The Eden Express Read online

  Clean, clean, clean. Feeling good, good, good. Clean me, clean clothes. Driving out to good old Joe and Mary’s in good old Car Car, taking each hill as it comes, each curve as it comes, in tune with the car and the road as much as with the boat and the lake. One foot in front of the other, simple, so much fun. How many other people ever really drive a car? I mean really drive a car or really steer a boat or really, I mean really, really eat an egg or prune a tree or take a shower or eat a steak sandwich? Lucky, lucky me. What a swell planet.

  Up the hill and down the hill, shifting just right, so as not to screw my clutch. It was the clutch more than anything else that made driving Car Car an art. One foot in front of the other, the secret of making my car go. The secret to my getting out of the nut house. It’s so simple, such a gas, and it works, works, works. No reason for people to be such jerks, jerks, jerks. No reason for wars, either. If everyone would just catch on to this one foot in front of the other thing maybe the shit would just stop happening. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Who can say? Crest and surge and shift and turn. “There’s the VW bus. That must be the place.”

  DINNER, ETC. I liked staying with Joe and Mary. I usually found an evening with Joe and Mary just the change of pace I needed. I liked it for the same reasons Virginia and some of the others felt uncomfortable there. It was a vacation from hipness.

  I didn’t feel at home with them as I did with hipper hippies, but there were plenty of times when I didn’t feel like feeling at home. There were times when I wanted some hot tea, central heating, electric lights, a nuclear family. Innocence. They would have hated to hear me say that and I never admitted it to myself in so many words. My feelings about Joe and Mary were just one more thing I felt vaguely guilty and defensive about. Getting away from the farm for a bit was nice. It wasn’t fear of being cut off, it was just that people, events, weather all mattered so much up there.

  I didn’t want my life to be a series of evenings with Joe and Mary, I wanted the ups and downs. But it was nice to be with people my life wasn’t so hopelessly tangled up with.

  If I had been looking for a heavy time, I would have asked Virginia to come to town with me and Joe and Mary’s would have been the last place I went. I wasn’t looking for a place to get the Eden Express rolling again.

  Greetings, greetings.

  “Mark, this is David.”

  “You’ve probably heard this a million times before, but I’ve read everything your old man’s written and really dig his stuff. I’m really a fan.” I just smiled and nodded. Fan seemed like a nice enough kid.

  When I met Fan’s woman, Becky, I did a double take. She might as well have been Genie, whose letter was in my hip pocket: the body scaled down a touch, but the same sort of face, hair, and sexuality. Wearing a Triumph t-shirt to boot. She was helping Mary do up what looked to be an ace meal. Lots of mashed potatoes, corn, sausage, salad, rolls.

  Joe and Mary’s new place was quite a change from the previous ones. The others had been in town; this one was about eight miles out toward Lund. Their other places hadn’t been what you would call luxurious, but they had a marginal respectability to them, with electricity, indoor plumbing, light fixtures, some furniture. This new place of theirs was more a cabin than a house. It had some electricity, some kerosene lamps, central heating, plumbing—but none of it was very reliable. There was a telephone that didn’t work. The place was all crazy-quilt. Nothing fitted together or seemed to follow.

  It went so nicely. I was getting exactly the kind of Joe-and-Mary evening I had looked forward to. A good meal. Sitting around afterward talking, playing with Sarah, listening to music, watching Sarah play with Fan’s dog. Everyone enjoying everyone else. Worrying about going nuts again was the furthest thing from my mind. I felt so relaxed, so unthreatened, so comfortable. I was on vacation.

  In a matter of a couple of hours, maybe less, everything changed. Suddenly my life became inextricably balled up with Joe and Mary’s and Fan’s Becky’s and Kathy’s. I started caring about what went on there and with those people as much as if not more than I cared about the farm or Virginia or anything else.

  Maybe if Fan hadn’t asked so many dumb questions about my father. Maybe if we hadn’t smoked so goddamned much dope. Maybe if Joe and Mary hadn’t said so many dumb things, if they hadn’t been so all-fired-up enthusiastic about all the new drugs they had been trying and becoming so hip. Maybe if there hadn’t been so much music, or even if the volume had been a little lower or the music a little lighter.

  One way or another, things started happening. At some point what was going on stopped being conversation and started being something else. Getting up and saying“It was a wonderful meal and nice talk. I’m tired. I’ll see you in the morning” was no longer possible.

  Something real had started happening. Exactly the sort of thing I was trying to avoid by coming to Joe and Mary’s.

  They’d want something flashy from me, then it would switch around and they were trying to do something for me. The favors in both directions ran the gamut from pedestrian to profound. Who was doing what to whom was never very clear. It was a cosmic orgy of the deaf, dumb, and blind. We were all in over our heads.

  I didn’t want to help them. I didn’t want them to help me. I just wanted to go to bed, take my stupid immigration physical the next day, and go back up to the farm.

  A hell of a lot of dope. I remember hoping it would make things better. I remember its making things worse and being unable to stop. I remember wanting to stop.

  Fan David was rolling the joints, lots of them. I thought, this kid’s got to run out some day, but they kept coming and coming. I’d pretend to be asleep or sometimes really drift off. He’d shake my arm and make sure I never missed a round. It would look funny if I said no or just passed the joint. Maybe they’d think I was going nuts again. When in doubt, do like those around you are doing. Those around me were smoking dope nonstop. I didn’t want to make a fuss.

  I felt sick to my stomach. It was hot. The air in the room was stale and stuffy. Tobacco smoke, dope smoke, smoke from the furnace in the basement. Had I tried to stand up, I would have passed out.

  It was harder and harder to concentrate. That was OK. Attendance wasn’t required. Everyone seemed to be drifting in and out of it. Eventually we’d all drift off to sleep. Tomorrow was another day.

  Trying to pay attention wasn’t very rewarding. It made me feel sicker and there never seemed to be much worth paying attention to. Letting myself drift off seemed to make my stomach feel better.

  I was in a drift-off that seemed to go on forever when suddenly a rush of glee seemed to sweep away all the nausea, all the stuffiness, all the fog. Then, “Oh, shit,” my heartbeat and the music were going together. Crazy silliness, but such an irrefutable fact that there wasn’t much point in arguing with it.

  The next song was a little slower. I relaxed and felt much better. But what if it had been faster? All anyone who wants to kill me would have to do is flip that little lever to 78. The perfect crime. What if someone suddenly got it into their head they wanted to hear “Flight of the Bumblebee”? “Please, please. Anything but ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’!” But how could I say anything like that without everyone thinking I was nuts again?

  All of a sudden I was somewhere without the faintest idea of how I got there. Remembering what a bitch it was philosophically to prove that there was anything but the present if there was even that. Not having the faintest idea what time it was. How long had I blanked? A minute, a day, years, millennia? Maybe I didn’t blank at all. Maybe I just think I blanked. But something’s out of tune. Either more has happened to here than me or more to me than here. One of us has changed.

  When I was able to think at all, I’d go back over the evening, trying to figure out what the fuck had fucked up.

  We’ve been talking about weird things, but lots of people talk about weird things, especially when there’s that much dope going around. Astrology, ESP, drugs, hypnotism, schizophrenia, etc. All
perfectly standard-issue topics of conversation. Talking about weird things wasn’t enough to account for things getting so weird.

  I talked less weirdly about the weird things we were talking about. I was the conservative, but conservative with a twist. Fuck me and my goddamned twists. Conservative with a twist, hippie with a twist, artist with a twist, crazy with a twist, everything with a goddamned twist. I couldn’t do anything straight to save my twisty life.

  Maybe I saw the possibility of taking everyone up on all their weirdness and couldn’t resist. “So you like weirdness. Try this one on for size.”

  Telling them about being in a nut house brought weirdness a couple of light-years closer to home, but how could I resist? This was my first shot at virgins. Everyone else I had talked to already knew about it. They had all had a chance to think about it some. This was my first chance to bring the news. And besides, it fit perfectly into all the other weird things they were talking about. All in all, I had shown great restraint in not bringing it up a lot sooner than I did.

  They had so many misconceptions about insanity and seemed so interested I had to try to straighten them out. Maybe I let myself go nuts for the purpose of instruction: Mark’s Real Life University course in psychosis.

  How much did I tell them about the Eden Express?

  One way or another, the ball got rolling. Curiosities were pricked. Lots of private hazy hunches were confirmed and focused all at once. We saw doors we had never seen before and found keys we didn’t know we had.

  We started off light, doing things like straightening out a kink in Joe’s back. Apparently he had been more or less in pain from it for years. It had something to do with his father but that’s another story. Then we got into some subtler things, like a kink or two in Joe and Mary’s marriage.

  It’s hard for me to describe, because when I was at my best I wasn’t really there at all. We stumbled on some tricks of the exorcism trade and were chucking out the little demons who were mucking up our lives as fast as we could find them.

  I remember Mary telling me I didn’t have to worry about any repercussions. The forces of darkness had thrown everything they had at me and I had won. My crackup was like a vaccination. I had rounded the corner and everything was going to get better and better for me.

  “I sure as hell hope you’re right.” I remember thinking that the particular demons and spirits we had dealt with so far were small-timers and worrying that as soon as word got back to their big brothers it was going to be shit city again.

  “How are we doing this?” Very straightforward question. I don’t remember who asked it.

  I wasn’t sure, but I had some hunches. “I’m not sure, but I have some hunches. The potential is always there. You’ve got to somehow get a harmony going. It’s got to be exact. You have to have all the parts and nothing left over. Anything we need is here, as long as we maintain a closed system. Once we establish that, we can become anything. I know it helps to be cut off somehow to realize the necessary completeness and harmony. What we’ve become is a safety valve. We’re letting a lot of steam escape. Safely.”

  I think most of the really heavy things happened after my first attempt to get some sleep and pretend nothing very extraordinary was happening.

  Kathy and I had brought our sleeping bags with us. The room we were supposed to crash in was a little side room. It might have been an entrance at one point. It was hard to tell, it was such a crazy building. Crazy plumbing, crazy heating, crazy basement, crazy everything. There were piles of books and all sorts of other junk. We stumbled around making separate little nests for ourselves.

  Parallels, parallels, parallels. There we were, crashing.

  There was Kathy. There was me. Both with the sort of sleeping bags that could zip together to make a double. I was feeling a little sick and nervous and lonely and jittery. That was how it started with Vincent and Virginia. She was feeling bad and lonely and not able to sleep. Vincent rubbed her stomach for her and then one thing led to another. Understandable, even beautiful. But it never happened with me. I never got into these situations where it would be understandable, beautiful, poetic, loving, just what the doctor ordered. It sure would be nice to relax about this sort of crap. It would be a big help toward getting some sleep and feeling more like one of the gang. It made sense in every conceivable way, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t figure out who was to blame.

  A rainstorm had started after dinner and was becoming increasingly violent. I heard someone moving around in the living room. Joe and Mary were saying something was all fucked up with the furnace. I went to use the bathroom just off our little side room. Just as I flushed the toilet, I heard Mary saying, “Don’t flush the toilet.” I confessed and asked if there was anything I could do to fix it. She said very tiredly it could wait till morning. Everything was falling apart.

  In the little room where Kathy and I were crashing, I found a few ink and crayon drawings I had done on some earlier visit with Joe and Mary. They seemed terribly important. I sat there looking at them, trying to figure out their import.

  I should have known or someone should have known. Known what? That I was nutty as a fruitcake? Trouble ahead? I should have left Virginia? I should have been a painter instead of doing the farm? The world was going to end soon?

  Kathy was looking at them too. “You know, Mark, this sort of thing is much more important and real than the farm.”

  “Light under bushel burn house down?” I was trying to laugh. It was comforting that if I flunked farm I could be good for something else and that Kathy and others like her would see what I was doing as worthwhile.

  Kathy tried to sleep. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open; she was breathing in gulps, the way I sometimes did. Virginia hated the way I breathed. She said it kept her awake and made her nervous. I was being piggy with the oxygen.

  Kathy lying there all swaddled in that icy blue. I had always thought she was kind of pretty, but looking at her now she was exquisitely beautiful.

  What a bitch Virge was not to like her more. Maybe it was the way she breathed. Kathy wasn’t liberated enough or something. The couple thing she and Jack had going didn’t pass muster. Come to think of it, I couldn’t think of any couple thing Virginia approved of or anything that seemed to turn her on more than a marriage or a longstanding man-woman thing breaking up.

  I got in my sleeping bag and tried to go to sleep but it was hopeless. I was wide, wide, wider than wide awake.

  Kathy, my stomach feels all screwed up. Could you rub it? No, no. That was all wrong. It was clumsy and stupid. It was what I meant, but somehow there was no way for me to say it.

  Was Virginia not thinking about fucking when she asked Vincent to rub her stomach? What a luxury. I couldn’t ask anyone for a glass of water without thinking about fucking. Men, women, children, dogs, goats, and on and on. Some part of me somewhere wanted to fuck everything.

  And here I was in a situation that wasn’t half as kinky as some of my dreams and hallucinations. About my age, single, the opposite sex, someone I had known and liked for a long time. But I wasn’t any more sure that I really wanted to sleep with Kathy than I was that I didn’t want to hump alder trees.

  Maybe if she rubbed my stomach she’d want to sleep with me and I wouldn’t want to sleep with her. And if we did make love, weren’t things complicated enough at the farm already? It would be doing to Jack what Vincent did to me or doing to Kathy what Vincent had done to Virge or doing to Virge what Virge had done to me and on and on. Not that those things had been bad. In fact it might be doing us all a world of good, but maybe it would be a good idea to let the smoke clear from round one before firing off round two.

  Maybe a good toss in bed would do the trick. According to Freud, sexual repression was the root of mental illness. The sexual content of my hallucinations made it clear my crotch was somehow involved. If I wasn’t such an uptight, hung-up, sexual prig, if I could just let myself go go go…but
where would it stop stop stop?

  If I gave in to all my sexual impulses, I wouldn’t have time for much else. Maybe Warren was right about lust being my big sin. Maybe I should be put away for the public good. If the choice was between spending my life in a padded cell and giving in to every sexual impulse, I’d just as soon one as the other and I could hardly blame the powers that be if they decided on the padded cell.

  A possible alternative suggested by Jesus didn’t appeal much either. If your left hand offends you, cut it off. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

  The person I least wanted to know about my sexuality was Virginia. She might put it all together and figure out that my being monogamous with her was the sexual equivalent of what I wanted from an evening with Mary and Joe. I wasn’t following my “heart.” Had I followed my heart, I would have ended up exhausted and with some pretty strange bedfellows.

  So there I was, going nuts again and pretty sure I was going nuts again. The voices were getting clearer and more insistent. The crazy taste was in the back of my mouth. Things were starting to glow and shimmer again. Thinking maybe if I could make love with someone it would defuse this whole damn thing, but it becomes too late too fast. As soon as it starts happening people are scared to death just to talk with you. For someone to be able to get into all the tenderness and unguardedness of nakedness and lovemaking with someone on the verge of a breakdown, they’d have to be either awfully brave or so dumb they didn’t realize what was happening.

  What if I just laid it on the line? Kathy, I’m starting to crack up again. If you will just hold me and maybe make love with me, maybe everything will be all right.

  What if she said yes and we made love and I still cracked up? She might figure there was something more she could have done and just be one more person feeling guilty and helpless. Even if it worked, I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if I had cried wolf just to get laid.