Tales of Ordinary Madness (20 page)

A BAD TRIP

did you ever consider that lsd and color tv arrived for our consumption about the same time? here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other. t.v., of course, is useless in present hands; there's not much of a hell of an argument here. and I read where in a recent raid it was alleged that an agent caught a container of acid in the face, hurled by alleged manufacturer of a hallucinogenic drug. this is also a kind of a waste. there are some basic grounds for outlawing lsd, dmt, stp – it can take a man permanently out of his mind – but so can picking beets, or turning bolts for GM, or washing dishes or teaching English I at one of the local universities. if we outlawed everything that drove men mad, the whole social structure would drop out – marriage, the war, bus service, slaughterhouses, beekeeping, surgery, anything you can name. anything can drive men mad because society is built on false stilts. until we knock the whole bottom out and rebuild, the madhouses will remain overlooked. and cuts in madhouse budgets by our good governor are taken by me to indirectly imply that those driven mad by society are not fit to be supported and cured by society, especially in an inflationary and tax-mad age. such money could be better used to build roads or to be sprinkled ever-so-lightly upon the Negro to keep him from burning down our cities. and I have a splendid thought: why not assassinate the insane? think of the money we could save. even a madman eats too much and needs a place to sleep, and the bastards are disgusting – the way they scream and smear their shit on the walls, all that. all we'd need is a small medical board to make the decisions and a couple of good-looking nurses (male or female) to keep the psychiatrists' extracurricular sexual activities satisfied.

so let's get back, more or less, to lsd. as it is true that the less you get the more you chance – say beet-picking – it is also true that the more you get the more you chance. any explorative complexity – painting, writing poetry, robbing banks, being a dictator and so forth, takes you to that place where danger and miracle are rather like Siamese twins. you seldom go wire to wire, but while you're going the living is fairly interesting. it's good enough to sleep with another man's wife but someday you know you are going to be caught with your pants down. this only makes the act more pleasurable. our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell, which we evidently need. get good enough at anything and you will create your own enemies. champions get the razzberry; the crowd aches to see them get knocked off in order to bring them down to their own bowl of shit. not many damn fools get assassinated; a winner can be brought down by a mail-order rifle (so the fable says) or by his own shotgun in a small town like Ketchum. or like Adolph and his whore as Berlin split its sides in the last page of their history. lsd can flake you too because it is not an arena for loyal shipping clerks. granted, bad acid like bad whores can take you out. bathtub gin, bootleg liquor had its day too. the law creates its own disease in poisonous black markets. but, basically, most bad trips are caused by the individual being trained and poisoned beforehand by society itself. if a man is worried about rent, car payments, time-clocks, a college education for his child, a 12-dollar dinner for his girlfriend, the opinion of his neighbor, standing up for the flag or what is going to happen to Brenda Starr, an lsd tablet will most probably drive him mad because, in a sense, he is already insane and only borne along on social tides by the outward bars and dull hammers that render him insensible to any individualistic thinking. a trip calls for a man who has not yet been caged, who has not yet been fucked by the big Fear that makes all society go. unfortunately, most men overestimate their worthiness as basic and free individuals, and it is the mistake of the hippie generation not to trust anybody over 30. 30 doesn't mean a damn thing. most beings are captured and trained, totally, by the age of 7 or 8. many of the young LOOK free but this is only a chemical thing of body and energy and not a realistic thing of spirit. I have met free men in the strangest of places and at ALL ages – as janitors, car thieves, car washers, and some free women too – mostly as nurses or waitresses, and at ALL ages. the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

an lsd trip will show you things which no rules cover. it will show you things not in textbooks and things which you cannot protest to your city councilman about. grass only makes the present society more bearable; lsd is another society within itself. if you are socially orientated, you can probably mark lsd off as a “hallucinogenic drug,” which is an easy way of getting off and forgetting the whole thing. but hallucination, the definition of it, depends upon which pole you are operating from. whatever is happening to you at the time it is happening does become the reality – it can be a movie, a dream, sexual intercourse, murder, being murdered or eating ice cream. only lies are imposed later; what happens, happens. hallucination is only a dictionary word and a social stilt. when a man is dying to him it is very real; to others, it is only bad luck or something to be disposed of. Forest Lawn takes care of everything. when the world begins to admit that ALL the parts fit the whole, then we may begin to have a chance. whatever a man sees is real. it was not brought there by an outside force, it was there before he was born. don't blame him because he sees it now, and don't blame him for going mad because the educational and spiritual forces of society were not wise enough to tell him that exploration never ends, and that we must all be little shits boxed in with our a, b, c's and nothing else. it is not lsd that causes the bad trip – it was your mother, your President, the little girl next door, the icecream man with dirty hands, a course in algebra or Spanish superimposed, it was the stench of a crapper in 1926, it was a man with a nose too long when you were told long noses were ugly; it was laxative, it was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, it was tootsie rolls and Toots and Casper, it was the face of FDR, it was lemon drops, it was working in a factory for ten years and getting fired because you were five minutes late, it was that old bag who taught you American history in the 6th grade, it was your dog run over and nobody to properly draw you the map afterwards, it was a list 30 pages long and 3 miles tall.

a bad trip? this whole country, this whole world is on a bad trip, friend. but they'll arrest you for swallowing a tablet.

I'm still on the beer because basically, at 47, they've got a lot of hooks in me. I'd be a real damn fool to think that I've escaped all their nets. I think Jeffers said it pretty well when he said, more or less, look out for the traps, friend, there are plenty of them, they say even God got trapped when He once walked on Earth. of course, now some of us are not so sure it was god, but whoever he was, he had some fairly good tricks but it seemed he talked too much. anybody can talk too much. even Leary. or me.

it's a cold Saturday now and the sun's going down. what do you do with an evening? if I were Liza I'd comb my hair but I'm not Liza. well, I've got this old National Geographic and the pages shine like something's really happening. of course, it's not. all around in this building they are drunk. a whole honeycove of drunks for the end. the ladies walk by my window. I emit, I hiss a rather tired and gentle word like “shit,” then tear this page from the machine. it's yours.

ANIMAL CRACKERS IN MY SOUP

I had come off a long drinking bout during which time I had lost my petty job, my room, and (perhaps) my mind. After sleeping the night in an alley I vomited in the sunlight, waited five minutes, then finished the remainder of the wine bottle that I found in my coat pocket. I began walking through the city, quite without purpose. When I was walking I felt as if I had some portion of the meaning of things. Of course, it was untrue. But standing in an alley hardly helped either.

I walked for some time, scarcely aware. I was vaguely considering the fascination of starving to death. I only wanted a place to lie down and wait. I didn't feel any rancor against society because I didn't belong in it. I had long ago adjusted to that fact.

Soon I was on the edge of town. The houses were spaced farther apart. There were fields and small farms. I was more sick than hungry. It was hot and I took off my coat and carried it over my arm. I began to get thirsty. There wasn't a sign of water anywhere. My face was bloodied from falling the night before, my hair was uncombed. Dying of thirst wasn't my idea of an easy death; I decided to ask for a glass of water. I passed the first house, which somehow looked unfriendly to me, and walked farther down the road to a very large, three-story, green house, hung about with vines and shrubbery and many trees. As I walked up on the front porch, I heard strange noises inside, and there seemed to be the smell of raw meat and urine and excreta. However, I felt a friendliness about the house; I rang the bell.

A woman of about thirty came to the door. She had long hair, a brownish red, quite long, and these brown eyes looked out at me. She was a handsome woman, dressed in tight blue jeans, boots, a pale pink shirt. Her face and eyes showed neither fear nor apprehension.

“Yes?” she said, almost smiling.

“I'm thirsty,” I said. “Could I have a glass of water?”

“Come in,” she said, and I followed her into the front room. “Sit down.”

I sat down, lightly, upon an old chair. She went into the kitchen for the water. As I sat there, I heard something running down the hall toward the front room. It circled about the room in front of me, then stopped and looked at me. It was an orangutan. The thing leaped up and down in glee when it saw me. Then it ran toward me and leaped upon my lap. It put its face against mine. Its eyes looked into mine a moment, then its head pulled away. It grabbed my coat, leaped to the floor and ran down the hall with my coat, making strange sounds.

She came back with my glass of water, handed it to me.

“I'm Carol,” she said.

“I'm Gordon,” I said, “but then it hardly matters.”

“Why doesn't it matter?”

“Well, I'm through. It's over. You know.”

“What was it? Alcohol?” she asked.

“Alcohol,” I said, then waved beyond the walls, “and them.”

“I have trouble with ‘them' too. I'm quite alone.”

“You mean you live in this big house all alone?”

“Well, hardly.” She laughed.

“Oh yeah, that big monkey stole my coat.”

“Oh, that's Bilbo. He's cute. He's crazy.”

“I'll need that coat for tonight. It gets cold.”

“You'll be staying here tonight. You look like you need some rest.”

“If I get some rest I might go on with the game.”

“I think you should. It's a good game if you angle in on it right.”

“I don't think so. And, besides, why should you help me?”

“I'm like Bilbo,” she said. “I'm crazy. At least they thought I was. I was three months in a madhouse.”

“No shit,” I said.

“No shit,” she said. “The first thing I'm going to do is fix you some soup.”

“The county,” she said later, “is trying to run me out. There's a suit pending. Luckily, Daddy left me quite a bit of money. I can fight them. They call me Crazy Carol of the Liberated Zoo.”

“I don't read the papers. Liberated Zoo?”

“Yes, I
love
animals. I have trouble with people. But, Jesus, I really
relate
to animals. Maybe I
am
nuts. I don't know.”

“I think you're very nice.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“People seem afraid of me. I'm glad you're not afraid of me.”

Her brown eyes opened wider and wider. They were a dark brooding brown, and as we talked, some of the shield seemed to drop away.

“Listen,” I said, “I'm sorry, but I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Go down the hall, then turn in the first door on the left.”

“Okay.”

I walked down the hall, then turned left. The door was open. I stopped. Sitting on the shower rod above the bathtub was a parrot. And on the throw rug, a full-grown tiger stretched out. The parrot ignored me and the tiger gave me a bored and disinterested stare. I moved back to the front room quickly.

“Carol! My God, there's a
tiger
in the bathroom!”

“Oh, that's Dopey Joe. Dopey Joe won't hurt you.”

“Well, I can't crap with a tiger looking at me.”

“Oh, silly. Come on with me!”

I followed Carol down the hall. She walked into the bathroom and said to the tiger: “Come on, Dopey, you gotta move. The gentleman can't shit with your eyes on him. He thinks you wanta eat him.”

The tiger just looked back at Carol with disinterest.

“Dopey, you bastard, I'm not telling you again! Now I'm giving you until
Three!
Here we go! Now: One ... two ...
three
....”

The tiger didn't move.

“All right now, you
asked
for it!”

She took that tiger by the ear, and pulling at that ear, she raised the beast from his reclining position. The cat was snarling, spitting; I could see the fangs and tongue, but Carol seemed to ignore it. She led that tiger out of there by the ear, guided him down the hall. Then she let go of the ear and said, “All right now, Dopey, you go to your room! You go right to your room!”

The tiger walked down the hall, turned in a half circle and lay down on the floor.

“Dopey!”
she said. “Go to your room!”

The cat stared back, unmoving.

“That son of a bitch is getting impossible,” she said. “I may have to take disciplinary action, but I hate to. I love him.”

“You love him?”

“I love all my pets, of course. Listen, how about the parrot? Will the parrot bother you?”

“I guess I can bear up under the parrot,” I said.

“Go ahead then, have a good crap.”

She closed the door. The parrot kept looking at me. Then the parrot said, “Go ahead then, have a good crap.” Then
he
did, right into the tub.

We talked some more that afternoon and evening and I got a couple of good meals down. I wasn't quite sure whether the whole thing was just a giant show of D.T.'s or if I had died or if I had gone mad and was having visions.

I don't know how many different types of animals Carol had there. And most of them were housebroken. It was a Liberated Zoo.

Then there was “shit and exercise time,” as Carol called it. And she'd march them all out of there in groups of five or six and lead them to the yard. Fox, wolf, monkey, tiger, panther, snake – well, you've been to a zoo. She had almost everything. But the curious fact was that the animals didn't bother each other. Being well fed helped (her feed bill was tremendous – Pappa must have left plenty), but I got the idea that Carol's love for them put them into a rather gentle and almost humorous state of passivity – a transfixed state of love. The animals simply felt
good.

“Look at them, Gordon. Really look at them. You can't help loving them. See how they
move.
Each one so different, each one so real, each one so much itself. They're not like humans. They're contained, they're unlost, never ugly. They have the gift, they have the same gift that they were born with ...”

“Yes, I think I see what you mean ...”

That night I was unable to sleep. I put on my clothing, except for shoes and stockings, and walked down the hall to the front room. I could look in without being seen. I stood there.

Carol was naked and spread upon the coffee table, her back on the table with just the lower parts of the thighs and the legs dangling over. Her whole body was excitingly white, as if it had never seen the sun, and her breasts were more vigorous than large – they seemed parts of their own, striving into the air, and the nipples were not the darker shade as were most women's but rather a bright pink-red, fire-like, only pinker, almost neon. Christ, the lady with the neon breasts! And her lips, the same color, were open in a dream state. Her head was hanging lightly back over the other edge of the coffee table, with this long red-brown hair dangling dangling, swinging slightly, curling a bit on the rug. And her whole body had this feeling of being
oiled –
there seemed no elbows or kneecaps, no points, no edges. Oiled
smooth,
she was. The only things that jarred out were the sharp-pointed breasts. And curled about her body was this long snake – I don't know what type. The tongue flicked and the snake's head moved back and forth to one side of Carol's head slowly, fluidly. Then raising, its neck bending, the snake looked at Carol's nose, her lips, her eyes – drinking at her face.

At moments, the snake's body would slide ever so slightly about Carol's body; it seemed a caress, that movement, and after the caress, the snake would contract slightly, squeezing her, coiling there about her body. Carol would gasp, pulsate, shiver; the snake would slide down by her ear, then rise, look at her nose, her lips, her eyes, and then repeat his movements. The snake's tongue flicked rapidly and Carol's cunt was open, the hairs begging, red and beautiful, in the lamplight.

I walked back to my room. A very fortunate snake, I felt; I had never seen such a body upon a woman. I had difficulty sleeping but finally managed.

The next morning when we had breakfast together I said to Carol, “You're
really
in love with your zoo, aren't you?”

“Yes, all of them, every last one of them,” she said.

We finished breakfast, not saying much. Carol looked better than ever. She just radiated more and more. Her hair seemed alive; it seemed to leap about with her movements, and the light from the window shone through it, bringing out the red.

Her eyes were quite open, simmering, yet without fear, without doubt. Those eyes: she let everything in and everything out. She was animal, and human.

“Listen,” I said, “If you can get my coat from that monkey, I'll be on my way.”

“I don't want you to leave,” she said.

“Do you want me to be part of your zoo?”

“Yes.”

“But I'm a human, you know.”

“But you're untouched. You're not like them. You're still floating inside; they're lost, hardened. You're lost but you haven't hardened. All you need to do is to be found.”

“But I might be too old to be ... loved like the rest of your zoo.”

“I ... don't know ... I like you very much. Can't you stay? We might find you ...”

Again the next night I couldn't sleep. I walked down the hall up to the beaded partition and looked in. This time Carol had a table in the center of the room. It was an oak table, almost black, with sturdy legs. Carol was spread upon the table, her buttocks just upon the edge, legs spread, with her toes just touching the floor. One hand covered her cunt, then moved away. As her hand moved away, her entire body seemed to blush a bright pink; the blood washed through, then washed away. The last of the pink hung for a moment just under the chin and about the throat, then it vanished and her cunt opened slightly.

The tiger walked about the table in slow circles. Then he circled faster and faster, the tail flicking. Carol gave this low moan. When she did this the tiger was directly in front of her legs. He stopped. Rose. He placed one paw on either side of Carol's head. The penis extended; it was gigantic. The penis poked at her cunt, seeking entrance. Carol put her hand upon the tiger's penis, attempting to guide it in. They both swiveled upon the edge of unbearable and heated agony. Then a portion of the penis entered. The tiger suddenly jerked his haunches; the remainder entered ... Carol screamed. Then her hands reached up around the tiger's neck as he began working. I turned and walked to my room.

The next day we ate lunch in the yard with the animals. A picnic lunch. I ate a mouthful of potato salad as a lynx walked by with a silver fox. I had entered a whole new totality of experience. The county had pressured Carol into erecting these high wire fences but the animals still had a wide area of wild land to roam in. We finished eating and Carol stretched out on the grass, looking up at the sky. My god, to be a young man again!

Carol looked at me: “Come on down here, old tiger!”

“Tiger?”

“ ‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright ...' When you die, they'll know you, they'll see the stripes.”

I stretched out beside Carol. She turned on her side, resting her head upon my arm. I faced her. The whole sky and earth ran through those eyes.

“You look like Randolph Scott mixed with Humphrey Bogart,” she said.

I laughed. “You're funny,” I said.

We kept looking at each other. I felt as if I could fall down inside her eyes.

Then my hand was on her lips, we were kissing, and I pulled her body into mine. My other hand ran through her hair. It was a kiss of love, a long kiss of love, yet I still got an erection; her body moved against mine, moved snake-like. An ostrich walked past. “Jesus,” I said, “Jesus, Jesus ...” We kissed again. Then she started saying, “You son of a bitch! Oh, you son of a bitch, what are you doing to me?” Carol took my hand and placed it inside her blue jeans. I felt the hairs of her cunt. They were slightly wet. I rubbed and fondled her there, then my finger entered. She kissed me wildly. “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch!” Then she pulled away.