The Televisionary Oracle (29 page)

Images Are Dangerous
sold only about four hundred copies out of a total two thousand produced before the rest of the lot met an untimely end. The publisher fell way behind in the rent on the warehouse where he’d been storing my books and others, and during the eviction process the landlord relocated sixteen hundred copies of my pride and joy to the county dump.

At least my music cassettes had brisker sales: a whopping total of about two thousand, two hundred among the three of them.

I’m being sarcastic. Even by the samizdat-style standards of the indie record scene, that number was pathetic. I never had a deal with even a small distribution company, and so didn’t have much power to get any of my precious creations in the hands of stores outside Santa Cruz. I can say with confidence, at least, that my work was played for a few weeks in more than twenty-five distant cities, from Schenectady to Chapel Hill. I have the proof in the form of playlists from tiny college radio stations in all those places.

The evidence was unambiguous. According to most of the standards by which success is measured, I had virtually no professional credentials. My fame was
extremely
local. The money I earned was miniscule. The artistic artifacts I produced were virtually unknown.

Maybe nothing embodied my chronic sense of abject humiliation more than a scene at an all-night Kinko’s photocopy store one chilly October morning at 3
A.M
. It was around the eighth anniversary of the launch of my career as a sacred entertainer. Though I had only crude, self-taught skills as a graphic artist, the task had fallen to me to create a poster for an upcoming Tao Chemical show. There simply weren’t
enough funds to hire a pro. For that matter, I barely had enough cash to order the two hundred or so flyers necessary to cover all the essential telephone poles, bulletin boards, and public walls in town. (A task I’d be handling myself later that afternoon.) I’d brought my penny jar with me, planning on looting it to pay the Kinko’s bill.

As I struggled to assemble all the elements of the flyer in a visually appealing way, I kept an eye on the only other customer in the shop. It was Crazy Carl, the homeless prophet who always wore a pair of green baseball pants wrapped around his head as a turban. He, too, was working on his latest propaganda: one more in his series of telephone-pole broadsides wherein he detailed the CIA’s collusion with Jehovah-worshiping UFOs in a sick project to use mind control technology to force every man, woman, and child in America to wet their beds every night.

As the years went by, David Bowie’s prophecies in Atlanta detoured into the same ambiguous limbo as my brilliant career. Just as I was forced to re-evaluate my vision of being one of the anarchist bards on the leading edge of a national groundswell of feverish revolutionary culture, I had to accept the likelihood that Bowie had been wrong.

The counterrevolution had come, all right, but not in the way he predicted—not through anything so obvious as the arrest of dissidents or the suspension of the Bill of Rights. Instead, the “revolution” had been bought with Reagandollars and turned into an ingenious form of social control. The music of chaos, heresy, and disruption was now a lucrative product belonging to the Brobdingnagian engines of capitalism. They packaged it in such a way that it could never be truly dangerous to any institution. It had become a
simulation
of revolution. Spunky rebellious angst was confined to cartoony displays of generic rage at live concerts and on rock videos. Goaded by wealthy rock icons who cared not so much about overthrowing reality as basking in the perks of their fame, the kids spent a few hours pretending to be free-thinking outlaws, safely blowing off steam which might otherwise have been directed into staging protests about the widening gap between the rich and poor or organizing teach-ins about the deadly collaboration of American might with Salvadoran death squads or writing their congresspersons about the secret genocide in East Timor.

Rock and roll, owned and operated by the same corporate culture that became an invincible vampire during Reagan’s swath of destruction, was the perfect smokescreen and diversion to drain off libidinous troublemaking and revolutionary fervor into mere fantasy.

The upshot to all this was that real wackos like myself—artists who weren’t churning out the emasculated simulations of revolution formulated and sanctioned by the priests of Trickle-Down Economics—didn’t stand a chance at fame and fortune.

In the wake of my depressing epiphanies, I retrenched. My imagination suffered a deflation, but I welcomed that as a sign of a growing pragmatism. Instead of trying to be a poet, musician, performance artist, raconteur, radio personality, graphic artist, writer, dancer, and actor, I decided to shrink a little—maybe just be a poet, musician, and performance artist.

I dissolved Tao Chemical and for a few years pursued a solo career. Using taped music and ambient sound as my accompaniment, I did shows in which I blended incantation, singing, and an approach to ritual that I called “shamanic performance.” I was part-Patti Smith, part-Abbie Hoffman, part-minstrel. Years before MTV featured “spoken word” performances that brought the genre respectability, I recorded an album of songs, stories, prayers, and poems.

“Reality,” I declaimed in one of the pieces, “is now nothing more than the sum total of the war between competing infotainment conglomerates.”

Y
our suffering is interesting and important, beauty and truth fans.

No one can take that away from you. But we don’t feel sorry for you. That’s not our style, and it wouldn’t help you anyway.

Our slogan is,
There are only two healers: death and ecstasy
. So as we flirt with healing you, we have to be sure we’re always having fun killing off some worn-out part of you. If our words seem cruel or self-exalting or unlike what you’ve come to expect from healers, don’t worry: They still work just as well. Better, in fact, exactly because we’re not
boring ourselves in order to figure out how to pierce your protective coat of narcissism. We just stay excited about you, and you do the rest.

We’re effective healers because we never call ourselves healers. We don’t allow our egos to appropriate and exploit that dangerous image. If someone accuses us of being healers, we deny it and claim to be poets or ritualists. Likewise, if someone admires us for being poets or ritualists, we deny it, professing to be guerrilla therapists or sacred janitors. We don’t really mean any of it. We’re just escaping from all the dangerous images that would force us to become parodies of ourselves—that would fool us into being more passionate about the impression we make on you than being who we love to be.

We know it has all been said and done before, but the difference with us is that we’re not just out to manipulate you into giving us your adoration and money. We really love you unconditionally. Not sentimentally. Not ironically. Not as a joke or a con or with the disguised hope that you’re going to owe us big-time. This is not a simulation, beauty and truth fans. It’s real life.

We may tease, but never for our self-aggrandizement. We may prank, but never to get one-up on you or to jack ourselves up with fantasies that we’re more spiritual than you. We really do want to be in your dreams helping you carry the garbage out of your nightmares.

F
orty-five minutes after leaving Dr. Elfland’s office, I was back in my hotel room, hoping to follow up on the feelings and fantasies that had overflowed while I lay on the operating table. I drew the curtains closed, took off all my clothes, climbed under the covers, and downed a tablet from my new supply of Vicodin. (Grand experiment: I had never had a psychoactive drug in my life.) There was a six-pack of ginger ale on the nightstand, and my journal was nestled close to me in case I was inspired to write.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself lying in the temple of my burnt-out redwood tree back home. Oops. I flashed on my popsicle sticks. Shouldn’t I fetch them? They were stuffed in my leather bag in the closet.

I felt too woozy to retrieve them. Instead, I simply
envisioned
myself rubbing them together. What the hell. There was no way to recreate exactly the conditions I’d always needed in order to slip into the Televisionarium. Might as well experiment to see what worked here in exile.

I simulated the feeling of the crunchy leaves against my back and pictured myself looking up at the sky through branches. My usual relaxation exercises weren’t necessary—my body was already limp—so I skipped right to the deep, fast breathing. The transformation was happening with amazing fluidity. I didn’t have time to worry about whether or not I could do it. After a few minutes I easily invoked the melting sensation that was the final step over the threshold.

And then I was there on the other side of the veil. The syrupy gossamer web had dropped over me.

But this was different from any version of the Televisionarium I had ever explored back home. There were no unearthly iridescent colors, no talking animals, no volcanoes made of mashed potatoes spewing warm chocolate rain down on fields of golden snow, no diamond ladders that stretched from the bottom of a peppermint tea lake to cloud houses where friendly sphinxes carved medicine dolls out of magic black radishes.

Instead, I was in a junkyard inside a rust-red cave that was as big as a stadium. A rocky roof soared high above me, and everywhere I looked there were scraps and debris, some of it arranged into rough sculptures. In one place, a spiral tangle of decrepit window frames stretched around a central heap of shattered toilets, copper tubing, and televisions. Close to me was a giant claw-footed bathtub filled with baby dolls and human teeth, some of the latter still attached to shreds of decaying gums. Next to it, lodged points-first into a pile of mattresses, was a pair of red plastic scissors almost twice my height. About twenty yards away I could see two old Cadillacs, one pink and one blue, lying on their sides. They had both been bent in half by some powerful mechanical jaws and shoved together to form the approximate shape of a square. A mangled ferris wheel rose from inside the mass, and from its dilapidated skeleton hung scores of pajamas of all sizes and colors. Some of these were on fire.