Still Life with Woodpecker (21 page)

CALL IT INTUITION,
divine influence, or plain dumb luck—any way you sliced it it was still eureka. Eureka! Surely, Leigh-Cheri hadn’t expected to solve cosmic riddles by consulting a book on package design. She merely had a …
hunch
… that such a book might enlighten her about the reasons for there being pyramids on the Camel pack. As it turned out, there was scant information, but it was pertinent enough to make her cry “Eureka!”

Camels, it seems, hit the national market in 1914 (the year, according to interpretations of the Book of Revelations by Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, that Jesus Christ was finally coronated as king of Heaven; the same year, incidentally, that Tarzan of the Apes, another king and, like Jesus, a non-smoker, appeared on the scene). These particular cigarettes, an innovative blend of Virginia burley and Carolina bright, with imported Turkish leaf included for taste and aroma, and with a generous amount of sweetening added, were created personally by R. J. (Richard Joshua) Reynolds in Winston-Salem, N.C., the previous year. The package also was designed in 1913. It was Mr. Reynolds’s idea to name the new cigarettes “Kamel” or “Camel” to give them an exotic mystique befitting their Turkish ingredient, and it was Reynolds’s young secretary, Roy C. Haberkern, who talked Barnum & Bailey into letting him photograph Old Joe, the cantankerous circus dromedary, for the title role on the pack. Who placed the pyramids in the background is unclear. The Camel label had been prepared for Reynolds by a Richmond lithography firm, and it was believed that an itinerant lithographer newly in the firm’s employ applied the finishing detail, including the pyramids, shortly before
he walked off the job. Nobody remembered his name, but they recalled that he was a talented draftsman and had flaming red hair.

It must have occurred to Reynolds or his staff that pyramids were unknown in Turkey, yet objections were raised to the misplaced masonries neither at the home office nor anywhere else. If fact, the Camel label went on to become the most beloved in the history of packaging. When, in 1958, the manufacturer tried to alter the label—“Just a few minor changes in the familiar camel and the pyramid symbol to modernize the forty-five-year-old design”—smokers raised a stink more vile than last night’s ashtray. R. J. Reynolds, Jr., son of the deceased founder, was so angry that he sold a block of his company stock, and public reaction was negative to the extent that the directors quickly returned to the original design.

After Leigh-Cheri had read the story of the Camel label three or four times, she closed the book and placed it atop the chamber pot where Gulietta would be sure to see it and carry it back to the library. Leigh-Cheri was done with the book. Leigh-Cheri had no desire to clutter the pure pyramid of her thoughts with the knowledge that the Baby Ruth candy bar was named for the daughter of President Grover Cleveland and not for the baseball player, or that Double Bubble gum was originally called Blibber Blubber. Her eureka device was jangling and flashing. She was about, as she tossed the Camel pack high in the stale attic air and caught it under her chin, to formulate a theory.

It was to be a bit on the queer side, as theories go, and a person might need to spend a few months alone in an empty attic contemplating a pack of cigarettes to appreciate it at all. Nevertheless, resonance of the theory was to reach rather far. And it would reshape the life of that princess who had given up the world for the moon, who yearned desperately to make love stay.

THE THEORY ARRIVED
neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end. Several weeks went by in the unwinding. When at last it was stretched out, it looked like this:

Pyramids, although everywhere in bad repair, are not in the usual sense ruins. That is, they are not simply relics of civilizations that have gone out of business, of concern only to archaeologists, historians, and those who spend the present jacking off the past. Pyramids were built to endure, made to defy both time and humanity. Their stones, jigged into position without mortar, were fit together so snugly you could not slip a bill between them, nor for that matter, a credit card. Oriented with extraordinary precision, so that each of their angles faces one of the cardinal points, we can conclude from the pyramids that for thousands of years the position of the terrestrial axis has not appreciably varied—pyramids are great global reference points, unequaled in technology or nature. But they are more than that. Whether they were utilized as tombs, temples, or astrolabes or all three may be less significant than the discovery that pyramids, apparently as a result of properties peculiar to their particular shape, can generate or amplify an energy frequency that is restorative to what scientists call bioplasm, what philosophers call the life force, what the Chinese have always called
ch’i
. Pyramid power even enhances inorganic life. Pyramids are giant objects, affecting other objects, animate and inanimate, in ways beyond those normally attributed to gravity and electromagnetism.

Whatever the intended function of pyramids, they are not obsolete. They remain somehow relevant. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, with the current civilization staggering blindfolded down a rail strewn with banana peels, the mysteries of pyramid power, once solved, might provide an answer to the ubiquitous question, “Where do we go from here?”

Obviously,
somebody
wanted us to keep pyramids in mind, because the pyramid symbol has been placed conspicuously upon items that we regularly handle or observe. On any given day there are more than two billion one-dollar bills in circulation. For most of the century, half of the cigarettes smoked in the United States were Camels, something like thirty billion a year. It isn’t likely that pyramids were chosen
arbitrarily
to adorn two of the most popular common objects of modern times.
Somebody
knew that dollars and cigarettes would be in wide circulation and saw to it that pyramids would travel with them, constantly reminding a culture separated from the original structures by distance and time that pyramids have something of value to give if we’d learn how to receive it.

Exactly who was responsible for that prominent and constant pyramidal display? Well, the committee that created the dollar bill in 1862 acted out of tradition and sentiment. It decided to include a pyramid symbol because there had been one on the last paper currency issued in America, some interest-bearing bank notes used to finance urgent undertakings such as the War of 1812. Those early bank notes had been designed by that jack-of-allgenius, the only enlightened man ever to hold high political office in the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The hand that put the pyramid on the Camel pack in 1913—almost exactly one century later—hung from the inky
sleeve of a transient lithographer who departed soon afterward, perhaps to join the military forces being recruited for World War I.

Looking for connections, we find that both designs were executed in the state of Virginia, less than a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., the most powerful and influential world capital of the era. Ostensibly, the only other similarity between Jefferson and the nameless lithographer was the fact that each had red hair. That might be relegated to the realm of meaningless coincidence were it not for one thing: a certain race of red-haired Caucasians was credited in the myths, legends, hieroglyphs, and oral histories of Chavin, Mochica, Tiahuanaco, Inca, Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Aztec, and other New World pyramid-building peoples with having ordered and supervised pyramid construction. If no redheads are mentioned in connection with Egyptian pyramids, it may be only because not a single legend or historical account concerning pyramids has survived in Egypt. Two hundred years after the last pyramid was reared in their country, Egyptians were as baffled by the big masonries as everyone else.

Okay. Let’s get this porcupine on the street. A race of carrot-topped demigods, known everywhere as Red Beards, appeared at various places in the ancient world, transforming the natives, spurring them to develop highly advanced civilizations in a very short time, leaving behind vast pyramids and other solar/lunar architecture when they suddenly and inexplicably disappeared. That much is fact. It is also historical fact that the Chavin, Mochica, Olmec, Zapotec, and Toltec peoples also vanished abruptly and without explanation. Apparently, the Red Beards had powerful enemies, capable of zapping whole civilizations into other dimensions. If the Red Beards were extraterrestrial, a lunar race dispatched to earth, for whatever reason, from the planet Argon, then their enemy would have been a solar society, the blonde Argonian ruling class. Call them Yellow Beards. When the Yellow Beards learned
what the Red Beards were up to on earth, they immediately zapped the people with whom they were conspiring. Poof! Off went the Chavin, next the Mochica, then the Olmec and so forth, transplanted, each in turn, from the universe to the anti-universe, leaving no forwarding address. Friendship with Red Beards bore a certain liability. Finally, the Red Beards themselves were zapped. This occurred shortly before the arrival of the conquistadors in the New World. When the Spanish priests heard tales of Red Beards, they naturally labeled them devils. It’s no coincidence that Satan is usually depicted as being as red as boiled crabs.

Stuck in the anti-universe, still the Red Beards did not give up. They had faith in the potentiality of earthlings. Maybe they felt that alone in the universe we here on earth (perhaps because of our close proximity and special relationship to our moon) possess the humor, the playfulness, the romantic sentiment, the general warm and honorable looniness to counteract the rigid solar efficiency of the Yellow Beards. Surely the Red Beards would not accept that the pyramids have been built in vain. Therefore, they attempted to reestablish contact with earth. Of necessity, communication would have to be telepathic. And it would have to rely primarily on simple visual symbolism. Since the so-called anti-universe is a mirror image of the so-called universe, words would be reversed as they crossed from one dimension to the other, and language, even when translations were faithful, would make no sense at all.

So the Red Beards beamed their telepathic vectors into earthly dimensions. Only a few humans responded, and they exclusively redheads—maybe a trace of racial memory, an ancient residue of Argonian DNA remained in their genes—and the response was far from desirable. Reception of the extra-dimensional transmissions confused them and frequently brought them grief. For example, Vincent van Gogh, the most famous redhead omitted from the Twelve-Most-Famous-Redheads list, took to
painting vases, chairs, stars, etc. as if they embodied the life force, which they likely do; as if there were vibratory fields, auras, around them, which there probably are, but everybody thought poor Vincent on the weird end of the banana, and eventually he was driven to take his own life. After several centuries of similar failures, the Red Beards refined their technique. They began to concentrate on a specific redheaded individual with a specific end in mind. Thus, they were able to influence Thomas Jefferson, an ideal receptor because of his wide-ranging sensibility, to affix a pyramid to the first American paper money issued since colonial days. When, after a century, that play hadn’t turned any big tricks, they beamed to the brain of a redheaded lithographer a more ambitious transmission.

The Red Beards had established a telepathic broadcast path, a channel that cut directly and deliberately through Washington, D.C., the most important of world capitals. Development of Camel cigarettes was occurring, fortuitously, within the mainstream of that channel. In 1913, most smokers rolled their own. Manufactured brands were just barely catching on, and while Fatima in Boston and Philadelphia, and Picayune in New Orleans were gaining appeal, Camel was to be the first cigarette to shoot for national (later, international) distribution. Moreover, R. J. Reynolds’s recipe for Camels called for a substantial amount of sweetener. Sugar, like lust, accentuates the reddish pigment in the hair and/or freckles of lunar-oriented people, especially when they’re exposed to direct sunlight. Leigh-Cheri had learned that from bona fide Argonians.

All right. Now we’re cooking, now we’re dressing this alligator in gold lamé. There was something else about the new cigarette that made its package the ideal medium for a Red Beard communiqué. It already was wed to a potent symbology.

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the
camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power
within
us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our “hump”—that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable—that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. The camel symbolized a lunar truth, totemized a Red Beard lesson concerning survival in the desert, the desert being solar territory, any landscape bullied by the sun.

Transmitting to the receptive antenna on the red roof of the nameless lithographer, the Red Beards saw to it that palm trees were included on the package, for the date palm, essential to those who must dwell in deserts, underscored the symbolism of the camel itself. Every desert has its oasis, there is nourishment and shade to be found in the most barren environs if one knows where to look. Aware that hard times were coming in the last quarter of the twentieth century, times of shortages, pollutions, political betrayals, sexual confusions, and spiritual famine, the Red Beards, via the cigarette package, were projecting a moon ray through our sooty curtains. A ray of encouragement and hope.