Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (80 page)

“God, Lloyd,” Twinker laughs, “have you ever tried giving a talk at a business lunch for the Rotarians? You’re too fucking weird.”

“Have some more champagne, dear,” Lloyd says, refilling Twinker’s glass with the last of the Dom Pérignon. “I’ve actually lectured to the Rotarians on more than one occasion, as a recruitment ploy for the Freemasons. You’d be surprised–some of them are quite open-minded.”

“Open-minded enough to book a cruise ship down the Amazon so they can hang out with shamans and hallucinate their Rotarian heinies off with you?” D.H. asks him.

“For my one and only experience with ayahuasca, I didn’t take the trouble to do it in the Amazon with an authentic shaman,” Lloyd elucidates with a tight smile. “Instead, I had a quart of ayahuasca juice prepared for me in Peru and shipped to Kingsburg at considerable expense. I drank it in my living room with Miles Davis on the stereo–the Carnegie Hall recording of
Dark Magus
, which seemed appropriate at the time.”

“I would’ve thought
Bitches Brew
,” D.H. says, “but
Dark Magus
works–although it’s a little scary.”

“I expected the experience to be scary,” Lloyd says. “After all, any true change is accompanied by terror, dread, and anxiety as we let go of our old illusions and outworn patterns of existence. One of the most common shamanic visions is of a vividly depicted journey to hell, during which the shaman-to-be’s body is ritually disemboweled and dismembered. Granted, this happens in a visionary trance state, not in actuality, but still… it must be quite frightening, don’t you think?”

“Hell yeah!” Skip agrees. “Even just seeing Count Chocula freaked the fuck right out of me.”

“What’s interesting to think about,” says Lloyd, “is how the shaman stands in direct opposition to the serial killer: He eviscerates himself (rather than others), for the good of his community (rather than to terrorize it). His voluntary madness can lead to healing and spiritual integration, as opposed to the serial killer’s involuntary madness, which only leads to chaos, destruction, and death.”

“And you signed up for it,” Gordon says. “For voluntary madness.”

“I did. As Rimbaud so eloquently put it, the Poet becomes a seer by
‘immense et raisonne dereglement de tous les sens’
–an immense and systematic derangement of the senses. I comforted myself with the knowledge that, in most cases, after the initiate’s body has been dismembered, it’s reassembled again–often with a stone placed inside it that conveys special psychic powers. For centuries, this has been the way shamanic initiates have become shamans. It dates back to one of the oldest myths of civilization, the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld.”

“So did you get disemboweled, or what, you poor fat bastard?” Jimmy asks. He’s not interested in mythology.

“Let me put it to you like this…” says Lloyd, “my bowels suffered mightily, but I was not, as hoped, disemboweled in any meaningful way.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I found out the hard way that ayahuasca is a powerful emetic. That’s why I wasn’t too harsh with you this past Halloween when I found out you’d thrown up in my Tang Dynasty vase. I’d used that vase for the very same purpose just a few years earlier.”

“Gross!” Jimmy laughs. “I’ll bet you puked twice as hard as I did!”

“It was a gusher,” Lloyd candidly admits. “You wouldn’t believe how incredibly foul ayahuasca tastes. It’s like drinking rancid grapefruit juice mixed with someone else’s chewing tobacco spit. I kept it down for about an hour. By then the hallucinations–or, I should say, the widening of my visual spectrum into nonordinary reality–had begun in earnest. So when the urge came to vomit, I indulged it, spewing like a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral’s rain gutter. To the detriment of my eternal cosmic relations with the Tang Dynasty, however, I felt too woozy to leave my chair.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t shit your pants,” says Jimmy, always on the lookout for the next worst-case scenario.

“That came later.”

“Oh great!”
Jimmy rolls over on his back in the sand, laughing his ass off. He looks like a feral dog ecstatically rolling in a pile of rotting fish carcasses to cover itself with their scent.

“What kind of things did you see?” Gordon asks Lloyd, curious.

“Well, at first I felt myself in the presence of invisible beings of great intelligence. It’s hard to describe, but it seemed as though I could
see
their invisibility, as one sees the clear skin of paramecium teeming in a drop of pond water under a microscope lens. It was as if they had the ability to camouflage themselves against the background environment, but I glimpsed their outlines sparkling at the edge of my vision. If they
hadn’t
been invisible, I suspect they might have lived up to the descriptions of the Shoggoths in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos–massive, protoplasmic beasts that had been created by the star-headed Old Ones. Although understand… I don’t think they actually
were
Shoggoths. They were far too intelligent for that.”

“Enough with the damn Shoggoths,” says Twinker, holding her empty champagne glass up to Skip and indicating that he should fill it with beer.

“Almost shouting to be heard above Miles Davis, I asked if someone else was in the room with me.” Lloyd calls out,
“Is anybody there?”
in an attempt to dramatize the situation. “I heard an urgent and powerful voice say,
‘Yes!’
directly in my left ear. They called themselves the
Sensaurians
I learned in that very same instant, as the invisible beings began communicating with me in a sort of telepathic dream-language. Words blended into things seen. I no longer had any need to speak. I mentally asked them if they were from a realm that transcended space and time. They said they were indeed. They went on to tell me that the majority of human beings were
sarcogenetic
–cut off from the source of eternal life. They also had a word for that source of eternal life, which I’ve since forgotten… because right at that moment I started vomiting.”

“Ooh,
that
must’ve impressed the hell out of ‘em,” Twinker slurs.

“The Sensaurians were far beyond the point of ever being impressed by a mere human,” Lloyd says. “Just being in their presence was a profoundly humbling experience. By the time I finished vomiting, they were gone. In their place I saw two luminous, multi-colored snakes swimming through the air in front of me, thrusting and wriggling about like interstellar sperm in the darkened room.”

“Did you accidentally have a big orgasm while you were puking?” Jimmy asks, sitting up again. “Because that’s happened to me before,” he says with lippy candor.

“The snakes began darting in and out of my solar plexus,” Lloyd says, ignoring his gutter-minded nephew. “It was terrifying. There was nothing I could do to stop them. I could feel them wriggling in and out of my body as if I were a hunk of melting Swiss cheese. It was a most loathsome feeling, I can assure you…. Using the same telepathic dream-language as the Sensaurians, the snakes told me they wanted to live inside my belly. If I’d grant them that small favor, they said that in return they’d always tell me who my enemies were and how to overcome them, and they’d answer any questions I might have that were otherwise unanswerable. I knew from my extensive reading on the subject that other ayahuasca-drinkers had sometimes had visions of snakes entering their brains or stomachs. Usually they plucked the snakes out, unable to overcome their deep sense of revulsion. But I chose to let the snakes in.”

Lloyd pauses to let those last words have their full effect. “The snakes thanked me for deciding in their favor. Then, as a little foretaste of the knowledge they would soon be imparting, they told me that the word
America
had been derived from the Peruvian word
Amarecu
, which means ‘Land of the Plumed Serpents.’

“At that point I clenched my teeth, gripped the arms of my chair, and commenced beshitting myself. The visions soon ended. But I’ve often wondered since if I made the right decision.”

“To shit your pants or not?” Jimmy asks him.

“About the snakes.”

“Well, let’s see…” Twinker chirps through the onset of a bad case of hiccups, “you were out of your mind on drugs–
‘hic’
–seeing talking snakes–
‘hic’
–and you were filling your pants with poopy diarrhea from sheer terror.
Of course
, you made the right decision, Lloyd…
‘hic.’
You were acting
soooo
smart right then.”

“Your maternal instincts are showing, my dear,” Lloyd says, blowing her a kiss.

“She’s always like this when she gets drunk,” Skip complains. “She’s like a damn mother hen.”

“I am not!” Twinker hiccups, then laughs at herself. “Yeah, I guess I am….”

“Shamanic experience depends on what we bring to it,” says Lloyd. “Spirits, or archetypes–even demons–tend to reflect what’s already within our hearts and minds. If you come from a place of love and wisdom, love and wisdom is ultimately what you’ll find. On the other hand, a lifetime spent watching made-for-TV movies isn’t going to qualify you for a spiritually liberating entelechy. If you come with a flabby intellect and the typical load of American pop-culture-formed sensibilities, your experiences will likewise tend to be violent, carnal, and cartoonish.”

“And if you come mostly full of crap,” says Jimmy, employing the same pedantic tone, “you might end up having to change your underpants.”

“
Touché, mon neveu…
. I’m perhaps not the best one to speak. I should point you instead to the work of James Merrill–the poet son of one of Merrill Lynch’s founders, if you’ll recall…. His epic poem,
The Changing Light at Sandover
, is a perfect illustration of what I’m trying to convey.”

“Never heard of it,” Jimmy sneers.

“That’s not surprising, even though it won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Few people care much about poetry these days. There’s no money in it. But Merrill labored over
The Changing Light at Sandover
for more than twenty years, even though he’s wealthy enough to do whatever he pleases. The complete poem cycle, all 560 pages, was published in its entirety only last spring. What’s fascinating about it is that much of the poem was channeled through a Ouija board, with Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, taking dictation from spirits. Those spirits included, among others, their departed friends Maya Deren, the doyenne of American experimental film, and W.H. Auden, the celebrated poet.”

“Weird…” says Skip. “I always thought the Pulitzer only went to journalists, like those guys who reported on Watergate. I didn’t know they gave out prizes to poets and fortune-tellers, too.”

“Only to the
rich
fortune-tellers,” D.H. jokes. “The gypsy fortune-tellers don’t stand a chance.”

“James Merrill’s true riches are his cultural inheritance and his astonishing intellect. He’s a man with a profound understanding of Dante, Milton, and Blake. In some ways, he might very well be their equal….
The Changing Light at Sandover
containsinsights into non-ordinary reality that even the most ‘supernaturally knowledgeable’ shaman might not be able to put into words–and certainly not words so beautifully strung together and multi-faceted as Merrill’s.”

“Okay, so I guess you like the guy,” Gordon says.

“Maybe you should’ve married him,” Jimmy sneers again.

“And your point is… what?” D.H. asks. “Smart people with really big trust funds make better shamans?”

Lloyd replies: “Not at all. I prefer the explanation set forth by one of the entities channeled through Merrill’s Ouija board (and please excuse my paraphrase):
Your lives are polished and hoisted into place, like crystals, to receive the Light.
James Merrill has had a lot of polishing–that’s all I’m saying.”

“Oh wow… that’s
deep!”
says Twinker. It’s not hard to tell she’s being facetious. Bored, she scoots over in the sand and sticks her tongue in Skip’s ear. Skip half-swoons and automatically grabs her tits.

“This concept of human beings as receivers for the Light ties in with the Gnostic prophet Mani’s vision of creation,” Lloyd explains to the others still listening. “In case you haven’t run across him, Mani was born in 216 AD in Lower Mesopotamia, in the same general area as ancient Sumer, within the borders of present-day Iraq. He was a prodigy who by the age of twelve began receiving a series of calls from an angel that he referred to as his immortal Twin, or Divine Self.”

“I didn’t even know they had phones back then,” Skip interrupts, playing the fool for Twinker’s benefit.

“I’ll bet the angel had a mechanical-sounding voice like that computer from the future that was making all those prank calls to Jack Sarfatti,” says Gordon, catching on.

“Only this was about seventeen-and-a-half centuries earlier,” says D.H., doing the math.

“That’s a fascinating connection to make,” says Lloyd, “but I think you all know that I was using the term
calls
as a synonym for
visitations
. During those visitations, the angel provided Mani with insights into the secrets of creation and spiritual evolution, which later became the basis for the Manichaean religion. One of the greatest secrets revealed to Mani during that time concerned the nature of Light and Darkness–or good and evil–and the beginning of creation.”

“If this is another snake story–
‘hic’
–I’ll need more beer,” Twinker says.

“No snakes,” Lloyd promises. “This is about how the Spirits of Darkness sought to invade and conquer the Kingdom of Light.”

“Oh goody. A fairy tale…” says Jimmy, rolling his eyes.

“Not a fairy tale so much as a myth that explains why evil exists in our world, and why it so often goes unpunished,” Lloyd says. “In Mani’s version of the creation myth, the Creator of the Kingdom of Light experienced a moment of doubt just before he set creation in motion. Through the crack of that doubt, the Spirits of Darkness were born. They immediately set out to invade the Kingdom of Light and wage war upon it, but they were unable to breach its gates. The Creator was vexed. He saw that the Spirits of Darkness were evil and violent. They deserved to be punished, but how could he punish them when his Kingdom knew only goodness? There was but one solution: the Light would have to embrace Darkness in an act of love. So a part of the Kingdom of Light was given over to the Spirits of Darkness. Darkness and Light intermingled in a whirling dance of creation that evolved into the material universe. Evil and death were woven into the very fabric of this universe, as well as the Divine Spark that originated from the Creator of Light himself. But again, the Creator was vexed. He saw that creation would ultimately destroy itself unless evil and death were overcome. So he had the Spirits of Light create humanity in their own images and likenesses–mortal twins. Those mortal twins were then sent to incarnate on Earth, the mixed kingdom, so they could bring more Light–and clarify the Light already there–through acts of love and forgiveness. This was done, and continues to be done, because the Spirits of Light know that punishment or banishment will never vanquish the Spirits of Darkness. It’s only when Light enters evil, and illuminates it from within, that evil is redeemed and thereby overcome.”