewhere so peaceful and chaotic and unbent by human desire was to understand how dead and colonized most of the planet is. And also to glimpse something of the circular eternity of an experience we only see as a straight line, running from birth to death.
As I stood thinking these thoughts, a new sound, strange and foreign, imposed itself over the others. I turned toward it and saw three men, a hundred feet away, walking in single file. They followed the course of a path so faint I never would have picked it out. But now, tracing the distance between us, I saw that I was standing on it. I braced myself to be seen, and just as quickly realized I would not be, understood that although I saw and heard, I did not stand, would not follow them by walking. I was not here bodily, but in some other way. I knew that one of those approaching was Billy, and that whatever I experienced was what the resin—or the consciousness behind it, which was and was not his—deemed essential.
The first man came upon me: brown-skinned and black-haired, with eyes like polished onyx. He was clothed in two strings of red and white beads, one laid diagonally across each shoulder to form an X over his chest. A thin cord encircled his waist, and his foreskin was attached to it by a small clasp—so he didn’t flop around when he walked, I guess. Through his septum ran a copper rod; hammered silver-dollar circles of the metal sat in both earlobes. His chest was flat, his body smooth and faintly muscled. He walked neither slowly nor fast, looked not at the ground before him but at the tops of trees and the flight paths of birds, as another man would scan a newspaper. I might have put his age at fifty, and been off by a decade in either direction.
The next man walked twenty paces behind. He wore the same beads and cord. A copper rod pierced each cheek like a set of whiskers. He was younger and taller, with the same teardrop-shaped eyes, and he sang to himself in a high, flutey voice, so quietly that the jungle swallowed up the song the instant he passed.
Last came Billy, thin and haggard, in cutoff jeans and sneaks, the straps of a rucksack digging into his bare shoulders. His hair was pulled into a wisp of a ponytail, his face scarlet and scaly-raw beneath his tan. He glanced up from the path and our eyes met, or at least I stared straight into his, and in that instant I went from thinking Billy’s skin looked like it hurt to feeling the sting myself—and also knowing that it was the farthest thing from his mind, which was muddled by deprivation and electric with excitement, fear.
Getting delirious and lightheaded is a bitch when you’re not even there. But that’s what Billy felt, so the sensation hit me too, and I had to retreat a little ways into myself to keep my shit together. My father could barely put one foot in front of the other, and if the Dickclip Brothers noticed, they didn’t seem to care. For a few seconds I felt helpless, irate, and then I kind of reached into Billy’s consciousness, and realized I was wrong. Billy’s state was deliberate, necessary, a preparation for the ritual to come. The knowledge bloomed inside me, the way the light had spread across the rainforest. I no more questioned it than I had the gift of vision.
Each moment, Billy’s mind and body were becoming more and more my own. Following him along the path involved no choice. Knowing what he knew required no exertion. He was an apprentice to the men leading the way, and under their supervision he’d undertaken La Dieta, the diet: forsaken salt, sugar and human contact for months, made himself like a man wandering the desert so that his ego might recede and the spirits he sought to know would respond to his body’s calls for help.
The path led to a small clearing, a spot where fire had burned back the jungle. The shamans were seated on a fallen log. Billy crouched before them, slid his backpack to the ground, unzipped it and removed a plastic kid’s mug festooned with pictures of Gobots. The poor fucking Gobots, man. It was perfect, somehow. I don’t know if you remember, but Gobots were the wack American-made answer to Transformers. Even their names were stupid. The leader was called Leader-1. The helicopter was Cop-Tur.
Billy passed the elder shaman a plastic bottle, half full of murky liquid. The man held it up to the light, uttered a few jungle-bitten syllables, and the word bazaguanco passed into my mind: from his lips or Billy’s brain, I don’t know which. My father trickled some bazaguanco into the Gobots cup and swirled it around, heart thudding in his/my chest. It smelled of warm, vegetative decay, like the garden compost bin at Karen’s married-to-a-doctor homegirl’s place in Woodstock, where we used to spend weekends once in a
while until they got divorced.
The bazaguanco tasted like it smelled, and Billy gulped it down with eyes squeezed shut. I remembered what he’d said about the recipe for the resin, and as the brew bubbled in the cauldron of Billy’s gut and the shattering of this reality by the next grew imminent, I decided it made sense. There were a gazillion plants up in this motherfucker. Which three or four could be combined into drugs or medicine was not the kind of thing you puzzled out by trial-and-error.
I’d like to keep coming up with fresh ways to describe the sensation of getting knocked dick-in-the-dirt by unfathomable rainforest drugs, but honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. I read up on bazaguanco later, and what every new age gringo seeker and traditional-yet-Internet-savvy herbal healer and psychopharmacology doctoral candidate seems to agree on is that if there is a God, this is the shit that gets Him high.
People drink it and fall down energetic wormholes into fiery hells; they float through internal eternities as specks of light and then return to earth with the worst hangovers of their lives and no more pesky heroin addiction, no more crippling lifelong depression. No more cancer. They write lengthy accounts of interdimensional sojourns and terrifying confrontations, talk about vomiting up the dark matter of their deepest fears and traumas, poking at the goo with a stick the next day unable to discern what it could be. They fucking ramble on and on, and even if you’ve taken bazaguanco yourself, or smoked some other crazy shit and done the virtual tour, these accounts read as half amazing, half gobbledygook, which is why I’m dancing around all of it like that fucking dude Britney Spears married who tried to rap.
The younger shaman took a thin mat from the pack and unrolled it on the ground. Billy lay down. The elder leaned toward him, elbows on his knees.
Rage Is Back Page 9
