The Children of Hamelin (41 page)

“You’re on acid?” Harvey’s electric voice said. Sounded better that way: IBM computer trip. “Take it easy, you must just be having a bad trip...”

“A bad trip? Another bottle of acid
and the California Lizard rotting in his own white leather blood and it’s coming in the air now
another bottle of acid
and they’re sucking me dry and pumping in void and it’s a bad trip? It’s a trip to Condition Terminal to the black—”

“Take it easy! You’ve got to make it down to the Foundation. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

“But—”

The phone went dead. The motherfucker murdering speed-freak California Lizard bastard hung up on me with
another bottle of acid
stewing in my own cauldron of night’s black angels closing in filthy cocksucker leaving me to stew in my own
another bottle of acid
juices—Black void fading to red fury fading to—something snapping back into focus, like Harvey leaving me hanging was a hard slap of reality across the face. That what he wanted to do? Because he had done it, waiting there with salvation from the forces of dead dealers’ other bottles of acid could be the greatest dead vampire in the whole world of nightmare assassins—

I had to get to the Foundation! Had to maintain! But it was coming in the door how could I go out into the night of blackness total void of
another bottle of acid
under every dark street corner waiting for me there in the rain in the dark in the long cold dark went on and on and on—

From the sewer of memory the ghost of a moment: walking down Second Avenue in the rain trying to remember how once before on Romilar or something I had made time stop, turned myself into a walking-machine outside the timestream of my mind, and now I seemed to remember how I reached in and turned off the switch in my head...

Another bottle of acid
won’t work I can’t get there trapped in this cave of my own fright Harvey a million miles away in the warm sweet inner—

—Door. Steps. Cold wind. Running. Lights. Cars. Arm waving. Cab. Motion through a whirling Christmas tree. Money passed from hand to hand. Slam of car door—

—Sanctum of his Total Consciousness dream of OmOhm home on om...

And I was standing on the cold empty street outside the Foundation staring at the glowing brass nameplate, while the night, a great sky of razorblades, was about to fall in on me in a million shearing fragments. I leaned on the bell—

No no no not
another bottle of acid
not the sky falling in on chicken little gutless faggot you could be the number one murder on acid in the world with just
another bottle,
baby—

The door was pressing against my face trying to kill me with secret vibrating death-ray of the California Lizard’s kamikaze white leather rising sun of blood... the buzzer... buzzer.

I yanked the knob, leaned on the door, and it flew open and I fell inside, slammed the door behind me, but couldn’t find the police lock to lock out the universe of hungry razors of night battering the secret cave of orange desire—

I loped up ten million stairs in total darkness on my hands and knees while thousands of razor-sharp mafia spades pounded on the door behind me with sharp glass medicine bottles—

Drooling sweating oozing ichor I sensed a long black womb and halfway down it a warm yellow light. I ran down the womb down the hall mewling and screeching and tore open the door to:

A small room. Just a gray carpet and a floor lamp and two overstuffed black velvet chairs. One chair was empty, but in the other sat a soft gray creature in a dirty white shirt and baggy gray pants.

“Sit down,” said Harvey.

I dissolved into a boiling pool of black jello in the empty chair and my eyestalks looked at Harvey; warm gray eyes behind his glasses like a cocker spaniel, a concerned tired grimy face, an ancient teddy-bear.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I sat there waiting for the teddybear to speak, to say something magic that would chase away demons of bottled of acid white leather spades in mafia suits pounding broken bottles on the door below—but the teddybear just sat there radiating quiet gray warmth out of its big rheumy eyes as we sat facing each other under the roof of its warm little cave insulated from the blackness outside far away outside by a million miles of orange cotton-candy insulation.

The teddybear looked so sad and tired and worried staring at me with those great leaky eyes and not smiling, only those gray, sad, all-forgiving eyes in a pasty gray face looked totally blank. I wanted the teddybear to say something, anything, crack a smile, curse, scream, laugh,
anything...
But the silence hung like a curtain between us and the eyes of the teddybear told me I was going to have to break it.

“Hey, man,” my voice managed to say, like something from a bottle, “I’m sorry I dragged you out of bed.”

“If you’re sorry now, wait till you get my bill,” the Harveybear said—such a dumb Harvey-imitation of a psychiatrist telling a psychiatrist-joke that the air seemed bright with flakes of shiny gray plastic. But then the Harveybear finally smiled and the air suddenly crinkled around the smile-line-extensions and reality fractured along some new cleavage and some part of me that had gone on an immense dark journey best not to even remember was suddenly back.

And the Harveybear had brought me back! Harvey—the Black Forest Cuckoo-Clock Builder Elf, the Control-Freak, the Psychic Castrator
—Harvey Brustein
had brought me back!

“Jesus Christ, man,” I said, “did you do that on purpose?”

“Do what on purpose?”

“I was off on the dark side of nowhere gibbering and screaming inside and you brought me back. Just like that. Without even saying anything... How did you know...?”

Harvey smiled a knowing Buddha-smile. “I’ve used LSD in therapy,” he said, “so I’ve developed ways of bringing people out of acid bummers as a matter of necessity. Most people on bad trips feel threatened by their external reality in one way or another. So the first step is to present them with a non-threatening reality with which they want to and must deal: a quiet, concerned human being who is ready to listen but in no hurry to speak.”

“As simple as that?”

“You’re dealing with external reality now, aren’t you?”

I wondered—I seemed to be alone with Harvey in a guru-cave in India, bodiless, floating, mind-to-mind telepathy. Reality—or something beyond the real?

“I feel so strange,” I said. The shape of the words existed as emotions in my mouth. Nothing else that was me was real.

“If we’re going to get anywhere, we’ll have to go back in there, you know.”

“I know,” I said. And I knew he knew what I was saying when I said I knew. Back there into the darkness into the void into
another bottle of acid.
But somehow it was like looking at a movie of myself from far away—vague shadow-shapes shifting in an electric night...

“Talking about it won’t be nearly as bad as living it,” Harvey said. “When you give a nightmare verbal symbols, it takes it away from the inside and puts it outside where you can look at it instead of being eaten by it. Try and tell me what happened...”

“I just saw the hole in the bottom of Dope. Hole down into pools of black vomit and the whole universe is trying to push me through. But that’s not the worst of it—worst of it is that a big part of me wants to be pushed through.”

“Why do you want to be pushed through?”

“To get on the other side.”

“Why do you want to get through to the other side?”

“I don’t want to get through!” I screamed at him. “I just told you, it’s pools of black vomit in there death in there monsters in there wearing my face...”

“But you just said part of you wanted to be pushed through. You’ll have to face that part of you. Why do you want to go on through?”

The words bubbled up from my ectoplasmic gut to my flesh-and-blood lips: “Because it’s the other side! Any other side! Because this side sucks! Anything is better than reality on this side!”

“Anything?”

“Oh wow...” I moaned.

Colored whirling lights seemed to halo the cosmic teddybear as a flash flared in my mind: blow your minds, baby, take a trip, flash, freak out; it was all the language of escape artists, refugees from an East Germany of the mind jumping off the top of The Wall in a hail of reality’s bullets, not caring what we were jumping into as long as it was On The Other Side.

“Have you ever really understood why you take drugs?” Harvey said. His eyes were huge tunnels into the center of the universe of my brain—could he read the flash in my mind?

“Not until now,” I told him.

It was so simple—drugs were the only way to look at reality from another side, only way to believe there was another side. Drugs were the sacrament of an Einsteinian god, a God of universal random chaos, God of the ultimate freedom of a table of random numbers, maybe not a very good god, but a god with my kind of style. Getting high was a cosmic good. But...

But... white leather rising sun out of the moldering California Lizard in
another bottle of acid
you just couldn’t keep from taking that next fix of darkness and the merchants of void in a spike in a cap in another bottle of acid sucking you dry sucking you in and filling you with Condition Terminal darkness...

“Perhaps not even now,” Harvey said. “Not completely.”

“I know why I take drugs,” I insisted. “What I don’t know is where drugs take me...”

“Which is what counts, isn’t it?” Harvey said. “I know why you take drugs and so do you: to see a better reality, a deeper vision, a more total view of the truth...”

“No man,” I told him. “I’m not looking for any Oneness with the Cosmic All. A man needs more than one reality is all. Get stuck in one reality and you’re dead—”

Whoom!
Another massive flash hit me! That was it, that was the evil in Dope: dope-reality fought to trap you inside itself and shear off any vision into other realities. Paranoia of Dope was the same paranoia as Anti-Dope: stay in one fucking reality! You’ll turn to shit if you step outside your bag. Neither Dope nor Anti-Dope had a lock on Total Reality—to chase that down the infinite corridors of Dope was a ticket to gibbering paranoia: always the chance of finding it in
another bottle of acid,
one more fix. Dope, like nuclear power, had no morality; you used it or it used you. If you could maintain, you added snatches to your mosaic of reality, but if you lost, you lost heavy because surrender to pure force was surrender to chaos. Each trip was an existential moment: your whole universe was on the line.

The room seemed to flare up with bright yellow light of sunshine—by digging the essence of the evil in Dope, I was free, not just free from the danger, but free to take hash, pot, even acid, free to take the Middle Path between Condition Terminal and gibbering East German anti-Dope paranoia, free to snatch as many goodies as I could from the hands of the Devil inside as long as my reflexes held. Free! Free! Free!

“You seem to have come to some conclusion,” Harvey said.

My lips laughed like the grin of the Cheshire cat suspended in nospace. “Yeah, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no conclusion. Secret of the universe, man—don’t look for Final Conclusions. They’re just not there.”

“But there is a conclusion,” the Harveybear growled softly. “And it’s nothing if not final. And we don’t have to look for it. It’s called death.”

From the corners of the room, shadows advanced, devouring the light. The Harveybear grew dark shaggy fur, long yellow teeth; its eyes became hollow sockets.

“Don’t talk to me about death!” I screamed. “I’ve seen too much death tonight too much—”

“But you haven’t experienced it,” the shaggy thing in the black chair said, licking its sharp teeth.

“Of course I haven’t experienced it, you asshole! I’m sitting here talking to you ain’t I?”

“But don’t you want to experience it? Get it all over with? Find out all there is to know?” It wasn’t making sense! The Harveybear was gibbering slavering scraps of white leather coats rising sun of blood hole into final darkness forever and ever who the fuck wants to know about death the end of everything long black slide into sleep with no bottom... And who the fuck has a choice?

“Every true mystic has said you must die to be born again in one way or another. Don’t you think there might be a truth in there somewhere?” said the Giant Polar Bear God of endless frozen desert.

“Pie in the sky in the great bye and bye...”

“Let’s bring it down to Earth. As far down as we can. Let’s talk about fucking. Ever meet a girl who was afraid to have an orgasm?”

“If you’re half the shrink you think you are, you know that Arlene—”

“I know. I wanted to be sure you did. What is she afraid of? Not pleasure—but of surrender. Not surrender to anything in particular, just surrender itself.”

“Keep going,” I found myself saying. Shadows seemed to soften. The light from the floor lamp bathed Harvey in gold. The words poured from his calm Buddha-lips like living glass butterflies. He was right about Arlene, and it wasn’t just sex. That was why she was afraid of a real relationship—it meant surrender of a piece of her destiny to an outside force. He had it—the worm at her core. I felt myself in the presence of Truth...

“Surrender to what?” the Gray Buddha said. “What is there to fear surrendering to if the fear has no specific object? How about surrender to reality itself, to give oneself to the unknown beyond your control and let it take you to the hidden shore?”

“Sure, sure, that’s why Dope too—cast yourself into the arms of the great unknown. But why be afraid of it...?”

“Because,” said Harvey, “the ultimate reality is death. That’s where we’re all going. Control is an illusion the unconscious individual erects to hide the unfaceable. Surrender control, and you lose the illusion and you see that the ultimate reality is death. Who does not fear death?”

For an instant, the room seemed to go black, totally, finally, ultimately black like the hole at the bottom of Dope of sex of rising suns of blood on white leather of sleep without bottom or end and I heard my blind voice mumbling: “We all know about death... can’t do anything about it can’t face it why—”