The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel – white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.
8. “Genius ‘Round the Wand Stands Hand in Hand, and One Shock of Recognition Runs the Whole Circle ‘Round”
– Art LinkIetter
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I live in a quiet place, where any sound at night means some thing is about to happen: You come awake fast – thinking, what does that mean?
Usually nothing. But sometimes . . . it’s hard to adjust to a city gig where the night is full of sounds, all of them comfortably routine. Cars, horns, footsteps . . . no way to relax; so drown it all out with the fine white drone of a cross – eyed TV set. Jam the bugger between channels and doze off nicely.
Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom – struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion – often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation – that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.
And neither have I, for that matter. But I once lived down the hill from Dr. – on -Road, Names deleted at insistence of publisher’s lawyer) a former acid guru who later claimed to have made that long jump from chemical frenzy to preternatural consciousness. One fine afternoon in the first rising curl of what would soon become the Great San Francisco Acid Wave I stopped by the Good Doctor’s house with the idea of asking him (since he was even then a known drug authority) what sort of advice he might have for a neighbor with a healthy curiosity about LSD.
I parked on the road and lumbered up his gravel driveway, pausing enroute to wave pleasantly at his wife, who was working out in the graden . . . pruning carrots, or whatever . . . humming while she works, some tune I fail to recognize.
Humming. Yes . . . but it would be nearly ten years before I would recognize that sound for what it was: like Ginsberg far gone in the Om, – was trying to humm me off. That was no old lady out there in that garden; it was the good doctor himself – and his humming was a frantic attempt to block me out of his higher consciousness.
I made several attempts to make myself clear: Just a neighbor come to call and ask the doctor’s advice about gobbling some LSD in my shack just down the hill from his house. I did, after all, have weapons. And I liked to shoot them – especially at night, when the great blue flame would leap out, along with all that noise . . . and, yes, the bullets, too. We couldn’t ignore that. Big balls of lead/alloy flying around the valley at speeds up to 3700 feet per second.
But I always fired into the nearest hill or, failing that, into blackness. I meant no harm; I just liked the explosions. And I was careful never to kill more than I could eat.
“Kill?” I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb “hunt?” Did it understand hunger? Or grasp the awful fact that my income averaged around $32 a week that year?
No . . . no hope of communication in this place. I recognized that-but not soon enough to keep the drug doctor from humming me all the way down his driveway and into my car and down the mountain road. Forget LSD, I thought. Look what it’s done to that poor bastard.
So I stuck with hash and rum for another six months or so, until I moved into San Francisco and found myself one night, in a place called “The Fillmore Auditorium.” And that was that. One grey lump of sugar, and BOOM. In my mind I was right back there in the doctor’s garden. Not on the surface, but underneath – poking up through that finely cultivated earth like some kind of mutant mushroom. A victim of the Drug Explosion. A natural street freak, just eating whatever came by. I recall one night, in the Matrix, when a road – person came in with a big pack on his back, shouting: