Collected Essays (85 page)

So I came onboard as a co-editor. At this time, scanners were hopelessly inefficient and flaky, so I just typed up my favorite Mono excerpts and then placed them in alphabetical order according to the main topic being discussed. It made for a nice book, and I wrote this essay as the introduction. It appeared under the title, “On the Edge of the Pacific.”

The Manual of Evasion

January 7, 1994. En route to Portugal.

No clear idea what day of the week it is, I’m still in the holiday “broken clock all gone” mode of vacation. Times like this is when it really pays off to be an academic. I don’t have to go back to work for almost three more weeks.

I’m on my way to Portugal, to be filmed by some guy who got a grant from the city of Lisbon to make a movie about Lisbon. Edgar Pêra. The negotiations were all with his producer, Catarina Santos. Edgar’s read some of my books in Portuguese and decided to have me be in his movie, also the SF-and-conspiracy writer Robert Anton Wilson and the psychedelic prophet Terence McKenna. Edgar must be quite a character, judging from his taste in literature, but you never know with Europeans. Catarina wrote me to ask me my sizes for costumes. The movie may be fictional rather than the expected documentary, I don’t know. She called again just before I left, and I asked her what the costumes were, and she didn’t want to tell me. “It’s better if it’s a surprise.” So the theory I’ve been promulgating to my friends and family is that I’m going to Portugal to be filmed dressed as a giant chicken scratching at the ground with my feet.

My dog Arf has been scratching the ground like crazy recently, I think it releases musk from glands by his dewlaps. I’ve been studying him in preparation for my role. If Edgar asks me to improvise, that’s what I can do. The first thing I’ll say will be, “Do you have a chicken costume I can wear?” My face showing inside the huge, open beak. Foghorn Leghorn. A wobbling featherduster wired to my padded fanny. Or, worse, the handle stuck up my naked butt. But, hey, don’t laugh, they’re paying me all expenses plus a nice fee.

January 8, 1994. Airport hassles.

It’s 29 hours later and I’m still in an airport. Newark was iced in, and my flight from Dulles was cancelled. I spent the night in the Dulles Hyatt in D.C., and I went back to Dulles pretty early in the morning today. Now I’m at JFK in New York.

I had interesting dreams last night, I was in this half-awake kind of state worrying about when to get up, and started dreaming quite lucidly, knowing I was dreaming, and the dream room endless variations on the hotel room. And sometimes something would come and grab me or attack me, and I realized this time that those things are also me, they are projected by me, everything in the dream is a projection of me, so I’d like
grab
the imp on my shoulder and squeeze and merge with him, and have a whirlpool kind of feeling. Very unusual. The fact that I watched
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
on TV in bed just before sleep helped the dreams too no doubt.

Here in N.Y., the tree branches are all covered with thick coats of ice. There’s been an ice storm, which is why it took me 24 hours longer to get here. I have a boarding pass for TAP (Air Portugal); here’s hoping it takes off in an hour like it’s supposed to. Bad sign: it’s doesn’t have a gate listed yet, and all the other planes do. My suitcase got away from me at Dulles yesterday, too, so I’ve been wearing these clothes for two days now, and slept in the shirt as well. Supposedly it will catch up with me or I with it in Lisbon. If I ever get there.

Okay, we are on the plane now. I have a window seat and the plane is completely full. This is going to be rough. Nobody on the plane seems to speak English at all. The loudspeaker is playing the Lettermen singing Christmas carols. A big fat stoic lady next to me in all black and with big purse and coat and shopping bags that she doesn’t want to put in the overhead. Her face is covered with warts, warts on warts like a fractal. Her arm is sticking way into my space. It’s a good thing they’re paying me to do this.

January 9, 1994. Lisbon, Terence McKenna.

As it turned out, the plane sat on the ground for 2 ½ hours before taking off. While we were sitting there, Robert Anton Wilson got put on the plane, his connection had been late. I said hi to him; he looked pretty stressed, his face taut, red and masklike. Later he told me that he’s 62 and has high blood pressure. He also has post-polio syndrome, which makes him walk unsteadily.

When we got to Lisbon, it turned out that
both
our suitcases were lost. It took a long time to give info to the baggage people, and when we finally got out of the airport there was
surprise
nobody there to meet us. So there I was, 36 hours after starting out from D.C. (where I’d made a stopover to visit my ailing Pop), with my suitcase gone, no clue what to do, and old Bob Wilson on my hands—he prefers “Bob” to “Robert.” He was starting to really lose it, obsessively complaining about everything, like that he wouldn’t have his medicine, and me falling unwillingly into the role of chirpy cheerer-upper that I’d just finished doing with Pop on the way out here. Wilson looks a bit like Pop, actually: he has white hair and beard. I told Wilson, “Don’t be so surprised they didn’t manage to meet us. I mean these are people who invited Rucker, Wilson and McKenna to be in their movie. These people have got to be nuts! These people are fucked up! It’s like…how long would you wait for Queen Mu to meet you at an airport?” We had a voice and fax phone numbers for Catarina Santos, but she wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she have a message machine.

So Bob Wilson and I asked the tourism counter to recommend a hotel, and we got a cab to their recommended Hotel Nacional, a depressingly anonymous place in the business district, new, soulless, with a lobby of stone polished to a fierce tombstone glare; it didn’t seem as if anyone else at all was staying there. Wilson and I lay down for naps in our separate rooms. My heart was doing funny things lying there, palpitations you might call it, my poor overstressed heart fluttering at my chest. I got up in the early afternoon, and Wilson was still asleep. Fine.

The sidewalks of Lisbon are mosaics made of miniature cobblestones, extremely slippery in the winter rain, mostly white, but with black swirly symmetric Belusov-Zhabotinsky patterns every so often. In the less traveled areas, grass grows verdant in the multiple mosaic cracks.

I found a small funicular railway and rode it up to the Barrio Alto, a neighborhood of old houses with laundry hanging out. The walls were crumbly stucco washed over with colors. It must be glorious on a sunny day. And there are tiles everywhere. The Moorish influence. I missed having Sylvia here to show it to. I saw a little park with a nice-smelling cedar that had been trained to grow out over a circular overhead trellis—some beams up in the air making a hundred-foot-diameter disk with the branches of the cedar sprawling atop them. Old men underneath playing cards at little tables. Very quaint. I could see out over the city from one spot in the Barrio Alto—these view spots are called
miradouros
—I could see Teja River (called the
Tagus
in English, no doubt a British idea like using
Leghorn
for the city
Livorno
in Italy or, for that matter,
Lisbon
instead of
Lisboa
,) and I could see the big landmark: the Castelo de São Jorge (the tilde over the letter
a
in
São
means to pronounce it like
Saoung
, cognate to Saint).

As it was Sunday, most things were closed, but I did stop in at one hole-in-the-wall cafe for a 150$00 escudo glass of beer. (The Portuguese use the $ sign for a decimal point.) The exchange rate is about 160 escudos to a dollar, so that means the beer was about ninety cents. Not that it was a big one by any means, it was a strange crippled-looking little glass. This humble cafe is beautifully appointed—tiled walls and a real wrought-iron lamp high on the wall, it’s the kind of place that would be full of yuppies in Germany or the U.S., but here it’s full of Mediterranean men, short guys with lined faces and thin lips, guys whom in California you’d be more likely to see in the parking lot of 7-11 than in a cafe. Portugal is
their
country!

I also stopped in at a cafe next to a movie theater and had a
Pizza a Atum
.
Tuna
in English is
Atun
in Spanish, and
Atum
in Portuguese. Because the cafe was next to a movie theater on a Sunday, it held two darling little groups of mother and children. How I love seeing women with their children, it is so wonderful to see the happy cute big-cheeked ice-cream-eating kids, and the loving tender mothers, the mothers albeit a bit frayed and distraught due the pressures of raising said kids—as were Sylvia and I during those three-kid-travelling-circus years of yore, raising Georgia, Rudy and Isabel. The Holy Family, the divine and darling herd.

When I got back to the Hotel Nacional it was nearly evening. The good news when I got back was that Catarina Santos was on the phone just then looking for me. I’d sent her a fax when I got up from my nap. Catarina had been assigned to meet us at the Lisbon airport, which has an exit and a traffic that looked (to me anyway) comparable in size and complexity to the airport of, say, Lynchburg, Virginia. It’s pretty hard to miss someone at that exit, but Catarina had missed us, and had even given a frantic “Your father is missing!” call to son Rudy, back in Los Perros, at 2 AM California time, which made me want to kill her.

Waiting for Catarina to come to the hotel, Wilson and I had a few drinks, then slept a couple more hours, and then she showed up looking much cuter than expected at about quarter of ten. And trailed by none other than Terence McKenna.

Catarina is
une jolie laide
(a beautiful ugly), a woman with such lively complicated features that you love to watch her. She has a large, highly animated lips which are often drawn twitchingly up to her nose for this or that badger/gopher face of mockery or emphasis. She has a cracking, charming voice because she smokes cigarettes all the time, like all of the people here. When she met us, she was dressed all in black with a miniskirt and a black leather coat. Terence was glued to her like a limpet, apparently they were having an affair. I didn’t envy him, as she’s a sulker and a manipulator. But she was always fun to watch; her face was like a circus.

It turned out that Terence had gotten to Lisbon three days earlier than Wilson and me, and was angling to stay three days longer. He’s divorced, unemployed, and was eager to stretch out the gig.

Terence is a person who grows on you. He’s a tall skinny guy, about six feet and 160 pounds, with kind of gold-prospector face, meaning a chin up near his nose as if he didn’t have teeth, and loads of whiskers in no particular pattern covering most of his phiz. His eyes are large, thoughtful and brown. His forehead is low; I’d say the guy’s whole face is about half the height of a standard horse-faced soap-actor’s visage. He has a head like a cheerfully scrunched fist. He looks a little like what you get when you put two dots of ink for eyes on your index finger’s bottom knuckle and bounce the knuckle up and down over your thumb with a handkerchief wrapped around your hand to make a kind of puppet. (Sorry, Terence, I’m exaggerating!)

So Bob Wilson and I went out for dinner with Terence and Catarina and Edgar Pêra, the director of the movie, which is called
The Manual of Evasion: LX94
. LX stands for Lisbon, or an alternate Lisbon, and the production is funded by the city of Lisbon in honor of a year-long festival of the arts called Lisbon ‘94. We went to a place near the water, near the Rio Teja, at ten o’clock at night, a typical or even early time for dinner in Lisboa, quite a shock for someone with my supper-at-six upbringing. I had some beautiful olives and salt cod
seviche
as appetizer, then grilled cod, cod cooked in milk, and cod with beans and shrimps.

Edgar is a handsome man with short dark hair, a Mediterranean/Moorish face with full features and a lovely round chin with dark stubble. He often shrugs and makes self-deprecating gestures, like, “Who cares!” or “Don’t ask me!” or “For God’s sake relax!”, blowing out air and shaking his head.

The best part of the day was that we took our backpacks (no luggage yet, guys!) out of the cold, shiny Hotel Nacional after dinner and brought them to the four star York House. This is where our employers, the Companhia de Filmes Principe Real had meant to put us up all along. And it is a terrific four star hotel, all in wood and tile and ceramic. Edgar said that during World War Two, the York House was a meeting-place and hang-out for spies. According to Wilson, who refers to the movie CASABLANCA, Lisbon was a big hangout for spies in WWII.

I should mention that on the way to dinner, and on the way back to the hotel, we got high in the car smoking hash. (Not mine! I don’t remember whose!) Walking up the three gardened flights from the street to the York House, the spy house, high on hash in Lisbon, well it felt pretty cool.

As we checked in, Wilson started a big fight because the clerk wanted to keep his passport overnight; I evaded, and went on to my bed.

January 10, 1994. Filming on the river.

I was awakened by a liveried man knocking on my door to bring a tray of breakfast at 7:30 AM. Rolls, butter, apricot jelly, and a pot of coffee and a pot of hot milk. It was delicious; the butter was like a different substance from the butter I get in the U.S.—it was so fragrant and healthy-tasting. Outside it was raining.

I phoned TAP (Bob Wilson’s interpretation of the Air Portugal acronym was now “Take Another Plane”), and there was no news about my suitcase. It seemed that TAP’s origination airport for the NYC/Lisbon flight alternates between JFK and Newark. So my bag was 48 hours out of phase. I put on the same clothes for the fourth (!!!!) day in a row.

A woman showed up at the hotel to put make-up on me and Bob and Terence. Catarina and some film-crew people were there with a bunch of clothes, but they figured my overcoat and beret looked fine. They were fresh out of giant chicken suits, even though I did repeatedly ask for one. Bob was wearing up in a white T-shirt and a camel’s hair coat, and they made him put on something black, which pissed him off.