Occasionally,
in early fall, a fog of such quality creeps across town that everything comes
to a sticky resiny halt.  Everything for
everyone, save for the Wake & Bakers, who delight in the climatic anomaly
as if it were some hazy low hanging clouded school’s closed snow-day, their
bantered voices pontificating about a never-to-happen rumored Steely Dan tour
with giggles deep into the wee hours, tickled by the clicking of tumbling
Backgammon dice, and punctuated by the expletive of  “doubles!” 
Most folks here about, or anywhere for that matter, don’t take the
Stoners with any degree of seriousness, tending to ignore them, writing them
off as lazy.  But let me assure you, like
any tribal sub-culture, spending even the shortest amount of time among them
will reveal endless wonders and a degree of sophistication that will leave you
breathless at their conceptual understanding for the true nature of existence
and being.

It
was here, in a dimly lighted deeply carpeted living-room, around a cable-spool
coffee table, bridged, while playing Backgammon, that I discovered there were
but three types of people walking the planet … those who lie, even in the
smallest ways, and have become comfortable with their deceptions.  Then there are those who would tell not a
single untruth, yet do so not out of honesty, but for some misguided moral
calling, and are easily recognized, as they’re basically unhappy, with heavy
hearts.  And then there are those who
could not bestow an untruth because they’ve no need to … and this was the world
of the true tribal Burner.  There’s a
simple purity to their being, without spending time in the fog the lines of
their almost naïve paintings and dialog can never be understood.  And with that I rolled a six and a four and
was off the bridge, with my profound thought evaporating as quickly as it came …
though once making my move, my eyes roamed the thick air just above my head, as
if there were something hanging in the exhaled blue smoke that I should be
remembering.

It
was easy to feel comfortable here, my whole being felt like a flannel shirt
just taken from the dryer on a cool night. 
Their substances had exotic names, delightful textures, and smells that
one’s olfactory senses could feed on.  My
demons rested in starch white bags, or plastic bottles with explicit
instructions, which were often ignored, but nevertheless, served as some sort
of warning beacon, while the Burners kept their weed in small plastic bags or
glass bottles, where their marijuana, hash, keef, and opium could be viewed,
discussed, mixed, sorted, fussed over, and above all, with the saving of seeds,
rejuvenated.  Rejuvenation was not
something my demons participated in, they were of pure blood, they needed
sterile environments, prescription pads, FDA numbers, sideway glances … and a
great deal of money, ‘less one had a prescription plan.  I laughed to myself, at least I thought I
had, as I remembered the old adage, “Dope will get you through times of no
money, but money won’t get you through times of no dope.”  Someone from across the room laughed aloud
while holding up a well thumbed Zap comic saying, “The Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers!  You said it backwards, but the
meaning’s all the same.  Wait, let me
look, maybe I read it wrong.”

Then,
what was illusively hanging just above me in the exhaled blue smoke settled
like fine dry dust from a bookshelf too seldom used.  There were actually four types of  people walking the planet … the fourth being
those with a penchant for the telling of a story.  These beguiled individuals lived for the
muse, they relished in the fabrication and the adventure of the absurd.  Why? Because they’d tapped into an essential
primal need that crossed all boundaries, the deep seeded lust for folks, if
only for a moment, to step outside of themselves and be part of something not
greater, but something they could never allow themselves to be associated
with.  Yet they instinctually craved the
inspired tall-tale verbal adventure, an aspect of life that was beyond them and
their time honored sensibilities.  And
while true or not, they wanted to believe it so.

The
yarns, the half truths, these bendings of the fabric of reality created half
lives that created whole lives, and the story-tellers had to be so skilled that
their lives and lies instantly became part of the fabric they were weaving, as
they wove it.  While the rest of us can usually
instantly judge truth from fiction, or the honest from the liar, these people
danced a line where truth was fiction, and fiction was truth, a melding of so
much speculative information that it was impossible to tell where one began and
the other left off … leaving these self-beguiled beings inventing, reinventing,
and manipulating cause and effect until they’d no choice but to keep walking
down a hall and through a mirror that would never reflect their image.  And the best part [?], the joke within the
joke, they’d been this way their entire lives, standing there watching words
floating out of their mouths with such lustrous splendor that even they could
only stand by and watch in awe.

Now
I felt a justification, or perhaps just the effects of the weed, nevertheless,
I wanted to tell my new found friends about riding into the Innerzone with
Danny Utah in a car with fins that scraped the sky, causing Roman candle sparks
to rain down on the highway behind us, and my telepathic cat.  I wanted to tell it all, tell it all with the
slow drawn enunciation of  Sam
Elliott.  I’m sure they’d have sat there
wide-eyed … and hours later, in the cool light of the morning and half reason,
my stories would have taken on epic proportions, a life of their own, with effects
and rumors I barely dare to imagine.

I’m
not sure I could live here, but it’s certainly a place I could spend a great
deal of time; though the not so secret Patchouli Oil hand shake got rather old,
rather quickly.

✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠

My
room’s gotten rather comfortable, even without air-conditioning, which I’ve
just noticed, bringing back memories of half lost teen years, sweating through
the night on damp sheets, fumbling across a single bed with an impassioned
lover, beads of salted water running down our breasts, glistening in the light
of the moon, allowing us to feel as one, not just with each other, but with the
entire wetness of a planet turned inside out. 
Memories stored in the Innerzone don’t unfold like a flower to behold,
it’s more like they slowly come into view, until a presence is recognized,
leaving folks to deal with them; though most people tend to simply ignore.  Here, our lives are stored in the spiderwebs
that occupy the farthest corners of the room, hidden in shadows along peeling
crown-molding.  We seldom look too
closely at these dust gatherers, passing under and around them with a duck and
wave of our hands, as if these webbed memories might somehow stick to us …
forcing us to remove the strands of our lives one by one and consider them; if
we’re lucky.  But most people aren’t
lucky, they wipe them away with instinctive grand gestures, or better yet, hire
others to come in and straighten their rooms, their lives, entrusting people
they don’t even know to wipe down and rid all surfaces of anything that may
remind them of something uncomfortable or not. 

I’ve
given into allowing the spiders of my life to create their cathedrals strand by
strand.  On more than one occasion I’ve
walked in and found the housekeeper sitting at the end of my bed, feather
duster in hand, lost, anxious to remove these matted nestings, yet transfixed
that I could live like this.  So she
makes my bed, pours fresh water, adjusts the blinds, vacuums the carpet, and
then almost sneaks out, closing the door with the gentleness of holding a
child, as if the essence of my being could somehow descend on her, and affect
her day.  Of course this all couldn’t
happen, it’s pure nonsense, my memories can affect no one else other than me,
the best she could do would be to disturb them, but that happens all the time,
who’s to say who, what, how, or even when our lives will be disturbed. 

Everyone
learns that smoking in bed isn’t a good thing to do, I’ve come to discover that
reading in bed can have consequences just as dramatic.  It was while reading late the other night
that I began to realize the purpose of the Innerzone.  With this, my book was instantly tossed into
the dresser drawer, and even though it was well past midnight, a call to
housekeeping was made.  Moments later a
rather sleepy-eyed maid rapped at my already opened door, I’d opened the window
just as wide, and was instructing her with sweeping gestures, arms raised to
the ceiling, saying that I wanted all of this cleaned out immediately, every
single strand.  “Are you sure,” she
asked, “you’ve spent so much time letting all this happen, though I’ve no idea
the reason?”  “All of it please, and now,”
I said.  “I’ll be in the bath, I’m
feeling rather … well I don’t know what I’m feeling.  All I know is I need a shower, and want all
of this gone by the time I get out.”  I
could hear the canister vacuum click on as I was adjusting the hot water, and
later as I stepped from the shower into the steam filled room I heard the door
to the hall closing.  Wiping the steamed
mirror clean I began to wonder if I’d just made some huge mistake, then
rummaged through the medicine cabinet for just the right bottle.  So many of them were “just the right bottle,”
though I settled with a smile on a still sealed container of Quaaludes, took
one, then sat on the edge of the tub toweling dry, though I was really waiting
for those lovely 714’s to begin strolling through my head, giving me the
courage to see the results of what I probably shouldn’t have done.

I
opened the door as if it were a singular event in my life, the small room
seemed much more expansive, everything was in it’s place, the door to the hall
was closed, the window opened just a crack, the curtains rippling ever so
slightly, and no longer were the memory laden webbed stalactites hanging over
my head.  But that didn’t mean that I’d
forgotten anything either.  And as I laid
on the bed wrapped in my bathrobe feeling as comfortable as if I were part of
the bed itself, I figured I’d sort this all out in the morning.  But it was the morning already, and I laughed
at the drug induced profundity of the thought as the long orange fingers of the
sun were making their way between the slits of the blinds, caressing my
eyes.  I was breathing in time to
something outside of myself, and I just knew that if I turned on my side and
drifted off that I’d wake up with a face intaglioed by the pattern of the
spread, but I was too wasted to care … everything was delightfully making no
sense as I turned on my side, slipping away, remembering the words, “Sleep now,
tomorrow’s waiting, you don’t want to be late.”

There
was a smile etching its way across my face, I could feel it as I lay there with
my eyes still closed, wondering what time it was.  I’d been dreaming, I hadn’t even realized
that over time I’d stopped dreaming and tried to remember when my last one
was.  Dreams are elusive enough, yet with
one’s life hanging right in front of them, or in the balance, I imagine dreams
tend to retreat into the nether regions of the mind to protect themselves from
overexposure.  Grams was in this one,
Grams dreams are always the best.  It was
early morning, I couldn’t have been more that 5 or 6, the hallway from the
bedroom seemed endlessly long, my footed pajamas sliding on the polished wood
floors, my hands running down each side of the wall to steady myself, tiny eyes
barely half awake, a mouth full of sleep, peering around the corner into the
kitchen, pulling out a white painted chair with a homemade barkcloth cushion at
an enameled table, Grams’ back to me, perpetually cooking something that always
smelled wonderful.  It was worth waking
up just to see her smile, pull a paregoric cigarette from her apron pocket and
spark it up, mixing the smell of the tobacco with the smell of the eggs,
allowing me to feel I was in some sort of exotic haze.  She looked right at me, then her eyes shifted
to the yard, which could mean only one thing; and my heart began to race.  There it was, a trail across the morning dew,
a box-turtle on a journey to somewhere that I was about to interrupt.  I was up and out the backdoor before words
could be spoken, racing for the fence, hoping for all the world that the turtle
hadn’t made it past the picket border, the feet of my PJ’s soaking wet, but I
scooped him with not three feet to spare, where if he’d managed to edged
through, I’d spend the rest of the morning with my face pressed between the
slats determined to have him turn and come crawling back.  Grams followed me out, a plate of eggs and
ham in one hand, and in the other, lettuce and raw hamburger.  Grams was so gracious, she sat right down in
the wet grass with me as I ate, played with the turtle, and tried to get him to
eat as well.  Later, as I held up my
prize for the Egg-man, the turtle’s tiny legs motoring in midair, Gram said, “She
ran it down and caught it all by herself,” making me feel proud.  “Well now, that’s a catch for sure.  You do know that a box-turtle needs a proper
box?” he said grinning.  “A proper box
Grams, have we a proper box?”  I repeated
the phrase with so much emphasis on the word ‘proper’ that both were exchanging
a glance I came to understand only adults shared, but I didn’t care, Mr.
Egg-man had gone to his truck, and in his hand was a proper box, and I was
delighted to the point of breathlessness. 
Grams asked for two dozen eggs, but their voices were trailing off into
nothingness, my world was no bigger than the box my turtle was now roaming.

➽➽➽➽➽➽➽➽➽➽➽

The
clock next to my bed read 4:20, I was feeling heavy from sleep, then remembered
the Quaalude, glanced at the window, gathered together the open back of my
hospital gown and decided to get out of this box for a spell.  There was a message floating down over the
intercom, I was certain it was for me, but it hung in the air like a ribbon
tied to an oscillating floor fan, never quite reaching my ears.  So I pressed the button next to the pink door
stepping barefoot onto the green and white checkered linoleum floor with a
thought that caused me to turn and reconsider my room, “At the time of your
demise, there will be a moment of understanding,” but it must have been a
clerical error, a message like that would never be for me.  It hadn’t actually dawned on me that I was in
a hospital, not until I rubbed my face with my hand, only to discover it was
completely draped with a gauze bandage up to my elbow.  There Innerzone was definitely not someplace
one wanted to have anything done that required precision or concerned skill,
everyone here was just like me, vacationing from the world, and in starched
whited hospital uniforms or not, they were filling their heads and lungs with
anything that would keep their feet two or more inches off the floor.  And that truth was too soon self-evident as I
passed the nurse’s station, where both were sharing a mask, holding their
breath while deeply inhaling a substance that was beyond my knowledge, but was
certainly lifting their spirits.  One of
the nurses began trying to communicate with me, laughing and failing.  The other held up a clipboard pointing at the
top page, yet refusing to remove her mask, and even when she did, her words
made no sense.  So she said them louder,
and pointed to the page thumping her finger against the board while holding it
against the glass partition, as if shouting and grand slow-motion gestures
would make her undecipherable words more clear. 
But I played along, and in good spirits I smiled holding up my bandaged
arm, pointing and mouthing in exaggeration, “It’s feeling much better, thank
you,” and wandered further down the hall, leaving them to fall back into their
swivel chairs, shrugging their shoulders in total exhaustion.

A
policeman rose when he saw me coming, asking if I’d a few minutes to talk.  “Do I need a lawyer?” I asked with a sleepy
smile.  “Not unless you’ve something to
hide,” he replied shoving one hand into his pocket, and fooling with a deck of
playing cards with the other.  I glanced
around the empty waiting-room and said, “This is the Innerzone, there are no
secrets here, everyone’s life if an open book. 
Have you been sitting here all night?” 
“You’re right,” he said placing his cards on the table, “there’re no
secrets, ‘less of course you’re dead, and yes, I’ve been here most of the
night.  Mind telling me what you
remember?”  I sat down and sorted through
his playing cards, “You know you’re missing the Jack and one Ace?  Last thing I remember is crawling into the
back seat of a car, cut my knee on some broken glass, I was so far from sober,
all I wanted was to get some rest, get my head in order.”  “The car belonged to Danny Utah,” he said
flipping though a spiral notebook.  “You
know him?”  I looked around hoping to be
interrupted by a Doctor, a visitor, even a gassed nurse, though no one came to
my rescue, so I shifted on my feet, anxious to be honest, and fumbling
miserably, “Yes.  No.  Maybe. 
Perhaps.  Sort of.  Hard to say,” I said stacking the cards
together.  “Yeah that’s what I figured,” and
the officer took a seat re-stacking the cards yet again.  “You know,” I said, “one of us is going to
have to lay those cards on the table and leave them be.”  He laughed extending his hand, “Dan
Pullman.  Sgt. Dan Pullman.”  “I’d shake, but I seem to have a tethered
wing.  Did this have anything to do with
Danny?”  “Yes, no, maybe, perhaps, sort
of, hard to say,” he shot back with a grin. 
“Tell me, where were you and Danny headed?”  I stood there thinking that I’d nothing to
win and nothing to lose, so I answered, “I was trying to outrun some
demons.  What Danny was doing is anyone’s
guess.  Maybe he was trying to help me,
or maybe I was just an excuse for he and that car of his to slit the sky and
rain down stars.  What happened?”  Sgt. Pullman looked me right in the eyes
without blinking, “Danny got himself caught in a meteor shower’s all, I doubt
he’ll be going home.  You know, it’s one
thing to dance here for awhile, it’s another to get lost, and even harder to
imagine plotting a six by six residence for all time, if you follow my
drift.  We pulled these from the backseat
and the trunk, they’re all legal prescriptions, so I’m giving them back to you
with a piece of advice … careful who you’re riding shotgun with, illusions
are tentative at best, don’t go losing yourself on a tollroad in the middle of
the night.  And no I’m not missing the
Jack or an Ace, they’re right here in my pocket, cards I’ve yet to play.  A looker like you might want to consider
stashing a couple away.”  And with that
he turned and walked off.  I called after
him feeling somehow betrayed, though probably only by myself, “Well at least I
keep my shoelaces tied,” but he wasn’t listening, and he should have, ‘cause
when the elevator doors closed, sure enough, the end of his shoelace was
plainly visible.

♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎♣︎

The
following morning I was considering a bit of graffiti on the bus-shed wall:

I fell through the door

Facedown on the floor

slipping into laughter

I blew in the door

Flew across the floor

into happily ever-after

I stood feet in the sand

Pockets in my hands

I was sinking

I drove all night

Was a dancing delight

to your drug song …

when
an ol’ timer spread out a bandana on the bench and sat down next to me saying, “This
place you’re lookin’ for, it’s a good ways off the map, it’ll take you a half a
tank of Red Indian just gettin’ there and back. 
I used to go down there in a silver Airstream camper, but I was just a
boy back then.  ‘Course they’ve torn up
the highway now, most of it washed out in the rain more than 30 years ago, why
hell, the whole place could be gone for all I know.  Tell me girl, why you chasin’ my dreams?”  But he didn’t give me a chance to answer, he
just went on,  “Even when it was there,
there was nothing but the wind whistling through the pines.”  So I just nodded as he took a flask out of
his sock, a shot glass from his pocket, poured himself two fingers and settled
back against the wall as the morning sun warmed his face.  “Go ahead,” he said, “It won’t kill ya’, it’s
just the water of my past.”  “Thanks,” I
said, “but I don’t drink.”  “No one does ‘til
they do,” he said still holding out the glass with the sun filtering though the
amber like it was some sort of fortune teller’s crystal ball.  “Well, if you ain’t gonna drink it, you might
hold it for me while I tie my shoelace,” he asked.  But I wasn’t really listening, I was lost
somewhere in the bottom of the glass.  I
took the shot, then wiped the corners of my mouth with the bandana while trying
to read the rippled yellow bus schedule. 
This was a lonely place to be sure. 
By noon no bus had showed, so I figured it was time to head back to
town, climb the stairs to my room, open the unlocked door, and fall facedown on
the bed.  Which is pretty much how I
remembered it when I woke, and is pretty much the reason I don’t drink.  Drinking doesn’t separate me from reality, it
just mushes things up like a rubber-band ball that refuses to bounce.  So I laid there on the bed thinking that I’d
like to turn the radio on, but that my arms weren’t long enough to reach the
knob … another shortcoming of alcohol. 
If I’d been high, my arms would’ve definitely been long enough …
either that, or I could’ve enlisted one of my demons to flick the switch.