I first met Gomez While drinking a banana daquiri out of a
coconut. I was on an ivory white beach
deep in the Dream Archipelago. Ocote
Soul Sounds were drifting off in a schooner headed for their next gig. Neal Cassady and myself waved them off. Another schooner carrying five men was arriving.
Hey, said Neal, you guys ready for this?
Always, said the man with the longest hair.
Meet Gomez, Neal said to me.
Hi Gomez, I said, what are your friend’s names?
We’re all Gomez, said Gomez.
Doesn’t that get confusing?
I asked
We’re the band Gomez, said the man carrying a small drum set. I’m Olly, these guys are Ben, Ian, Paul and Tom.
I won’t remember all that, I said.
Neal and I lay down and soaked in the sun. We spent the next few minutes, hours, days,
weeks, months, or, was it seconds? lounging on beach towels, listening to Gomez
and watching the locals skin-dive for giant clams out on the reef. The beach life was a lazy nap after Sunday
dinner, a state of half-waking. Urgency a foreign word clouded in ignorance. We were reptiles basking, tongues flickering
on inconsequential conversation, tasting the air and finding all was calm. The time we had spent in R’lyeh(see episode23) seemed to be as consequential as a dream.
No. Less. A dream within a dream. A passing notion. Francis Bebey was gone. Had he ever existed?
Such was life in the Dream Archipelago.
A tall, elderly gentleman with thinning, grey hair walked by
where Neal and I lay. You are misusing
my creation, he said, kicking sand in our faces.
Friend of yours? I asked Neal
The less we talk about it, the better, said Neal. Another daquiri?
I assented, lay back and sunk into a stupor. Imagination is a strange thing, I thought. The more you look at something in your mind,
the stronger it becomes. It is the
opposite of holding a snowball in a warm room.
You start with nothing, you hold it a small moment, sensation forms, a
notion, an idea, and it builds, forms layer upon layer, going from something
soft and malleable to something hard, rigid, something you can look at from
different angles, something ready to join the world. Just as a snowball is scooped from the
greater mass, the idea joins the greater mass.
I was pleased with the metaphor.
A reverse snowball. A reverse
snowfall. Everything we dream eventually
rises to the sky, becomes the atmosphere which makes life possible. Cycles of weather. The air we breathe. Thoughts gathered on a beach of bleached bone.
Another daquiri? said Neal.
I looked to the drink he had just given me. It was empty.
Not just empty, the remnants had hardened, suffused with the coconut,
the straw wilted in the heat, the umbrella ragged.
Don’t mind if I do, I said, unsure if the words had come from
my mouth. I felt like I was experiencing
a memory as the moment I lived. I moved
my arm and found the sun rising and setting with each motion. Up then down.
What was happening? There was no
panic, no sense of self. I felt outside my own body, that my body was everything I could see and hear and
taste and touch. I was the sun, the sea,
the music, the skin-divers, the reef, the clams. I was the breeze in the palm trees, the palm
trees, the motes of dust pulled from the palm trees, the scintillas watching all, the watchers
on the other side. I was a cloud that
became rain that became a stream, a river, the ocean and back. I was the cycle of life.
Another daquiri? said
Neal.
I haven’t drunk this one, I tried to say, knowing I was
wrong. A beach of bleached bone? Where did that thought come from?
I pulled my hand through the sand. I was the sand. I lifted myself to my eyes. Each fragment was a skull. My skull.
Another daquiri? said
Neal.
Something is wrong, I said.
You just need another drink, said Neal.
No, I said. No. We need to get out of here.
I stood up. The world
shifted as I did, the sky turning to night, the stars spinning around us. I closed my eyes. Felt the sand between my toes. All those bones. All those lives. I shook my head. No, I shouted, my eyes squeezed tight, my hands
balled into fists. No, I said again,
tensing all my muscles, forcing my mind to picture my home, my apartment, my
book cases, the frayed tassels on the arm of my couch, the patch on the kitchen
floor where I spilled a jalfrezi and the turmeric stained the lino, the spider
in my bathroom, the dust around the air
filter in my bedroom window, the laundry by the washing machine, the pair of blue
and red striped boxers on the top of the pile, the frayed elastic in the
waistband, the label, machine wash, forty degrees. No, I shouted, my voice less a sound than a
force, a punch in the gut of the world.
No!
I opened my eyes. I
was looking at the ghost of my reflection in a window. Beyond the window, the pigeons on the windowsill,
the road below, rain. I turned and I was home.
Yes, I said to my reflection, who winked at me.
Not bad, he said. I
thought you’d lost your mind to the archipelago.
Almost, I said. My
reflection laughed, which made me laugh, and we’ve been friends ever since.
Episode BEFORE
Episode AFTER
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