Everyone I pass says hello. It’s okay for them, they only have to say it once; I’m the only person headed this way. The trail is flat and not so muddy. Birds are singing. A couple times I think I see a deer’s ass flashing at me through the trees. I wish I’d bought a Cornetto.
When I checked the house out online it showed on the satellite as a large plot, surrounded by trees except for where it opens on to the lake on one side. In real life it’s been converted into a hotel and I guess it’s kind of exclusive. The guy on the front desk looks at me all snooty when I ask to use the restroom. I am not impolite. When I come back from the bathroom, I go right up and tell him I lived in this house before it was a hotel, even though I don’t know for sure that I did, I just want to make him feel bad. He’s not affected by that in any way, so I think about telling him I have enough money to buy the hotel outright and that I might just do it, just so I can fire him. I guess I still have some anger, right?
Waiting at the little pier for the ferry to pick me up I compare the landscape in front of me to the map on my phone. The mountain behind the town has kind of an American Indian-sounding name, Skiddaw. The hill next to it is Little Man. When I see that it nearly blows my mind. My dad used to call me Little Man. I forgot that. Now I recall saying over and over, my name is Sonny, my name is Sonny, in that irritating way little kids repeat and repeat and repeat until finally someone tells them to shut up already. I guess he named me for the hill. Why not the mountain? Aim higher, right? (Skiddaw Agelaste-Bim.) I picture myself hiking up there. I read somewhere that if you think hard enough about exercise it has the same effect on your muscles as actually doing it. Personally I think that’s a mountain of BS.
Skiddaw is awesome. The top of it is over three thousand feet high but the trail to the top is easy going, grassy and wide, I have to run in places to make it harder. Again everyone else seems to be walking in the opposite direction to me and we do the whole hellohellohello thing again, although this time it’s more like good evening because I’ve started out pretty late. I figure they all have followed a different trail up and are coming down the easy route. Closer to the top I can see they are all just turning right around and coming down the same way they went up. There is no trail that I can see going down the other side, just a steep downhill slide made of flat purple stones. I stop for a while to admire the view. I swear I can see the ocean in the distance. Thomas says that in England you don’t get nature on the same scale as you do in America and I wonder how he can have lived here and say that. I guess he was too stoned to notice. I take a panorama shot on my phone to prove how wrong he is.
I take the quick route down. My sneakers have no traction on the stones, which stream down around me like water as I put to good use the jump-and-turn jump-and-turn ski techniques I learned at Big Bear. Oh my gosh, is that ever a fun way to get down a mountain! At the bottom I sit on a rock, gasping for breath. I send Andrew my panorama from the top of Skiddaw and he messages back, Glad you arrived safely, and Wow. No exclamation point. My kind of person.
I smuggle my fish and chips and soda into the bed-and-breakfast, breaking the no-food-in-bedrooms rule. While my veins are still loaded with adrenaline, I get out my dad’s tapes.
The Grace of Guru Bim #3
One two, one two… cough… There are no accidents, only destiny. Whatever has come to me in my life has come for a reason. My betrayal by Ruth Williams led me to my calling on the Isle of Sheppey. Nothing I said in the courtroom would have made any difference. I was called, as I had been before and would be again. The Universe needed me there and I went… the Universe doesn’t always send us to places we would choose to go. Meditation is a simple, easy and essential tool for the incarcerated man and, by extending my grace into the lives of those less fortunate, I was able to encourage my fellow inmates to follow a healthier path. Thomas Hardiker was sent by the Universe to assist me and guide others towards me. To help me through the suffering of separation from my newborn son. One by one the holes in Thomas’s aura were repaired. It was a long, hard five years but it was my calling and meditation that got me through. The earthbound human will always favour the word of the likes of Ruth Williams; only spirit recognises a higher purpose. I am no stranger to hardship and incarceration. I was raised by fools and educated by idiots. Only in the realm of spirit have I been the richest man alive. And my spiritual privilege has enabled me to get through all the long, dark days to touch the lives of others with my grace and my words. There is no convention in spirit, there is only healing.
I stop the tape and eject it. Only two more tapes left.
Tape Number Four:
One two, one two… cough… the title of this autobiography shall be The Grace of Guru Bim. It is dedicated to my son, Sonny Agelaste-Bim, aka Little Man. These past few years in Brazil with my son have been my happiest; we have grown so close. He is my spiritual equal in every sense and teaches me something new every day.
Oh, come on.
If I had a dollar for the gazillions of times I’ve heard all this crap.
Oh, I do, right?
I toss all the tapes and the stupid little machine into the trash. Only a moron would carry so much junk around.
Things We Can’t Undo #4 & #5
I head back to London to work out where to go next. I could get used to travelling first class. The complimentary beverages. The quiet, the comforting rock of the coach.
I try to remember my life in Brazil. None of my memories feature my father or Marsha Ray. All of them feature Maria and our life in Olinda, but I guess after we moved to Quilombo Novo I even forgot about her, like I forgot about Andrew in Scotland, and you wherever you were. Maybe I gave up on ever seeing you all again or maybe I just assumed I would and got on with my life in the meantime. Who knows how kids make sense of the weird stuff that happens?
At Quilombo Novo I became obsessive about football – playing not watching; there was no TV. Me and the other kids, we played barefoot, Brazilian style. Crazy, right? But that’s how I learned to play well enough to get into the Galaxy. It wasn’t so great after my dad stopped the local kids coming to the commune, but we kept on playing.
As I recall, classes there were given in English, but I don’t remember the local kids speaking any English ever so maybe that’s a false memory or I’m mixing up the time before and after they left. Most of the adults living at the commune were from places like Holland and Germany and England – cold places basically – and most of their kids had been born in Brazil. Most people spoke a mix of perfect English and patchy Portuguese and that’s how we got by. I still have a few words of Portuguese, mostly football-related: pé (foot), falta! (foul!), impedido! (offside!), toque de mão! (handball!).
The shaking my dad made us all do was kind of fun, especially when the whole commune did it together. Every day before lunch we quit school to go shake with the adults. The best part was falling on to the floor at the end and rolling around in the dirt moaning and groaning; we considered it part of our football training. Kids gave each other points for the most dramatic dive. (Ele amarelou!) Every single one of us could keep goal. We were sure as hell not scared to throw ourselves into the path of a speeding ball.
Early mornings, before school, we helped in the vegetable gardens, picking the corn, rolling the squash and pulling the manioc. The older kids got to strip the manioc too but that meant using knives. I was just at the age to move up to this job when we left, and that, besides leaving my homies, was the only aspect of leaving I was pissed about.
We had these showers set up in the trees. We took turns to pump the water through while the rest of us chased each other around in the water. Showers were only for bedtime though so during the day we mostly cooled off by swimming in the river, jumping and pushing each other in off the rocks. Since the other guru guy died, a safe swimming area had been marked out with large rocks in the shallows.
The Brazilian kids were scared of my dad; they called him the Surubim. I stayed away from the house where he and
Marsha Ray lived because I hated them by then. Mostly I hung out and slept at the other kids’ homes where it was cosy and noisy and there was no Marsha Ray to boss me around.
Sometimes I ate lunch or dinner with Thomas and Ken. Ken was cool; he used to talk about fixing a date to take me and all the other kids to see Salgueiro Atlético play and sometimes he would stop what he was doing in the clinic and come kick a ball with us. If I ever had a problem, like we needed a new football – I can’t think now what other problems were even possible – I went to Thomas. Thomas had a reputation as the man who could get anything; everybody’s go-to guy. Obviously I didn’t pick up on the full meaning of that then. And that’s it, the total contents of my memory.
But Thomas has more:
The day you arrived at the commune, Ken and I were away on one of our trips to Salgueiro to pick up medical supplies. When we were introduced later, you screamed and hid behind Mrs F That stung, but it lent greater credibility to the new guru’s spiritual prowess in the eyes of the residents. He explained that he’d bestowed upon you the power of auric interpretation, and that the proliferation of bottomless black holes in my aura had terrified you.
The communists – your father’s name for the other residents – seemed reasonably won over and excited and talk circulated of a welcome party. I was sent to ‘borrow’ a PA system from Fabio senior, the chap who ran the bar in Cabrobó I’d stayed at that first night and who had since become a good friend, and not just in the junkie sense of the word. The inverted commas are because after the party I was sent back with a wad of money to tell him we were keeping his PA. Your father wanted the equipment set up on the verandah so that he could use the microphone to address everyone. I might add that this was quite unnecessary; if he’d raised his voice a little, everyone could have heard him well enough.
The ‘party’ – there was no music – consisted of him making a speech about how the great universal spiritual powers had told him that standards of spirituality at Quilombo Novo had been eroded and sent him to set everyone back on the path to enlightenment. Mrs F stood up there next to him, nodding away at his every word, until he ordered her to shake, right there in front of everyone, to demonstrate what we’d all be doing together every day. Then we all had to have a go. It wasn’t easy to keep a straight face through Mrs F’s solo, let me tell you, but the other communists took it all much more seriously than I would have expected. Even Ken joined in, albeit with one eyebrow aloft. Good to keep one eye open at all times, he used to say. If there was a saviour living in our midst at that commune, it was Ken.
I was shocked by how much your father’s paranoia had escalated in the few months since I’d left you all in Recife. At first I put it down to the anxiety of parental responsibility, exacerbated by the difficulty of living in a foreign country. It soon became apparent that that couldn’t be the reason. At best his parental style was hands-off; he delegated everything to Mrs F, whom you clearly had the measure of and who was able to assert no authority over you whatsoever. Within weeks of arriving you were running wild, sleeping wherever you happened to doze off at bedtime and eating with whoever put food in front of you at mealtimes, usually within the commune but sometimes at the home of a friend outside. You had a bedroom in your father’s house but I’m sure you never slept in it.
You weren’t badly behaved, just independent, if not completely detached. You were pretty fluent in Portuguese when you arrived at QN. On top of that, you had more or less rejected your mother tongue. Anyone who could speak to you in Portuguese had a distinct advantage over those who couldn’t and the fact that your father and Mrs F had struggled to learn even a few words between them sealed their exclusion. That your father could allow you this level of independence somehow elevated him even higher in the communists’ estimation; nobody recognised it for the neglect it was. People were flattered to be included in your group of adopted elders. For me it was an absolute honour, especially given our tricky start, if that isn’t too gross an understatement.
I was instructed to continue living and working alongside Ken, undercover, like a neighbourhood spy in East Berlin, which was fine by me because we were good friends by then. My job was to feed back on any whiff of dissent in the community.
Everything tootled along nicely for a few months. The daily regime under Guru Bim, at first anyway, consisted of two group meditations – first thing in the morning and in the afternoon after the siesta – to raise new upward energy; plus two communal shakes, before siesta and at bedtime, to clear out any excess energy. I was expected to report any complaints to Marsha Ray, but I never heard even a mutter of dissent. In fact I was surprised by how happily everyone embraced the new routine and seemed to trust your father.
On the subject of trust, do you know what, or I should say who, finally inspired me to get clean? It was you. The more time I spent with you and the more trusting you became of me, the more I reflected on your kidnapping and wondered if in some perverse way that event was the glue of our growing attachment. To put it in less wishy-washy terms, I wondered if the reason you hadn’t rejected me in the same way you had clearly rejected your father and Mrs F was because I was the perpetrator of that kidnapping. I like to believe that kids are quite logical in their thinking or at least in their behaviour. Maybe somewhere in your subconscious you believed that if you stayed close to me I might also be the person to take you home again. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome with knobs on.
Anyway, as life in the commune got more difficult I began to feel protective towards another person – you – for the first time in my life. I mean truly protective, not just protective in exchange for money. I found myself wanting to take responsibility for your welfare. I went to Ken and told him I wanted to be off all of it, even methadone, even the drink, and for good this time. I asked for his help and naturally, Ken being Ken, he gave it willingly.
Around the time I was rejoining the world of sobriety, in the summer of 2002, life on the commune took a sinister turn. Your father issued a ruling that from then on only herbal medicines could be used in the commune and only Mrs F was allowed to administer them. Ken was furious, but he toed the line, outwardly at least. Even when he was ordered to move out of the clinic and into the house to treat your father, who had diagnosed himself with an unspecified serious illness. This may be my own paranoia but I suspected the real agenda there was to separate Ken and me. Mrs F didn’t like Ken and I was sure she had told your father he and I were lovers. As you know, he didn’t recognise homosexuality. Naturally that led me to wonder if he might be gay himself – he was certainly a misogynist. Either way Ken was too popular and we were too close and your father’s preferred MO was always to divide and rule.
While I was detoxing more new rules were introduced. The first was a complete ban on alcohol (the cachaça still behind the clinic was dismantled, albeit so it could be easily reassembled), followed by a ban on the use of all recreational drugs (most of the marijuana field was dug up and re-planted with Mrs F’s herbs – I say most because a small section was fenced off for your father’s own medicinal needs). Needless to say, none of this went down too well, and I sensed some of the blame was targeted at me for having brought my addictions into the community and generally lowering the spiritual tone.
And then he banned sex outside marriage. While the first two rules had been reluctantly accepted, this one almost sparked a revolution. The commune had been established in the age of free love and people were accustomed to sleeping with whoever they wanted. Your father quelled the protest by revealing that a message had come from the Universe that AIDS was spreading like wildfire throughout Brazil; if anyone at QN was HIV positive, he wanted to reduce the possibility of it spreading. Needless to say, the Universe had it all wrong, AIDS was no longer a big problem in Brazil – clearly he was counting on the fact that the communists had been cut off for too long to know any better. He was right: they all went along with it. As a sweetener he offered to temporarily extend his grace to any couple wishing to m
arry and to conduct those marriages personally. Your father’s manipulative skills were not to be underestimated. This was all part of a bigger plan, playing the AIDS card here set him up to use it again later.
So the clinic was taken over by Mrs F and her herbs and Ken was reassigned to the sole care of your father, whose health was failing, according to the Universe, due to his overexpenditure of energy in maintaining the spiritual health of the commune. In the light of this, the Universe decreed that he alone had the right to continue using pharmaceuticals, but this wasn’t made common knowledge and Ken was sworn to strict secrecy. I suppose your father presumed that if Ken told anyone it would be me first and that I would report it back to him. He was deluded enough to believe he still had my loyalty. (By the way, there was never anything wrong with your father; he was the healthiest person in Brazil. All those drips and medications were mostly placebos to placate his hypochondria.)
Good old Ken always saw the positive in everything. At least his new role allowed him continuing access to proper medicine, and your father’s assumption that everyone did as he told them enabled Ken to continue treating others on the side. We set up a system for smuggling medicine out to those who really needed it, using me as intermediary, which was a poor substitute for Ken’s presence in the clinic, but it was better than nothing.
Nothing, aka Marsha Ray and her herbs.
Narcissism for Beginners Page 19
