Chasing Chimeras

Sometime in the spring of 1976 I awoke on a beer-soaked couch in a San José apartment. A constellation of flies were buzzing around a big chunk of roasted meat resting on the floor beneath a table. Bits of oyster shell were scattered all over the apartment. I raised my torso and set my feet on the hardwood floor and greeted two of my friends as they – like me – adjusted to the demands of consciousness, and the injunction of a hangover. My body was in pain and demanded restitution for the damages I imposed on it. I remedied this by popping a can of beer open and drinking breakfast.

I’d quit my job at the hospital in Seattle and hit the road for California. I missed the sunshine. I missed the exuberant immoderation and lunacy of my pals to the south, Blake Wilson and Lucas Cole. The fragments of oyster shell on the floor were from Lucas dancing naked to Ravel’s Boléro and clicking the shells like castanets.

There comes a time in one’s mid-twenties when you know deep down the chimeras you’re pursuing are more apt to be sirens of disaster and catastrophe rather than angels of fulfillment. And you decide to either knuckle down and look harder for something stable and commonsensical, get real about life, stop chasing dreams, put your nose to the grindstone, etc. etc., or say to yourself fuck it, life’s short, there’s something finer I can do with my life than routine and money and a wife and kids and a lawn to mow and all that shit. What I want is the glory of creation, the sweetest emotion that ever existed, the joy of making something loud and dangerous and smart and wild, something that brings new vibrations to the collective, puts ideas in people’s heads, and a peacock in the heart.

I wasn’t done with California. There was something down there and I wanted to find that something and make something out of it.

But there really wasn’t much bravado attached to any of this. I felt that I was lost and had made a stupid mistake by quitting a job I liked to come south in pursuit of social phenomena that no longer existed. The collective had morphed from silliness and strawberry fields to earnest endeavor and trying to work the system from within while pursing status and comfort and an 8 ball of coke. Terence McKenna identifies the drugs of capitalism to be coffee, alcohol and cocaine. They energize and help one able to work hours non-stop. Alcohol dulls your sense enough to make it possible to do things that might be contrary to your principles, make friends with people with whom you really have nothing in common, and do things to other people that violate the golden rule.

Alcohol also helped make life palatable when you’re surrounded on all sides by the unpalatable, the tedious, and the implacable. It’s perfect for family get togethers, weddings, funerals, and getting to know one’s coworkers.

Me, I just liked being drunk. Goofy. Uninhibited. Disassociated. Extravagant and loquacious. It was right around this period that I first read Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. I loved that book. Still do. It was highly imaginative and full of bizarre encounters with the supernatural as the central figure – the palm-wine drunkard – embarks on a quest to find the ghost of his palm-wine tapster in Dead’s Town. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I was working for a mailing service in Seattle and was showing my mail route to a young, newly hired man from Nigeria, that I discovered that palm-wine was real: it’s created by the sap of certain species of palm tree, the palmyra, date palm and coconut palms.

I went to San Francisco and spent a week living in a flea-bitten hotel in Cow Hollow. I thought I might want to live in San Francisco. I went looking for a room to rent (there was no way I could afford an apartment), and interviewed with several groups of nice people. The opportunity was there, but I balked. Something didn’t feel right. The dream I was seeking no longer existed. I was chasing ghosts. The beats and San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 50s and early 60s were long over, with no residual effect evident anywhere aside from a few poetry readings as poorly attended as the ones in Seattle; Rolling Stone had moved their headquarters to New York, and although there continued to be something of a hippy culture persisting like mold in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and elsewhere, I’d never cared much for the hippies. They’re instincts were communal, whereas I desired quiet and solitude, and they were daffily anti-intellectual, seeking a ridiculous state of childlike innocence.

I remember going into a Chinese restaurant near the Tenderloin for a bowl of lotus root and pork soup and entering into a friendly conversation with a man who appeared to be a few years older than me, his mid-thirties maybe, who said he’d known Jack Kerouac when he lived in San Francisco. A lot of people in the Bay Area made claims about knowing Kerouac, or Janis Joplin or Grace Slick, and maybe some were true, but so what? What does it mean to know someone?

Kerouac had only been dead for seven years. But dead is dead. Any conversation I’d have with him in the future would be purely imagined and taking place in the confines of my head.

 It was some comfort to me that I was now experiencing what he’d experienced when he was adrift and staying in flea-bitten hotels – we were definitely on the same wave-length – but I envied his place in history, the fifties, which, although notorious for its McCarthyism and conformity and xenophobia, offered writers much more publishing opportunities. Despite the introduction of television, people still read a lot, and were more open to literary endeavor. On The Road had first been published by the Viking Press in 1957. Had Kerouac been shopping his manuscript around in the 70s, he would’ve been roundly dismissed by the mainstream publishers and relegated, at best, a small press run of maybe 500 copies. Chances are, he would’ve had a tough time finding readers. Smoking pot and traveling around the country seeking thrills and adventure rather than settle into a job and family were hugely idiosyncratic and fascinating to people in the 50s. It was old hat by the 70s. The highways were still full of long-haired, pot-smoking hitchhikers.

I read Kerouac for his style – the energy and vitality of his words and descriptions – but people tend to read more for content rather than style.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions did well in the 70s, so there was still some margin for eccentricity and idiosyncratic writing, it wasn’t completely dead as it is now, but taste in general ran solidly toward conventional narrative and bland, pedestrian writing. Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle, Mario Puzo’s Fools Die, and Sidney Sheldon’s A Stranger in the Mirror.

I remember at one point phoning home in Seattle out of loneliness. I’d never done that before, phoned home out of loneliness, just wanting to hear a familiar voice. My dad seemed a little confused as to why I was calling. Had there been reasons before? Requests for money? Maybe I’d misinterpreted the tone in his voice. But he seemed distant, and a little disinterested. I returned to the hotel feeling lonelier.

I returned to San José, spent a few more nights of drunkenness, then headed back to Seattle.

It hit me full force in the car driving up I-5 to Seattle that I’d been chasing a chimera. The entire cultural fabric of the Bay Area had changed quite drastically. The Zeitgeist had adopted new goals, guided – not by the cheerful sagacity of Allen Watts, but the triumphalist egoism of Ayn Rand. The social richness and exhilaration of the 60s had morphed weirdly into a techno-utopian infatuation with artificial intelligence and circuitry. The orchards and high-ceilinged Victorian houses of San Jose were quickly being replaced by the sterile, futuristic architecture that would come to dominate a landscape whose rhythms and energy were tirelessly devoted to the increasing denigration of the human imagination. Hardly anyone noticed that conversations were becoming more impoverished and vapid, or that the spirit of eccentricity had become a trifle more reserved, a trifle more measured, because the promises of instant communication and the universal access to information were not just compelling arguments, they were evangelistic appeals to old Enlightenment ideals of reason and logic. This was how the mind was going to be expanded: not through prayer and incantation, but software and computation. Even legendary psychonaut Timothy Leary had begun to sing the praises of the cybersphere. No one noticed until well into the second decade of the 21^st century that the prodigal wonder of the Internet had become a ubiquitous device of thought control.

I found it hard to believe that I’d been so deluded as to think I was going to find the same excitement of 1966 in 1976. We all know about drug addiction, but what about dream addiction?

My return to Seattle felt very different this time. It was clear that the past was now categorically and absolutely the past. It had become a domain accessible only by reflection. And all the distortions that go with rumination and self-questioning. Rooting around in the past is a weird kind of horticulture: tending to memories is like tending to shrubs and flowers. But the garden isn’t a happy backyard sprawl of ground cover flowers and healing plants. It surrounds a mausoleum. It surrounds a space of unreachable moments and imponderable ghosts. These are the woeful abstractions over which I poured time like water, poured fondness and nostalgia, poured attentions I wish I’d given when I’d had the chance. Gardening the mind lacks the comforting reassurance of dirt. But under the hypnosis of driving long distances on a freeway, it can provide perspectives subject to the chromatic nuances of music. If the truth is hard and bitter you can sweeten it with a little coloratura, a little rubato.

I heard a lot of Steve Miller on the way back to Seattle. Mainly, “Fly Like An Eagle.” “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.” 

Tell me about it.