It felt like the International had one last trip left in it. Two shocks had blown and the frame was cracked and quite a bit of the electrical system had gone dark. This thing’s from 1970 and it’s been a while since it went on a ride. But you could feel that last trip coming. And Joey said these people he knew from Austin intended to pick him up in Long Beach on their way to the Rainbow Gathering in the national forest over in north-central Oregon. The Gathering of the Tribes it used to be called, tens of thousands of hippies in the woods, seven days of Peace and Love. Four hundred miles to over there where it is—a distance the International could surely make and even possibly manage to retrace back home. You could feel that one last trip coming.
Peace and Love! This tall skinny mean guy in Iowa City in the seventies had a poster on his wall of a peace sign, the upside-down Y symbolizing peace, which he’d altered with a Magic Marker into a lopsided swastika, and he’d added words so that the Peace-and-Love slogan beneath it read PEACE OF THE ACTION/LOVE OF MONEY. I never forgot it…. I who have had so much of peace and so much of love, I have never really believed in either one.
The Magical Mystery Message to see the Rainbow was coming from a couple of directions, wasn’t just coming from Joey and the teenage past. All spring Mike O, a friend of mine from North Idaho, had been bothering me I should go. Mike O, a regular Mr. Natural: Barefoot Mike, Underground Mike, one of the originals, close to sixty years old now; his white hair hasn’t been cut or combed since youth and his white beard looks inhabited. How did we all get so old? Sitting around laughing at old people probably caused it.
How long since I’d seen Joey? We’d taken our first acid trip together, Carter B and him and me and Bobby Z. Hadn’t seen Carter in nearly thirty years. Joey since—wow, since ’74. That summer I was with Miss X. Bobby Z and Joey came to see us on the second floor where we lived in this place like a box of heat. They owed me a disruption—Joey did anyway, because Bobby and I had invaded him two years before, when he’d been living on the side of this mountain in Hollywood and studying to be, or actually working as, some kind of hairdresser. “What do you want?” I said when I answered the door. “You’re not gonna stay here.” The place had only one room to sleep in, and a kitchen the size of a bathroom, a bathroom the size of a closet. There weren’t any closets.
Miss X and I were always fighting. Every time a knock came on the door we had to stop screaming and collect our wits.
“We’re economizing on space,” I said when I saw who it was this time.
“Obviously,” Bobby said.
Joey had his guitar case leaning up against him and his arm draped around it like a little sibling. Miss X stood behind me breathing hard with the mascara streaking her cheeks, radiant with tears and anger and her wet eyelashes like starbursts.
In short, three weeks or two weeks or one week later I made loud vague accusations in a scene, basically the result of the August heat, that ended with Bobby Z and Joey heading north for Minnesota, taking Miss X.
I was stabbing through the window screen with a pair of scissors as they headed down the back stairs, and I didn’t see Bobby again until he was sick on his deathbed five years ago in Virginia, and Joey never since.
It’s funny, but Joey called me from Huntington Beach just last night—two years after this trip to the hippies I’m describing—just to say hello, partly, and partly because his band broke up and he’s just started AA and begun a program of meds for his depression and needs a place to lay back, because he’s homeless. He mentioned he’d heard from Carter B. Carter said he’s got hepatitis C and thinks I probably have it, too, because he must have picked it up way back during the era we were sharing needles when we were kids. I feel all right. I don’t feel sick. But it’s funny. Thirty years go by, and the moves we made just keep bringing this old stuff rolling over us.
The International throws a tire down in the Tri-City area of Hanford, Washington. It’s so hot on the tarmac I get confused in my head and forget to put the nuts back on when I change the flat, and the loose rim tears up the wheel a good bit before I figure out what’s happening and pull over, and I have to roll the thing in front of me a half mile to a garage and get the whole business straightened out. But the truck still works when all is said and done. After I’m in the mountains I start getting glad I agreed to go. Our vehicles, our hamlets and commerce miniaturized in the shadow of these mountains…RU FREE—Minnesota plates on a VW bus in the one-street town of Mitchell not far from the beginning of the Ochoco National Forest. Five youngsters all around twenty years old and a dog, gassing up.
The eastern end of the Ochoco Forest seems quiet enough, a showcase for the public administration of nature, having narrow roads of unblemished blacktop with level campsites scattered sparsely alongside them. The Rainbow Gathering’s website has provided a map leading out toward the wilder part of the mountain and down a dirt road toward a cloud of dust where hundreds of pickups and vans and tiny beat-up cars have parked at the direction of a bunch of wild-looking toothless young pirates with a hand-held radio under a plastic awning and a dirty illegible flag. Even down here, where people wait for the shuttle-vans that take them up the mountain to the gathering or where they shoulder their frame backpacks and start up the hill on foot, all dressed up in the ashes of their most beautiful clothes, in their long skirts and tie-dyed T-shirts, just like the hippies of thirty years ago, even down here there’s a feeling of anarchy Third-World style, the pole and tarp lean-to, the people with shiny eyes, the lying around, the walking around, the sudden flaring madness, only this is celebratory and happy madness rather than angry or violent. The shuttle-van climbs up past further checkpoints where serious authoritative hippies make sure nobody’s just driving up out of laziness to park all over the mountain and get in each other’s way. Past the first camp—the A-Camp, the only place where alcohol is permitted, although this segregation has been accomplished voluntarily and nobody would think of enforcing it. Past other camps of teepees, dome tents, shacks of twigs and plastic tarp to where the WELCOME HOME sign stands at the head of the footpath. The path heads into the series of clearings and copses where a whole lot of hippies, nobody can accurately count how many, have come to celebrate themselves, mostly, right now, by walking around and around, up and down the trails, past the kitchens set up under homemade awnings and canvas roofs, food centers staffed by those who want to give to those who need to take. Mike O has instructed me to equip myself with a big enamelware cup, a spoon, and a sleeping bag—to come as a taker, and be confident I won’t need more. No money changes hands here, at least that’s the idea, everything is done by bartering. But I’ve brought a couple hundred dollars in my pocket because Joey and I might look for mushrooms and seek some sort of spiritual union together through exotic chemicals like in the old days, and I don’t care what they say, I’ve never seen anybody trade dope for anything except sex or cash.
You hear wildly varying figures, eleven different guesses for everything—4,000 feet elevation, 6,700 elevation, 8,000 elevation. Claims of anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000, as far as attendance. But let’s say ten thousand or more hippies touring along the paths here in the American wilderness just as we did up and down Telegraph Ave. in Berzerkely almost thirty years ago. Yes! They’re still at it!—still moving and searching, still probing along the thoroughfares for quick friends and high times, weather-burned and dusty and gaunt, the older ones now in their fifties and a whole new batch in their teens and twenties, still with their backpacks, bare feet, tangled hair, their sophomoric philosophizing, their glittery eyes, their dogs named Bummer and Bandit and Roach and Kilo and Dark Star. And as they pass each other they say, “Loving you!”—Loving you! It serves for anything, greeting and parting and passing, like “aloha,” and might burst from a person at any time as if driven by a case of Tourette’s, apropos of absolutely jack. Everybody keeps saying it.
Scattered over about one square mile of Indian Prairie in the Ochoco National Forest we have the pole-and-awning kitchens and camps of various tribes and families and impromptu more or less hobo clans: Elvis Kitchen, 12-step Kitchen, Funky Granola, Avalon, Greenwich Village. The billboard map near the WELCOME entrance lists and vaguely locates the groups who wish to be located and who have notified someone among the oozing anarchic strata from the Elders down to the children as to where they’d be:
Aloha
Bear Fish
Bliss Rehydration Station
Brew Ha-ha
Cannabis confusion cafe
Carnivores cafe
Cybercamp
Faerie Camp
Eternal Book Assembly
Madam Frog’s Dinkytown Teahouse
Northwest Tribe
Ohana Tribe
Ohmklahoma
Shama Lama Ding Dong
Rainbow Solar Bubble
Deaf Tribe
Jesus Kitchen
Ida No & Eye Don Kare
Free Family
Sacred Head Church
BC Tribe
Twelve Tribes [w/Star of David]
Thank You Camp
Camp Discordia
…and the infamous “A-Camp,” the only region whose temporary residents have agreed that among them alcohol shall be one of the chemicals of happiness.
Alcohol: Near the parking area there is a place called “A-Camp.” Rainbow says “We love the alcoholic, but not the alcohol.” Personalities change on alcohol (and hard drugs). Sometimes people can’t control themselves as well. Therefore you are respectfully asked to leave the alcohol in A-Camp when you hike in to the main gathering space.
—so says the Unoffical Rainbow Website. The whole region commandeered by the Rainbow tribes, as always without benefit of permits from the U.S. Forest Service, parking and all, covers about four square miles. The givers, the ones who hand out food and take care of things to the extent they’re taken care of, the putters-up of portable toilets and showers and medical stations and crude signs like the directory and map or the small billboard illustrating how germs get from dogshit to flies to foodstuff and then to human fingers and mouths, along with advisos to interrupt this process by keeping your hands clean, these who make it all possible arrived and started erecting their camps a week or so before the general celebrants showed up, the takers, the bunch of us who just materialize and stash our stuff under a bush and hold out our blue enamelware cups for hot cereal offered every noon by, for instance, the orange-garbed bald-headed Hare Krishnas, who ladle out three to four thousand such lunches every day of the party.
Joey and I have planned to meet up at the camp of the Ohana tribe, a nomad family of twenty or more who caravan around North America living only in government-owned forests like the Ochoco. I don’t find Joey right off and have no real explanation for my presence among them, but the young teenagers who seem to make up the most of the Ohana don’t care where I put up my tent and don’t seem to hold it against me that I look like somebody from a TV news team, olive shorts, khaki shirt, baseball hat, and jogging shoes. Hey. Even socks. On the other hand nobody seems inclined to talk with me, either. At a glance they see there’s no sense asking me for reefer. Ohana means something in Hawaiian, they tell me. Peace. Or Love. They’re not sure.
I’ve located Joey. He looks the same, only older, just as sad or perhaps more so, having lived thirty years longer now and found more to be sad about.
Joey and I sit out front of my tent in the dirt while he tunes up. He’s played professionally for decades, and he doesn’t do it just for fun very often anymore. But just to oblige me…We sing a few of the old ones while the teenage Ohanans get a fire going about six feet away and start good-naturedly hassling whoever wanders past for drugs.
It’s the second of July and anybody’s who’s coming is probably here. The woods aren’t quiet. You can hear the general murmur of thousands as in a large stadium, just a bit muted by the forest. The sky turns red and the day dies and Joey has to put away his guitar thanks to competition: Drums start up all around, they call from far and near and not quite anywhere in the forest, they give a sense of its deeps and distances and they sound like thoughts it’s thinking.
We stumble through the night amongst them: the drums, the drums, the drums. All through the forest, pockets of a hundred, two hundred dancers gather around separate groups of ten or twenty maniac percussionists with congas and bongos and tambourines and every other kind of thing to whang on loudly, and the rhythm rises up from all directions into the darkness of space, until the galactic cluster at the center of Andromeda trembles. The yellow strobing light of bonfires and the shadows of the dancers on the smoke. Naked men with their penises bouncing and topless women shaking their beautiful breasts. Every so often when the mood gets them a cry goes up and a hundred voices rise in a collective howling that really just completely banishes gravity for a moment and dies away.
We hear it rained quite heavily two nights ago, but this night is all stars and stillness, the smoke of fires going straight up in the orange light, and the ground isn’t particularly uncomfortable, but just the same camping out always feels wrong to me—to sleep outdoors feels desperate, broke, and lonely—brings back those nights under a billboard on Wilshire where Joey and Carter and I found a bush to hide us, panhandler punks moving up and down the West Coast drunk on wine and dreaming of somewhere else, brings back those nights in a bag in the hills above Telegraph Avenue when I literally—literally, because I tried—could not get arrested, couldn’t land a vagrancy charge and a bed and a roof and three meals of jail food. In my tent on the earth of the Ochoco Forest I don’t sleep right. Neither does Joey. By next day noon we’re already talking about finding a motel. The morning’s too hot and the party’s bumping off to a bad start, we keep running into many more people looking for dope than people who look stoned, and the Krishnas run out of gruel twenty minutes after they start serving. Joey and I join what they call the Circle, about a thousand people sitting in a pack on the ground—no standing up, please—getting fed with one ladleful each of spiceless veggie broth, courtesy, we believe, of the Rainbow Elders.
Once upon a time in the cataclysmic future, according to Rainbow lore, which filters down to us from the ancient Hopi and the Navajo through the cloudy intuitions of people who get high a lot, once upon a time in the future “when the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying,” says the unofficial Rainbow Internet website, claiming to quote an Old Native American Prophecy, “a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow.” I see hardly any blacks, hardly any Indians from either continent, but it’s astonishing to see so many youngsters on the cusp of twenty, as if perhaps some segment of the sixties population stopped growing up.
The Rainbow Family, consisting apparently of anybody who wants to be in it, not only have a myth but also have a creed, expressed succinctly way back when by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance”: Do Your Thing; and with great reluctance they’ve allowed to evolve out of the cherished disorganization of these gatherings a sort of structure and an optional authority, that is, an unenforced authority, which defaults to the givers, the ones who actually make possible things like this gathering and many other smaller ones around the country every year since the first one in 1972; and the givers defer to the tribal Elders, whoever they are.
An online exchange of letters headed “God can be found in LSD” winds up urging that those participating in these experiments in spontaneous community-building only
and that anything else going on is nobody’s business unless someone’s getting hurt. “In that event, our system of PeaceKeeping (we call it ‘Shanti Senta,’ not ‘Security’) kicks in, and the unsafe situation is dealt with.” Speaking as a congenital skeptic, I have to admit that no such situation occurs all weekend, as far as I can learn. And nobody can tell me what Shanti Senta means, either.
I go walking in the woods with Mike O, who’s spent the last few days under a tiny awning dispensing information about the Course in Miracles, a heretic sort of gnostic brand of Christian thinking that doesn’t recognize the existence of evil and whose sacred text is mostly in iambic pentameter. He’s a grizzled old guy, wiry and hairy, lives in the Idaho mountains in an underground house he dug out with a shovel, never wears shoes between April and October. He stops a time or two to smoke some grass out of a pipe, a couple of times also to share a toke with passersby, because Mike is a genuinely unselfish and benevolent hippie, and after that he has to stop once in a while and rest his butt on a log, because he’s dizzy. We pass a gorgeous woman completely naked but covered with black mud. She’s been rolling in a mud-hole with her friends. I guess I’m staring because she says, “Like what you see?”
“In a day full of erotic visions, you’re the most erotic vision of all,” I tell her. To me it’s a poem, but she just thinks I’m fucked.
Somehow these flower people sense I’m not quite there. They see me. And I think I see them back: In a four-square-mile swatch of the Ochoco Forest the misadventures of a whole generation continue. Here in this bunch of 10,000 to 50,000 people somehow unable to count themselves I see my generation epitomized: a Peter Pan generation nannied by matronly Wendys like Bill and Hillary Clinton, our politics a confusion of Red and Green beneath the black flag of Anarchy; cross-eyed and well-meaning, self-righteous, self-satisfied; close-minded, hypocritical, intolerant—Loving you!—Sieg Heil!
Joey and I have discovered that if we identify ourselves as medical people ferrying supplies, the Unofficals at the checkpoints let us pass and we don’t have to bother with distant parking and the wait for one of the shuttle brigade of VW vans and such, and in the comfort of an automobile, Joey’s pretty good Volvo, we can come and go as we please. Coming back up from a burger run in town, we pick up this guy hitching. He says he’s staying in the A-Camp. “I’m not the big juice-head,” he says, “but at least those folks understand I like cash American currency for what I’m selling.”
“And what’s for sale?”
“’shrooms. Twenty-five an eighth.”
I don’t ask an eighth of what, just—“How much to get the two of us high?”
“Oh, an eighth should do you real nice if you haven’t been eating them as a steady thing and like built a tolerance. Twenty-five bucks will send you both around and back, guaranteed.”
And this is why certain people shouldn’t mess with these substances: “Better give me a hundred bucks’ worth,” I say.
It makes me sort of depressed to report that as we accomplish the exchange this man actually says, “Far out, dude.”
We now possess this Baggie full of gnarled dried vegetation that definitely looks to be some sort of fungus. Back at my tent I dig out my canteen and prepare to split the stuff, whatever it is, with Joey while he finds his own canteen so we can wash it down quick. And here is why I can’t permit myself even to try and coexist with these substances: I said I’d split it, but I only gave him about a quarter. Less than a quarter. Yeah. I never quite became a hippie. And I’ll never stop being a junkie.
For a half hour or so we sat on the earth between our two tents and watched the folks go by. In a copse of trees just uphill from us the Ohana group had started a drum-circle and were slowly hypnotizing themselves with mad rhythm. Joey revealed he did, in fact, eat these things once in a while and probably had a tolerance. He wasn’t sensing much effect.
“Oh,” I said.
In a few minutes he said, “Yeah, I’m definitely not getting off.”
I could only reply by saying, “Off.”
I was sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. My limbs and torso had filled up with a molten psychedelic lead and I couldn’t move. Objects became pimpled like cactuses. Ornately and methodically and intricately pimpled. Everything looked crafted, an inarticulate intention worked at every surface.
People walked by along the trail. Each carried a deeply private shameful secret, no, a joke they couldn’t tell anyone, yes, their heads raged almost unbearably with consciousness and their souls carried their bodies along.
“Those are some serious drums.”
Anything you say sounds like the understatement of the century. But to get hyperbolic at all would be to hint dreadfully at the truth that no hyperbole whatsoever is possible—that is, it’s hopelessly impossible to exaggerate the unprecedented impact of those drums. And the sinister, amused, helpless, defeated, worshipful, ecstatic, awed, snide, reeling, happy, criminal, resigned, insinuating tone of the message of those drums. Above all we don’t wish to make the grave error of hinting at the truth of those drums and then, perhaps, give way to panic. Panic at the ultimateness—panic at the fact that in those drums, and with those drums, and before those drums, and above all because of those drums, the world is ending. That one is one we don’t want to touch—the apocalypse all around us. These concepts are wound up inside the word “serious” like the rubber bands packed explosively inside a golf ball.
“Yeah, they sure are,” Joey says.
Who? What? Oh, my God, he’s talking about the drums! Very nearly acknowledging the unspeakable! He’s a mischievous bastard and my best friend and the only other person in the universe.
Loving you!
According to the psychiatrists who have embarked together on a molecular exploration of what they like to call “the three-pound universe”—that is, the human brain—what’s happening right now is all about serotonin—5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT for short, “the Mr. Big of neurotransmitters,” the chemical that regulates the flow of information through the neural system.
I read this article in Omni called “The Neuroscience of Transcendence” that explains the whole thing. Having ingested the hallucinogen psilocybin, quite a bit more than my share, I’ve stimulated the serotonin receptors and disrupted the brain’s delicate balancing act in cycling normal input messages from the exterior world—adding special effects.
At the same time, the messages outward to the motor cortex of the brain are disrupted by the same flood of sacred potent molecules, bombarding key serotonin receptors and sending signals unprovoked by any external stimulus. What’s happening in here seems to come from out there. The subjective quality underlying all of experience at last reveals that it belongs to everything. The mind inside becomes the mind all around.
Serotonin and the hallucinogens that act as serotonin agonists—like LSD, mescaline, DMT, and psilocybin—also travel to the thalamus, a relay station for all sensory data heading for the cortex. There, conscious rationalizings, philosophizings, and interpretations of imagery occur. The cortex of the brain now attaches meaning to the visions that bubble up from the limbic lobe—of burning bushes or feelings of floating union with nature. The flow of images is scripted and edited into a whole new kind of show.
EXACTLY!
YES! Bugs Bunny with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shoots you in the head with a miracle.
I watched helplessly as two beings encountered each other on the trail. Two figures really hard to credit with actuality. But they weren’t hallucinatory, just very formally and exotically got up as if for some sort of ceremony, covered in black designs and ornamental silver. They greeted each other and transacted. It was brief and wordless with many secret gestures, the most sinister transaction I’ve ever witnessed, the most private, the most deeply none of my business. Initiates of the utterly inscrutable. My eyesight too geometrically patterned to allow them faces. They had myths instead of heads.
That is very definitely it for me. I crawl into my tent. It’s four feet away but somehow a little bit farther off than the end of time. It’s dark and closed and I’m safe from what’s out there but not from what’s in here—the impending cataclysm, the imploding immenseness, the jocular enormity.
It’s been somewhere between twenty-five minutes and twenty-five thousand years since I ate the mushrooms, and already we have the results of this experiment. The question was, now that a quarter century has passed since my last such chemical experience, now that my soul is awake, and I’ve grown from a criminal hedonist into a citizen of life with a belief in eternity, will a psychedelic journey help me spiritually? And the answer is yes; I believe such is possible; thanks; now how do you turn this stuff off?
Because what if the world ends, and Jesus comes down in a cloud, and I’m wrapped in a lowgrade fireball all messed up on chemicals? Is the world ending? God looms outside the playroom. The revelation and the end of toys. The horrible possibility that I might have to deal with something.
And the drums, the drums, the drums. Fifty thousand journeys to the moon and back in every beat.
Four hours later I succeed in operating the zipper on my sleeping bag: tantamount to conquering Everest. I got in and held on.
Me and this sleeping bag! People we are going places now!
After several hours I crawled out into the universe and took up my rightful position in outer space, lodged against the surface of this planet. It wasn’t raining rain, it was only raining starlight.
This musician friend of Joey’s from Austin, this guy named Jimmy G, sits down beside me with a magic-mushroom guitar and serenades me with his compositions until almost dawn. He’s about fifty maybe, white-haired, very skinny, with a variety of faint colors washing over him ceaselessly. It’s incomprehensible to me that a genius of this caliber, whose rhymes say everything there is to say and whose tunes sound sweeter and sadder and wilder and happier and more melodic than any others in history, should just live in Austin like a person, writing his songs. Songs about getting our hearts right, loving each other, getting along in peace, sharing the wealth, caring for our mother planet.
By then, all over the world, the drums have stopped. Teenage Ohanans in the tent across the trail make tea on a campfire without uttering a word amongst them. Nobody talks anywhere in the Ochoco Forest; it’s a time of meditation. Today is the Fourth of July, the focal hour of the Rainbow Family’s gathering. Despite all the partying, this is the day of the party. The idea is to enter a silence at dawn and meditate till noon. Then get real happy.
Joey and I walk around watching folks start the day without talking. The strange silence broken only by two dogs barking and one naked man raving as if drunk, really raving, feinting and charging at people like a bull, stumbling right through the fire-pit down by the Bartering Circle.
Noon sharp, the howling starts. The wild keening of human hippies emulating wolves. Minutes later, the drums. In the big meadow where the Circle gathers for meals everybody jumps up dancing, some naked, some dressed in clothes, others wearing mud. The sun burns on them as the crowd becomes a mob the size of a football field. A guy pours Gatorade from a jug into people’s upturned open mouths, another sprinkles the throng with a hose from a backpack full of water, like an exterminator’s outfit—he’s a sweatbuster. Higher and higher! I crash under a bush.
Just before sunset I wake up and get back among the Circle and encounter a definite palpable downturn in the vibes. There’s not enough food and not enough drugs. The party has scattered among the various camps, the drum-circle that must have included a hundred or so wild percussionists mutters back and forth to itself from just a couple places hidden in the woods.
As the sunset reddens the west, black thunderheads form in the south: a lull, a dead spot, a return of the morning’s silence as the Rainbow Family watches a squall gathering, bunching itself together in the southern half of an otherwise clear ceiling.
Then a rainbow drops down through the pale sky.
The sight of it, a perfect multicolored quarter-circle, calls up a round of howling from everywhere at once that grows and doesn’t stop, and the drumming starts from every direction. Then it’s a double rainbow, and then a triple, and the drums and howls can’t be compared to anything I’ve ever heard, it’s a Rainbow Sign from Above—Loving you!—then a monster light show with the thunderheads gone crimson in the opposing sunset, the three rainbows, and now forked lightning and profound, invincible thunder, every crooked white veiny bolt and giant peal answered by a wild ten-thousand-voiced ululation—a conversation with the Spirit of All at the Divine Fourth of July Show! Far fuckin out! The Great Mother-Father Spirit Goddess Dude is a hippie!
And this is why a certain type mustn’t mess with magic potions: I’m thinking, all through this spectacle, that I should have saved a couple buttons for today, I should be high to dig this. Forgetting how I dug the starlight last night by zooming around somebody’s immense black mind in my sleeping bag and almost never witnessing the sky.
But after the rainbows and the storm the night comes down and we get just a little flashback: I close my eyes and remember that first ride on White Owsley’s acid, remember surfacing behind a steering wheel behind which I’d apparently been sitting for some hours, trying to figure out what to do with it; and there was Joey, and Carter B and Bobby Z, the four of us coming back to the barest fringes of Earth, a place we’d never afterward be able to take quite so seriously because we’d seen it obliterated, finding each other in this place now—none of us having ever taken acid before or even really talked to anybody about it, four teenage beatnik aspirants returned from an absurd odyssey for which none of us had been the slightest bit prepared and which we felt we’d just barely survived—remember watching Joey and Carter disappear into an apartment building and remember heading with Bobby, somehow traveling through streets like rivers behind this steering wheel—five hundred mikes of White Owsley’s!—remember steering magnificently through Alexandria, Virginia, in a gigantic teacup that once had been a Chevrolet under streetlights with heads like glittering brittle dandelions, remember letting it park itself and remember floating into a building and down the halls of the Fort Ward Towers Apartments, down the complicated curvature of the halls, and finding, at the end of the palatial mazes, finding—Mom! Mom in her robe and slippers! Her curlers from Mars! Mom from another species! Mom who said It’s five in the morning! I nearly called the police! WHERE have you BEEN and remember turning to Bobby Z, who’s dead of AIDS, at his funeral I threw dirt onto his coffin while his sister, my old highschool sweetheart, keened and screamed, turned to Bobby Z and said, Where have we been?—and the question astonished and baffled and shocked him too, and we both said, Where have we been? WHERE HAVE WE BEEN?
Bobby them drums are riding themselves up to the very limit and right on through like it was nothing. Where where where have we been?
Where did we go?