Homage

            by John Downey

 

            K-mar is shooting at ground squirrels with a bb gun he stole from a party he crashed the other week. The question of the moral intent behind shooting these squirrels is percolating in my mind, and I'm just about to tell K-mar that I don't think that his means will justify the end he is looking for, or actually even accomplish the end, being as he is missing every shot by a good four feet, but I realize I don't have to. Indeed, the squirrel currently in his sites no longer even seems concerned with this distant threat of annihilation via high-speed plastic pellets. It is picking at some acorn or peanut. K-mar fires again, missing every visible object in the immediate vicinity, bb flying off into the sky.

            Mushrooms, as hallucinogens, have a way of crippling even the most basic of motor skills, and firing a gun accurately into a small woodland creature is almost completely insurmountable. I recognize this. My companion may or may not. His lips, humungous and impressive things in their own right, flop together. Fully saturated in saliva, he half whispers, half slobbers, 'fuckkkkkkkerz. theeeese fuuuuuuuuckkkkerz are scrappppy.'

            I take out a cigarette and fumble with my lighter for what seems like hours before I can get the thing lit. It's a beautiful day. The sun is out and the breeze is faint. We are sitting in a field somewhere in the depths of Tilden. The opportunity to seize this glorious day by its neck and throttle it to its knees presented itself to us in the form of K-mar's cousin from Santa Cruz who is an impressive literary major/agriculturalist, concerned primarily with the cultivation of psilocybin-enriched fungi. In a fine act of generosity, he loaded us with two ounces of potent caps from his personal garden on campus and sent us on our way. We each ate an eighth and a half and decided to go for a nature hike, stopping beforehand to pick up a fifth of Jack Daniels for good measure.

Now it is 1:00 and we are gurping in this meadow, shooting at squirrels, laughing like babies about absolutely nothing. My cell phone rings. I answer in the usual manner.

            "I'm on ‘shrooms."

            "Ho, shit, really? Hey, uh, dude, dude, you're on ‘shrooms? Shit dude. Dude, party in Montclair, and I need a ride? Is that cool? Uhh...Is this making sense? Are you on ‘shrooms?"

            "Yes."

            "Uh....Okay, um, alright dude. Okay. Here: call me back. Its at nine. Alright? Dude, uhh...dude, are you gonna’ be on ‘shrooms? Can you go on the freeway?"

            "We will contact you."

            I hang up. I tell K-mar I'm over these ‘shrooms, lets go. It's a lie. I'm just peaking. As I stand up, the colors around me polarize and in the far grass of the meadow a pair of alligators race each other, curving, in each lap, ever so slightly toward us. K-mar stays reclined, fondling the base of his bb gun. I tell him to get up, lets go, we need to get going.

            His face is contorted in thought, and he makes no motion to move.

            "Why?" he finally asks.

            "K-mar, the alligators, you dick! They're heading straight towards us!"

He looks to where I'm pointing, where the grass is being pressed down stalk for stalk under each heavy reptilian footstep, rapidly coming closer to us. His eyes widen, and he springs to his feet, with the natural grace only a track star can possess. Together we sprint out of the field, down the fire trail we had hiked up, back to our car. In the valley below, thousands of small houses marinate in dirty storm clouds. We are high above our providence, expanding our conscious states of being, racing through the forest, living a Crusoeian dream. Yet, what were we racing for? We were heading back to become oozing chancres on the wide, greasy back of our great city.

            Some things you just can't escape.

~

            We arrive in the parking lot out of breath. I think we would have made the sprint back in under fifteen minutes if we hadn't stopped to observe a pulsating conifer. The lot is deserted, so we get the JD from the trunk and kill about a third of the bottle in preparation of our drive down.

            "K, say, are you good to drive?"

            "Nope."

            "Well, finish up that tennis elbow and lets get moving. There are things to be done."

            I take his keys out of his pocket and put them in his hand. I rummage through my pocket, find an oxycontin, pop it, hop into the passenger seat, and settle in while K-mar fumbles to unlock the door. The drive down would have been, for someone of a less drug-addled constitution, a terrifying experience. Luckily, the combination of substances in our systems causes wrong-lane games of chicken not to induce concern, but rather long fits of giggles and clucking noises. After narrowly avoiding our fifth head-on collision, K-mar begins to cry.

            The negative vibes slowly seep from his body and waft towards me, more with every tear. They are hideous, greenish clouds, and I press myself close to my door and try to air them away. I know if I am infected, it will be the end of me; the relative distribution of negativity in the world will be displaced onto my person, and the universe will implode itself directly on top of me. There are only two options; duck and roll out of the car, or talk this horrendous poison away.

            As it happens, K-mar begins speaking just as my hand is creeping for the door handle. At first nothing coherent comes from his mouth, just more foul emanations (by this time the green clouds almost fill up the car and have completely ruined my fleece, I’m positive). He blubbers for a while, occasionally spitting out small phrases like, 'never there' and 'burnt chicken', and then he drops the bomb.

            "My mama, Jay, she never breast-fed me."

            I nearly puke from shock. Of every awkward Oedipal issue someone could mention when there are enough psycho-actives in my stomach to make Timothy Leary blush, K-mar had to mention this. There is no time for talking away these negative vibes, or escaping them. I dig in my pockets until I find a vile of liquid ephedrine and quickly fill an eye dropper. I scream at K-mar to open his mouth. He turns to look at me, tears streaming down his face, and I jam the eyedropper between his lips.

            His features distort into a grimace at the taste, and his skin begins to sag down to his chest, folding on top of itself and running down his shirt like brown lava. I quickly refill the eyedropper and stick it in his mouth again, being careful to avoid getting any of the ephedrine on his teeth. Once the eyedropper is empty, K-mar springs back to life, his skin jolts back to his face with a snap like elastic, and the green gas simply disappears. He shakes his head and laughs.

            "Haha! That was a trip. Good lookin', my man."

            "It was nothing. Now, however, we are in a position to attend a function, of the social persuasion, in approximately..." a glance at my watch reveals two small, writhing snakes fighting each other on an off-white patina, "...five hours."

            "What are we gonna do until then?"

            "Here, pull over the car, I have an idea."

            In one deft movement, K-mar jerks us off the road onto a conveniently placed patch of dirt. We had intended to head back to town, but somehow we are still somewhere in the park-reserve area. Obviously, we haven’t yet accomplished whatever it was fate had put us here to do. Mulling over this, I hop out of the car and pop open the trunk. Underneath K-mar's old gym clothes we have five gallons of orange juice, two large bags of Doritos, two ounces of pot, a jar of Ginsing root, ten packs of cigarettes, a bottle of concentrated No-doze tablets, three palm-tree fronds, ten blotter-papers brimming with opium, and a water bottle full of wretched looking Ayahuasca bestowed upon us by our Peruvian friend Xantes. I grab a sheet of the opium blotters, six no-doze, the Ayahuasca, and a handfull of pot and climb back into the passenger seat. K-mar is admiring his finger nails.

            "Alright, K, here's the plan. We take that high scenic route, the one that extends over the ozone, out to Oakland. Along the way, I'll patch together a joint for us, and we'll smoke it at high noon by that grassy area off the turn-flip. Ka-peach?"

            K nodded, then shook his head,

            "My little cousin called, Jay. He said he wants to come."

            "Well, how old is your cousin?"

            "He about five months...no, years, five years old."

            I laugh, my jaw clenched, suddenly feeling like some 1950's Humphery Bogart figure.

            "Where we're headed, there's no room for tyros, K. Call that bubbly little sucker and tell him the game's off."    

            He nods resolutely. We wait as K-mar explains to his aunt why he wants to speak to his cousin again, and then why he had made his cousin cry, and then what the pitfalls of depriving a young child of lactation are. By the time he hangs up his phone, an hour has slipped away.

            K-mar sighs as he starts the engine. The car, an old jeep Cherokee, whines and grumbles to life and we pull out onto the empty parkway that later becomes the high, narrow pass through the hills to Oakland. By this time I really am over these ‘shrooms, and I now propose an inventive drug cocktail before we set out for Montclair.

            At a turnoff next to a meadow, austere and beautiful in the late afternoon sun, we pull over and get out of the car. I hand K-mar the joint and three no-dozes'. In the form it’s in, sapped and crude, the opium would easily incapacitate us. The no-dozes' were to allow us use of our various appendages, and the ayahuasca was to put a brilliant tint on the mellow trip we were going to enjoy. I pop the three tablets and hit the joint, letting the smoke seep out of my nose. K-mar is already reclined against a tree, grinning at me. I cheese back at him and take a long drink of the Ayahuasca. It tastes foul, but there is no energy in my face to express the horrible flavor, and I casually turn around to let the instant nausea I feel leave me in the form of a long vicious hurl. K-mar drinks a long drink and throws up himself.

            "Jaaaaaaaaay, whaaaaat izzzzzzz thissssssss?"

            I reel backwards, caught offguard by the sudden numbing of sound and explosion of color. A breeze catches my ear and I hear a thousand whispering voices, a thousand lazy susprints, phrases, words, diatribes, which pass as quickly as the wind. The moon hangs in the twilight of the day like a marble on some Mojave print. I look at K-mar. The contour of his body is soft and fuzzy, like a vaseline picture. I barely manage to motion at the murky water bottle.

            "You know, K, shamans in South America use this stuff to talk to God."

            "Oh yeah? Is that the truth?"

            K-mar's tongue, I can hear, is close to failing.

            "Truth is subjectivity, friend. What's God to guys like us, anyhow?"

            "Heeeeeeey. I go to church."

            "I go to burch, buddy. You can't argue with that."

            He can’t, and for thirty minutes we lean against the car, eyes dilated, astonished and amused at everything. The combination of psychodelics, depressants, and stimulents changes the meadow from a nice place in the evening to a psychological journey into the depths of logic and paradigms. Eventually, conversation shifts from grunts and exclamations to topics of being and purpose that would make any philosopher beam.

            "K, what is the principle behind human suffering?"

            "I don't know, Jay. I'm too fuuucked..."

            "Suppose, for just a visceral second, that there's no divine purpose to our existence."

            "Aw man, what are you saying."

            "If there's no one concerned with our actions, why do we act at all?"     

            "Jay, you know I never know what you're talking about."

            "Maybe...maybe we live our lives the way we do for one reason: so that we don't remain nameless in death. That makes sense...Yeah, I'm really digging that."

            "Whatever."

            "You know the story of Erostratus? He wanted to be remembered in history, so he blew up a temple, and here I am today, saying his name. Erostratus. Erostratus."

            "Why would you blow up a temple? I go to chuuuuurch."

            "Think about it, K-mar. If you were to die today, would anyone remember you in ten years?"

            "My grandmama. My boys would make t-shirts. RIP K-mar."

            "No, but you have to throw out old t-shirts in five years, and your grandmama....I like your grandmama, K-mar."

            "She's a nice lady."

            I smoke a cigarette and look at the long stalks of dry grass, swaying frigidly. This human drive to perpetuate one's title, I was on to something. Something big. However, hard work, and success within a system, a system that couldn't last for more than another hundred years, wouldn't leave you being talked about by those nameless scrutinizing progeny of the future. They don't care about CEOs or presidents or rock stars, them with their future drugs and future noises and future tastes, all numbed to a perfect casual jaundice. Erostratus. Erostratus had it right.

            "Goddamn it!" I shout, moving to my feet with an incredible display of balance. "K-mar, that's it! We're the closest to Greeks that humans have ever been since the Greeks! We can easily make the whole world know us, make the whole world remember us like the Greeks. Don't you see? We need to burn a temple!"

            K-mar is immersed in a small beetle scuttling around on his shell-toes.

            "No temples to burn, Jay. They already burnt all the temples."

            "No, K, look, a metaphorical temple!"

            The drugs are so strong now, I am sure of what I am saying. His head swivels around, and he stares at me, a long piercing look. I can see the keys in his eyes; I had unlocked him. We stare at each other, recognition and awe and comprehension transpiring from our pores, engulfing us. K-mar nods, I nod back at him resolutely. We get up and speedily fumble our way into the car.

            "This is gonna be huge, man."

            We peel out back onto the road to Oakland. The pass we are driving on is narrow and winding, our eyes scan for a long stretch met by a sharp turn. This will be our indelible act; this will etch us into history, into an infamy that has its own strange glory. The pyramids. Man's first step on the moon. The golden triangle. The apartheid in Africa. Here is an unprecedented action, implemented solely to outshine all the events time and the world could offer. Outshine our fathers. Outshine the years. This wasn't idle speech inside mouths, this was motivated action; something someone could easily mistake for violence and love, convergent, converged.

            The pass is up ahead. K-mar's eyebrows furrow and he forces the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer jumps to eighty. Eighty five. Ninety. We speed past the trees and grass and pavement and any lingering doubt. Eventually we even surpass my train of thought and suddenly, for a quick second, everything is an outline, two-dimensional color-by-numbers outlines. I don’t even brace myself as the car speeds off of the road and over the cliff. I don’t even brace myself as we soar through the air, majestic almost. I don’t even brace myself as the ground shrieks up at us, and K-mar laughs right back at it, insouciant, victorious.

            Some things you just can't escape.