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Orbiting the Planet |
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CHAPTER 35
November
1971
As the wings righted for the final approach, I felt my heart
quicken at the prospect of seeing Jon and Rosie again.
I also felt a little dismayed that I did not have all of Hunga
Dunga’s blessings packed in my small knapsack.
I had a shirt from Lizzie.
And
a paper heart from Trudy.
And
a fabric rainbow from Lana.
And
Zietar gave me his embroidery of the cosmic duck.
But from Baird I had only the looks of one who’d been betrayed.
Baird was furious that I had even considered leaving on such a trip
without the consent of the family.
Just
the idea of someone making a unilateral decision bugged him to no end.
Lizzie was also upset, but he admitted that what he was feeling was
spawned from jealousy, and not from anything I’d done.
The four people I would miss the most, Psylvia, Chuck, Richard, and
Duck were my greatest supporters.
At
the Family Meeting that Baird called immediately after learning of the
ticket, they were the ones who pleaded my case.
“He’s got to go,” argued Psylvia.
“How can he not go?
How
can he not take advantage of this?”
“But
why is he
going?” insisted Baird.
“What
does he hope to accomplish?” he asked as if I weren’t sitting right
there next to him.
“Baird, it’s an adventure,” Richard stated the obvious.
“There’s more to it than that,” Baird said.
“Jon and Rosie are guru groupies!”
Then he turned to me.
“Giacco,
you don’t need a guru.
You
have your Self.”
Chuck spoke up.
“Is
that what this is all about, Baird?
What
does it matter to you if Giacco finds a teacher?
What?
Are you afraid
you’ll no longer be master of all you survey?”
Everyone could see the blood climb up Baird’s neck to the top of
his head as he turned to face me.
“You’re
going to force me to resort to the divinity game.
The very teachings you seek are the teachings that tell
me
to tell you not to go!”
“And what does that mean?” I inquired.
“Giacco,” Baird answered with concern, “Wanting enlightenment
is as much a desire as anything else.
Maybe it’s the last desire... the ultimate desire... but
eventually, you have to give that one up too.
So you may as well give it up now.”
“Look Baird,” I tried to explain and I hoped it was true,
“I’m not going with any expectations whatsoever.
You’ve got it all wrong.
In
the first place,
I didn’t make
the decision to go on this trip.
The
ticket was the decision.
I would’ve never come up with it on my own.
I mean... I really don’t have much choice in the matter.
It’s a sign.
I have
to go.
I just
have
to go because... well, because it’s just too far out
not
to go.”
“A ticket around the world for christ’s sake!” Richard chimed
in.
“Baird, really, how can
you expect Giacco to turn it down?
Besides,
you know Jon and Rosie.
With
their karma, all he has to do is hang onto their coattails!”
“And what about money?” Baird asked.
“What about it?” Duck said.
“Jon’s paying for everything.
We’ll still be getting Giacco’s checks.
Don’t worry.
Richard
will take care of everything.”
Baird tried a different approach, completely atypical for him.
“Well, Giacco, the truth is that I don’t want you to go
because... well, because I’ll miss you too much.”
That took everyone off guard, especially me.
Not that anyone believed him.
It
was obviously a tactic of last resort, but at Family Meetings, when all
else failed, you went for the heart.
“Gosh, Baird!” I finally said, “That makes me feel really
good.
But it’s not like
I’m leaving forever.
It’ll
only be a few months at most,” even though I knew the ticket was good
for a year.
“And not only
will I miss you... and everyone else... but I really
will
think about what you’ve said... really.”
That seemed to placate Baird, or so I thought.
But when the vote was taken, Baird said
no.
I guess he felt obliged to be consistent.
Fortunately he was the only one who objected despite the fact that
he’d lobbied Bobby and Alvoye to vote with him.
And Luc was very recently defying Baird and becoming more
independently-minded every day.
Baird
cast them all an angry and then disappointed look when they voted
yes,
and Baird could not come up with a reasonable alternative.
I really don’t know what would’ve happened if the family
had
decided I shouldn’t go.
It
would mean
I would have to make a decision and everyone knew how hard that was!
I’d have to decide whether to abide by the wishes of the group or
to strike out on my own again.
Because
that’s what it would come down to.
That
would be the bottom line.
Maybe
that’s what Baird was up to.
Maybe
he was trying to force my hand.
To
choose commitment over commentary.
Action
over observation.
To strive
toward achieving a shared vision rather than watching the movie of my life
from some plush seat in the ethereal loge.
With the usual exceptions, everyone knew that Baird regarded this
whole affair as a philosophical conflict.
As far as he was concerned, we may as well have been playing out
roles from the
Bhagavad Gita.
With the usual exceptions, everyone understood why I had to go and
encouraged it.
For them there
was no conflict.
It was just
what was happening.
And they
were happy and excited for me.
The
usual exceptions shined me on and thought of me as no more than a person
who has to collect experiences the way some people have to collect stamps.
To them it was just a hobby.
To
me, it was becoming an unchosen career.
Nevertheless, on the day I was to leave, I found my body loitering
in different rooms of the house and my mind lingering on Baird’s words.
I couldn’t argue the fact that it was all the same.
Whether your external world was familiar and mundane or exotic and
new.
It was all the same.
You took your mind with you wherever you went.
So why go anywhere?
In
such a mood I could’ve talked myself into chronic immobility.
Upon Baird’s words I could have lingered indefinitely.
Just because it’s all the same.
Psylvia saw the vortex I was falling into and gave me a stage-slap
across the face to snap me out of it.
Richard picked up my pack.
Each
of them grabbed an elbow and escorted me out the door.
The rest of the family, except Baird, was gathered on the front
steps.
They threw confetti at
me and yelled
“bon voyage!”
and “be sure to write!” and “only drink boiled water!”
The three of us climbed into Zwagen.
I saw Baird standing in the upstairs bedroom window as we drove
away.
When the flight attendant opened the door, a rush of tropical air
flooded in.
As I made my way
down the stairs to the tarmac, it engulfed me.
First around my face, then up my sleeves and pants.
I felt the contentment of that little boy hiding in his sofa cave
next to the heating vent.
But
that was nothing to the contentment I felt when I saw Jon and Rosie
standing in the open door of the terminal.
Rosie started running toward me and I made a move in her direction
but an attractive, dark-skinned, nubile woman in a grass skirt stepped in
front of me.
At first I
thought she was topless but it was an illusion made by the way the
necklace of flowers rested against her breasts.
Other necklaces hung in the gentle crook of one arm.
She jiggled one free and placed it over my head, kissing me on each
cheek.
“A-lo-ha!” she
said.
The
ha
was the most energetic syllable, as if it needed a little push through the
hot air in order to reach my ears.
Hearing
a word in the language of vowels, the languid air, the smell of the
frangipani around my neck, the tops of palm trees swaying just beyond the
security fence, and the figures of Jon and Rosie, now almost upon me, made
my soul swoon.
Rosie threw her arms around me and kissed me.
She fondled my hishi necklace and said how nice it looked against
my Sicilian complexion.
I took
it off and as I put it around her neck, I said it looked even better
against her exquisite tan.
I
told her I would love for her to wear it for a while, to absorb her
beautiful self, but as much as I would like to, I couldn’t let her keep
it because it had a very special significance to me.
When she pried, I believe it was the one and only time I didn’t
tell her the whole story.
Not
because she wouldn’t understand, but because I myself didn’t know what
the whole story was.
Michael
had been a quandary for me and I didn’t have the energy to try to
unravel the knot I felt in my stomach every time I thought about him.
Rosie looked wonderful.
Her
skin glowed.
Her face beamed.
She was toxin free.
Jon
nuzzled her aside and gave me a loud and wet smackeroo on the lips.
He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, but his eyes were
brilliant.
“You guys look wonderful!” I said.
“Are you still all raw?”
“Well, I’m still raw,” Rosie answered.
“Probably from punching myself too often.
But Jon here… “
“I…,” Jon took over, “I like to think of myself as
basically
fresh, but highly seasoned.”
“Oh, in other words, you’re off the diet?” I concluded.
“Well, let’s just say I’m on a culinary sabbatical... but
I’m making up for it my smoking many, many, more cigarettes!”
“Much better, Jon.
Much
better!”
We got off the bus on
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the Jungle!” Jon answered mysteriously and made a face like
an African mask.
I screwed up my face with ignorance.
Rosie explained.
“The
‘Jungle’ is what the locals call the neighborhood behind the park,
Giacco.
Jon is just trying to
be cute.
Ignore him.
That’s where we’re staying.
We got us a small apartment.
You’ll
hate it, I’m sure.”
“Why would I hate it?
“It’s tacky,” Rosie said, “but it’s the best we could do.
We had a hard time finding someone willing to rent to us by the
month.”
“Well, how long are we planning on staying here?”
“Who knows?” said Jon.
“Time
is relative.
Why?
You got an appointment to be somewhere?”
“The only appointment I have is to be with you,” I said.
“My engagement book is in your hands.”
“Well, let’s scope out
A half-block away, coming toward us, was what looked like a purple
popsicle stick.
As it got
closer, we realized it was an old, wizened woman wearing a muumuu.
She was walking briskly, but slowed when she noticed us, almost to
the pace that seemed more appropriate for an emaciated octogenarian.
When we moved to the side to let her pass, she sidestepped in the
same direction.
She held out
her hands, blocking our way with a wall of paisley.
We stopped and she lowered her arms.
Then she crossed them, leaned back on one leg, and scrutinized us.
She looked all around our bodies, squinting her eyes trying to see
something.
We looked more
carefully at her.
Though she
looked ancient, she was really just middle-aged. Maybe early 50s or so.
It was her skin and bones that made her look so old.
She was so skinny she was hard to look at.
Like a holocaust victim.
She
displaced so little space, it was curious that the energy she emitted
seemed large.
Her voice was powerful and young.
“Look at you three!
It’s
about time you got here!”
Jon, Rosie, and I looked at one another and then smiled, humoring
her.
“Now you…” she said grabbing Rosie by the forearm, “You are
a beauty.
Just look at your
aura, would you?
It’s just
the most glorious blue!”
She
released Rosie’s arms and crossed hers again, pressing the purple fabric
flat against her chest.
“But you two!” she said looking at Jon and me.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Your
auras are a nice shade of blue too, except for that ugly, shitty brown
fringe all around it!
When?
When… I ask you… are you going to stop smoking cigarettes?”
Jon and I shrunk to about two feet tall and looked glumly penitent.
“By the way,” she said, reaching into the neck of her muumuu
and pulling out a little cloth purse, “I’m
In a gesture reminiscent of Bette Davis, she held the
half-cigarette between her fingers and raised it to her lips.
“Gotta light?” she asked Jon.
“Uh, yeah… sure.”
And
he fiddled in a pants pocket for a book of matches.
As he lit her cigarette, Jon introduced himself, Rosie, and me.
Jon blew the match out.
She
inhaled deeply with great satisfaction.
Though she didn’t cough when she blew the smoke into our faces,
her chest did convulse slightly.
Then
she rested the elbow of the arm holding the cigarette in the palm of her
other hand and stood there for a minute just looking at us.
“Well, thank you very much.
It
was nice to make your acquaintance.”
She started to walk by us, then turned.
“I’ll see you tonight, OK?”
“Tonight?” Jon asked.
“Well,
I don’t know if we can…”
“Queen’s
Jon’s jaw dropped to his Adam’s apple.
Then he turned to us, but our wide eyes said more than our voices
could have, so none of us said anything and we continued on our way.
Rosie was right.
I
hated the apartment.
Actually,
it was one half of a small duplex.
It
was clean enough.
It was big
enough.
But I wouldn’t say
it was tacky!
There wasn’t
enough there to be tacky.
What did the ad say?
For rent.
Freshly
painted, two-room, sensory deprivation chamber?
The eye thirsted for something… anything… interesting or
colorful to look at.
A pile of
Rosie’s clothing in the middle of a mattress on the floor.
Some books spilling out of the front pouch of Jon’s backpack.
A large wooden bowl sitting on the counter next to the sink.
It was filled with papayas, bananas, mangoes, and a couple of
fruits I didn’t recognize.
I made for the fruit.
That’s
when I noticed the porch… I mean the
lanai…
off the kitchen.
Just a small
room, maybe eight by four, with floor to ceiling screens for walls.
It made up for everything else.
There were a couple of weathered rattan chairs on either side of a
small bamboo table with a glass top.
A
vinyl covered foam pad lay unfolded off to the side.
It looked like it belonged to a lawn chair.
It did.
To the one that
was in a sitting position just outside the lanai in the tiny backyard.
But what a backyard!
An
old guava tree.
A lime.
Two papaya trees.
Three
young bananas.
All fenced in
by hibiscus bushes.
“This is your room if you want it,” Rosie said.
“What do you think?”
I turned from our miniature
Rosie and Jon were very pleased.
It really was the best room in the place and the lanai was where,
for all practical purposes, we all wound up spending our time.
The rest of the apartment became merely a storage area for three
backpacks and a place where Jon and Rosie could go to be by themselves.
Rosie squeezed one of the papayas in the bowl and took it out.
“Want some papaya, Giacco?”
“Sure.
Sounds
good!” I answered.
She
sliced it in half long ways, and scraped the black seeds out into a
plastic bowl.
“How about
you, Jonny?”
“No thanks, honnee!” Jon called from the area to be known as
the bedroom.
He was rummaging
through a paper bag next to his pack.
Rosie went to the refrigerator and pulled out a quart of yoghurt.
She scooped tablespoons of it into the papaya halves until they
were filled.
Then she placed a
cumquat on top of each one.
She
guided me back to the lanai and handed me one of the sundaes and a spoon.
We each sat in a rattan chair.
Jon came in and dragged the foam pad closer to us.
There was a whoosh of air as he plopped down on it.
“Ahh!
Excuse me,”
he said widening his eyes and raising his brows as if he’d just let go a
big one.
“Really!” Rosie
said.
“Have you no
manners?”
He put one joint
on the glass top of the table and lit the other one.
As he passed it to Rosie, the wind picked up and the sky cast over.
The sudden rain was refreshing.
The wind remained warm as it blew steadily through the lanai.
The papaya was sweet as candy.
The yoghurt provided the pretense it was health food.
The entire digestive system, from the palate to the colon, welcomed
the whole concoction.
The rain
lasted no longer than it took to finish the one joint of what Jon claimed
was Maui Zowie.
His claim was
probably correct because by the time the sun once again flooded the back
yard, the afternoon was utterly transcendental.
“Now this is the life to which I can easily become accustomed.”
I informed them.
Jon and Rosie
laughed in agreement and the three of us drifted off into private
thoughts.
I thought about how fast a person’s perspective can change.
How now, just a half-day away, it’s all as if it never was.
Hunga Dunga, that is.
I
thought about comings and goings.
About
couples and uncouplings.
About
how readily the mind can visit one cosmos and then another… from micro
to mac.
And know that neither
is grander than the other, but simply concentric.
November 1971
As the sun began its descent, we walked the five blocks to
Queen’s
It was
When she saw us in silhouette standing in front of the setting sun,
she gestured with some breaststrokes for her groupies to spread out and
make room for us.
“All of you… move over… make space for Jon and Rosie!” she
ordered.
Then, as if an
afterthought, “Oh and… what’s your name again… Gino?
Marco?
Something mafia
like that!”
“Giacco,” I corrected her.
“Yes, that’s it!
Let
Giacco in too!”
Faces of all ages looked up, but most of them were young.
They shifted their butts in the sand and the circle widened.
They hadn’t quite decided what to make of me, but they
immediately seemed to regard Jon and Rosie as celebrities.
Maybe it was because
“Are you our teacher?” were the first words out of Jon’s
mouth after
She laughed though it sounded more like barking.
“My Lord, no!
“Whatever
makes you think that?”
Jon looked embarrassed.
“Just
asking.”
And that one question promoted Jon and Rosie to the top of her
short list of illuminati inamorati.
“What about Giacco?” Jon asked.
“Giacco? I’ll do him separately, some other time,” she
offered casually.
Even at my angle to them, I could see a look of distress come over
Jon and Rosie’s faces.
Every
mystical signal was momentous and every spiritual nuance was of great
importance to seekers such as us… or perhaps from
“Giacco has his own karma,” she said softly, reassuringly.
“It is very much connected to both of yours… especially
Jon’s… but not entirely.
Giacco
is…” She tilted her head
in thought but the sagging flesh around her neck stayed where it was.
“Giacco is incomplete!”
She
said it quickly to get it over with.
“The
two of you are the most complementary Yin and Yang I’ve seen in years,
or maybe ever.
So I can read
your
cards… at least at this point in time… as if you were one entity.
But Giacco, I’ll have to do alone.”
Everything she said made sense even though I worried some kind of
precedent was being set.
Some
self-fulfilling prophecy that would always put me in Jon and Rosie’s
shadow.
I didn’t mind if I
had to walk behind them.
I
just hoped it was on the same path.
“Now,”
“I want you both to breathe deeply.
Meditate.
Focus your
energy on your breath.”
She
did the same.
After a minute,
she placed the deck in the palm of one skeletal hand, and with the other,
drew the first card from the top.
She
laid it face down, covering The Lovers with it.
She crossed that card with another.
Then, very swiftly, she dealt eight more cards; all face down,
arranging them in a spread resembling a Celtic cross.
The reading lasted about a half hour.
As she turned over each card, heads in the circle craned to see
what it was.
The pictures were
fun to look at though I would not have noticed all the details within them
if
Jon and Rose were embarking on a trip of great consequence, but we
were still carrying too much “baggage.”
We were not to bring anything we had packed, except necessary
documents and money.
She
instructed us to give everything away, including our backpacks.
She commanded Rosie to make each of us a small, zippered, cloth bag
that we could carry over one shoulder.
We were told never to accumulate more than the bag could
comfortably hold.
“There is an
infinite
supply
to those who keep themselves empty,” she said to the entire gathering,
not joyfully or inspirationally, but rather as if it were a law of physics
and she were Archimedes teaching his students how to use the lever and
fulcrum.
“So keep yourselves
empty and everything you need will come to you in abundance.”
She focused her attention back to Jon and Rosie.
“Your numbers are nine and twenty-two.
Nine is the number of love.
Twenty-two
is the key to the universe.”
Then
she once more visually swept the circle and gave everyone a brief
refresher course in numerology.
“Whether
you’re shopping or deciding which bus to take, pay attention to any
numbers that come your way.
Add
up the digits.
She panned the
circle of faces mesmerized by her words and spoke to them. “If you know
which numbers are auspicious for you, great.
If you don’t... find out!”
Her eyes went back to Jon and Rosie and her voice got softer and
less didactic.
“If the
digits of any numbers you run into add up to nine or twenty two...
that’s a sign.
Follow it!”
Her voice got even softer, almost intimate.
“You will meet a Swami.
However,
he is not dark-skinned.
He is
fair.”
“Is that our teacher?” Jon asked excitedly.
“I’m not sure,”
The last thing I remember about what
“Like the perfect circle you are,” she prefaced, placing one
hand on Jon’s shoulder and the other on Rosie’s knee, “complete and
sustainable unto your selves, your circle cannot encompass a larger
universe until it is torn asunder... until the circle is broken!”
Rosie and Jon looked horrified.
“What does that mean... in real life?” Jon asked.
“Well, this is hard for me to say, but I think the cards mean you
and Rosie must go your separate ways!”
Rosie audibly gasped.
Jon
squeezed her hand.
“Oh, not immediately,”
This came as a big blow to the three of us.
I, for one, could barely think of Jon without thinking of Rosie,
and vice-versa.
It was almost
enough for me to want to declare
“Look, you two.
I’ve
been around long enough to know most everything comes full circle.
Maybe not in one lifetime, but usually.
I
feel it’s very likely
that, should this come to pass, should you two find yourselves going your
separate ways, it will only be temporary.”
A big look of relief came over Jon and Rosie’s faces.
Until she continued.
“Mind you,
temporary
may mean years!
Maybe even
decades!
But before you leave
this earthly world for good, both of you will come full circle into each
others arms once again.”
Rose put the hishi necklace back around her neck and she and Jon
rejoined the circle, looking glum and confused.
Almost as a conciliatory gesture, she beckoned me to the spot they
had vacated.
“I guess this is as good a time as any to see what the cards hold
for you, Giacco,” she said.
I liked the picture of the Fool most of all and I hoped that the
card would come up, but to my great disappointment, she carefully placed
her Tarot cards in a purple silk scarf and wrapped them in a ritualistic
manner with the same sanctimony that Marines fold the American flag.
From a large straw bag she produced a different deck of cards.
The kind you play poker with.
Regular
playing cards.
I felt demeaned
and especially common.
She was
going to read
my fortune according to Hoyle!
I
was obviously not worth the deference with which she had read Jon and
Rosie’s future.
After cutting the cards with her left hand, she discarded the top
card and then dealt sixteen cards face down, four across by four down.
The backs of the cards all had the same logo on them… an eagle
with its wings spread and the words, “Compliments of American
Airlines.”
This, of course,
did nothing to further my self-esteem.
The next two cards she placed off to the side, again face down.
Pointing to them she said, “These are your Wish cards, but
we’ll get to them later.”
Sweeping
the back of her hand just above the top row of four cards, she said,
“This is the Far Past.”
She
turned each one over, left to right, and studied them.
Then she looked up and pronounced their meanings.
Nothing she said could be refuted because it was so general.
It could have been true of anyone:
I had conflicts with my parents.
I suffered from feelings of inadequacy.
I had a traumatic experience, probably in high school.
She passed her hand above the next row of cards… the Near Past.
She turned all of them over and smiled in relief.
I guessed things were looking up.
The card which seemed to catch her attention the most was the King
of Clubs.
“This is very, very good,” she said brightly.
“Yes, very nice, indeed!
Not
too long ago you came under the influence of a protector!
A mighty protector!
One
to be reckoned with!
Male.
Paternal.
God-like!”
She looked past me at someone sitting in the circle of onlookers.
I suspected it was Jon. “Yes, this is most comforting!” she
concluded.
She came to the third row while her ghoulishly skinny hand swept
gracefully once more over the cards.
I
tried to remember the traumatic experience in high school to which she
must’ve been referring.
There
were so many to choose from!
Her
voice snapped me out of it.
“The Present!”
“Curious,” said
Two of the four cards in that bottom row really excited her.
“This is most telling!
How
perfect!” she said very pleased with herself.
“Look, Giacco!
The
Ace of Clubs!”
My eyes
widened in anticipation.
“The
Ace of Clubs foretells of a great journey.
A journey over water!”
My
eyes remained wide out of politeness.
Everyone there had learned not an hour ago of our plans to go to
“And right next to the Ace of Clubs is the Eight of Spades!”
“And…,” I prompted.
“And… well… the Eight of Spades represents a journey, too.
A hazardous journey!”
She summed it all up.
“The
journey will be over water.
And
it will be very hazardous.
That’s
what the cards say.
In fact, I
would be very careful every time you find yourself near a large body of
water, if I were you!”
Oh, better.
That’s much better!
How
very comforting!
I snuck a look at the
expanse of ocean not more than thirty feet behind me, and felt a little
shiver from a spray of foam that misted my face.
“Now I want you to concentrate very hard.
I want you to wish!”
I pictured a road.
It
was much like the yellow brick road in the Land of Oz.
I wish to see the Wizard, the
wonderful Wizard of Oz, I heard myself singing to myself over and
over.
The
I closed my eyes tighter and thought about what I really wanted.
The first thing that entered my mind was the blond, hunky surfer
sitting next to Rosie.
I
wished he would steal into my lanai that night and have his way with me.
When I realized what I was thinking, I got even angrier at myself.
I kicked and scratched and forcefully pushed that thought out of
the way, feeling it was inappropriate for one seeking enlightenment, but
understandable considering I hadn’t had sex in what seemed like forever.
I commanded my mind to sit on a passing cloud, tried to imagine
what it would be like to know and see everything, possess complete
understanding of the cosmos, and wished to be the embodiment of Love and
Peace.
To my extreme chagrin,
images of the surfer slowly pulling down his wet trunks as he approached
my foam pad kept yanking me away from such noble thoughts.
I tried my best to haul my ass back to the cloud and keep it there.
“Ready?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.” I said.
She turned over the first Wish card.
“The King of Spades!
Now
that’s what I like to see!
The
Seeker!
You!
Can’t you see the resemblance?”
I bent over the card and squinted.
Long black hair, dark and shifty eyes, a distorted angular face
with a cubist nose.
Yep, that
was me all right!
No wonder I
wasn’t scoring!
She turned over the second Wish card.
It was the Queen of Spades.
“Oh, no!”
She
backed away from the card like it was a black widow spider.
“And it’s facing the King!”
Her eyes darted around the circle and refused to meet mine except
in passing.
The young woman
sitting immediately to
“Well, that’s enough for today,”
Everyone stood up.
No
one knew what to do or how to be.
It
was like a cocktail party for the extremely introverted.
We just stood there like dunes in the wind, unable or unwilling to
make conversation.
Jon and
Rosie shifted over to me, while all the others, except for the woman who
gasped, shifted in the direction of the neon signs of
“What was that all about?” I asked them worriedly.
More worried about having somehow insulted
Jon and Rosie just shrugged.
“Death!” A breathy voice said almost deliberately trying to
sound foreboding. We turned to the woman, now pulling a sweatshirt from her daypack. She slipped it over her head and wriggled her arms through the sleeves. Her voice was muffled through the soft grey fabric. “The Queen of Spades. Not necessarily evil or bad. But when it’s facing another face card… I mean especially when it’s facing the card that represents you…” Her head popped out the knit collar and she shook her long brown hair loose. Her voice, unfiltered by the cloth, finished the sentence with shocking clarity. “Well, it means… Death!”
December 1971
A strange kind of enervating ennui descended upon us with the
swiftness of a tropical storm.
I
don’t know if this could be directly attributed to
Rosie believed that whatever
Jon pointed out that the Queen of Spades would’ve shown up
regardless of what I was thinking.
We
all create our own reality with our thoughts.
But that’s exactly what it was, deep in the recesses of my mind,
that bothered me.
If I couldn’t control my mind, as evidenced by my ability to
not
think about sex when I didn’t want to think about it, then I
couldn’t
create my own reality.
I could
only create the ones dictated by my desires.
And if that was true, was it possible I didn’t desire
enlightenment enough for
it to
become my reality?
Everything
would be just fine if I could get rid of my mind once and for all.
On subsequent evenings with
The three of us decided not to think about any of it any longer and
renewed our vows to submit to everything that crossed our path without
internal commentary.
We would
just let the universe happen to us.
In
the
If
Inaction seemed to come so easily and the senses seemed perfectly
satisfied even when we were doing absolutely nothing.
We weren’t lazy or unimaginative.
We were just being
It was with the greatest effort that we finally kicked ourselves in
the collective butt and decided to do something.
Something unique.
Something
physically challenging.
Like
hiking across the moonscape of
It
was hardly a challenge.
Not
for astronauts like us.
We did
the whole thing toe to heel and even then we had to loiter around craters
and blooming silversword plants in order to make the trip last a weekend.
As Jon pointed out in bottomless understatement, “Let’s face it
guys.
Once you’ve seen one
bubbling crater and one silversword plant in bloom, you’ve seen them
all!”
It’s a good thing we’d gotten a hold of some acid.
It made the loitering much less boring.
We discovered, much to our delight, that we’d become weightless.
And we realized in triplicate, that we really
were
space beings.
And when the
real full moon rose that night, shining its light onto the lunar landscape
under our feet, we danced a slow-motion, gravity-free, bunny hop all the
way to the Kaupo Gap.
The next morning, just before dawn, we stumbled euphorically down
the crater side, descending through a couple of climates and a few
mezzanines of clouds.
Eventually
the sea separated from the sky as their blues hued differently under the
rising sun.
The horizon hazily
appeared but became more defined as the solar protractor began to
circumscribe the far edge of the world.
We made our way toward the sea.
Koa trees graced the broadening slope.
Then wild blackberries.
The
sun was getting higher and hotter.
The
foliage was greening and thickening.
Wild
papayas offered us breakfast and another hundred feet down, bananas, ripe
on the vine, caused us to loiter once again.
By noon, we were at
Life was so laconic and self-indulgent I felt a little guilty.
The only times I felt I warranted such a lifestyle was when I found
myself talking about god stuff.
Or
more often than not, listening about god stuff.
Usually, the spiritual repartee occurred between Jon and any one or
more of the many hippies who had decided that as long as they were going
to pursue enlightenment they might as well start in the Garden of Eden.
It was only at those times when I listened to bright-eyed,
innocent, inquisitive hippie angels; or long-, short-, or no-haired
zealots who proselytized about one path or another, that I felt somewhat
redeemed.
That I was doing
something worthwhile.
Passively
absorbing holiness the same way my skin was passively absorbing the sun.
Combing the cosmic beach for spiritual driftwood without even
having to leave my towel.
It didn’t matter what the words were.
Or what language they were in.
As long as they had something to do with peace, contentment, light,
bliss… my ears hung onto every word said by these visitors to our
blanket.
But my eyes and mind
inevitably found themselves hanging onto the lips that were speaking the
words.
And then the throat.
And the chest.
And the
concave stomach.
And finally
the holy of holies.
That’s
where my eyes and mind always ended up.
I would like to, but can’t account for the correlation between
physical beauty and the desire to know god.
It seemed the more a person yearned for the light, the more
attractive they were.
At least
to me.
The more they teased my
mind with cosmic insights, the greater the rumblings in my groin.
I fell in love with all of them.
That included Caleb, a devotee of Kirpal Singh.
He was from
Then there was Sarah.
From
When Sarah looked down at me and her long hennaed hair fell forward
and her light blue eyes got a faraway look as she spoke of B’Hai…
well, she struck chords down in my lower abdomen I wasn’t sure were
there anymore.
But as attracted as I was to both of them… and a few others as
well… I guess I was only supposed to get my
spiritual
rocks off.
Caleb was a
practicing celibate, or so he said.
How
convenient!
But he did
intimate he would otherwise be interested.
How nice!
And Sarah always talked about sex as if it were definitely many
rungs down the ladder from where she knew the fruit called “bliss” was
just waiting to be picked by her.
How
delicious!
I
guess for me, sex just wasn’t in the cards.
But I hated the idea that sex and enlightenment were mutually
exclusive, so I decided not to think about it.
I only hoped this dry spell wasn’t yet another precedent of
things to come.
Or in my case,
of things
not to come.
Actually,
it didn’t last that long.
It’s
just that I had hoped my next sexual partner would be a human.
Christmas
Eve 1971
“Bartender!
Hit me
again!”
Rosie demanded after
she slurped through a flexi-straw the last drops of her electric tropical
fruit punch.
She held her
glass up to Jon.
“And pass
me that bowl of macadamia nuts.”
Jon opened the refrigerator and took out a clear plastic pitcher
three-quarters full of a neon orange liquid.
He refilled her glass, and then topped off his own.
John looked at the bowl on the counter, but left it there.
“Those are the mushrooms, sweetie… the ones Caleb gave us.
I’d let the acid kick in a little more before I do any.”
“Oh!
Right!” Rosie
agreed.
“Well then, just in
case I get the munchies you’d better put them out of sight.” She took
the glass from Jon, pursed her lips around the straw, and daintily sucked.
“This is really good, Jon!”
Jon walked out the screen door of the lanai, the pitcher still in
his hand, and stood under the banyan tree.
“Yoo-hoo.
Giacco.
Where are you?”
“I’m right over here, honnee!” I answered through a smile I
couldn’t wipe off my face.
Jon looked through the branches.
“Not that high.
Lower
down,” I directed.
“Oh, there you are!” he said when he spied my shadowy form
melting into the sagging curve of a broad limb.
“Want some more punch?”
“No thanks, Jonnie.
I’m
doing just fine.
But you can
take this glass in for me, OK?”
Jon walked toward my voice and swung one leg over the branch that
was just beneath mine.
It was
so low to the ground, he looked like he was mounting a child’s
hobbyhorse.
Once he straddled
it, he bounced up and down, and the wood steed cantered in place.
“You doin’ OK, Chazan?”
“I’m doing fine!
How
about you?”
“I’m starting to feel a ripple up my spine.
But Rosie’s already flying!
She
hasn’t figured that out yet, but I can tell!”
“Did you do any of the mushrooms?” I asked.
“No, not yet.
We want
to wait a while.
See what the
acid does.
Is this the first
time you’ve done mushrooms and acid together?”
“Probably not,” I said, noticing it was getting more difficult
to form my words, “but it may as well be!”
“Are you OK out here by yourself?” Jon, the Protector, asked.
“But I’m not out here by myself,” I chuckled.
“Well, you soon will be! Jon said.
“Here, hand me your glass.
I’m
going back inside with Rosie.”
Before
he closed the screen door behind him, he looked back at me.
“Come on in soon, OK?”
I relaxed the length of my body against the limb and took two or
three deep breaths.
The first
three tiers of the main branches of the banyan were so wide you could walk
on them.
They stretched out
almost horizontally from the trunk.
The
one that invited me to lounge upon it actually dipped downward somewhat
before climbing back skywards at its extremity.
I heard some undecipherable conversation coming from Jon and Rosie
through the screens of the lanai, but the recognition of their voices
alone was soothing.
Jon
clicked on the radio, and music filtered into the backyard.
Stevie Winwood was singing,
God
is your vision of Heaven, and Heaven is in your mind.
I
looked around me.
The limbs of
the banyan reminded me of muscular arms.
At times they began to move and writhe like thick pythons.
The bark under my back began to undulate… slowly, but with an
undercurrent of great strength, like the massage of a powerful Samoan.
I
closed my eyes so as not to detract from the tactile sensations.
My skin noticed that the breeze was picking up before my ears did.
There was a consciousness that my body was operating at a molecular
level, each molecule hypersensitive to my arboreal environment.
I
melted deeper into the tree.
The
molecules of the banyan began flirting with the molecules of my skin.
As if sensing how amorous I was feeling, the banyan undressed my
molecules until they stood there naked, cells and all.
It
was futile to resist.
I let
the banyan absorb my atomic structure and felt the exchange of electrons
as I became the tree.
There
was a very deep rumbling emanating from somewhere deep in the trunk.
An earthquake about to happen.
I could feel it coursing through every limb.
And the limb I was now a part of seemed to engorge itself with
power, making us both tremble.
The
wind steadily increased titillating all the leaves, caressing them, not
gently, yet not recklessly either.
They
twisted, they rustled, excited now by the increasing pleasure.
The stroking fingers of air left no leaf untouched.
They swirled in ecstasy as the fingers played with their topsides
and undersides, no erogenous zone too taboo for exploration, and every
zone an erogenous one.
Even
the larger limbs swayed euphorically, like hips too aroused and begging
for more, unwilling to slake for a moment the seduction.
The banyan started to groan in unfathomable satisfaction when a
gust of wind brought it to a state of frenzied passion.
We couldn’t prolong the rapture.
We were beyond control.
The
sexual cyclotron scattered multi-colored universes of atoms into
multi-colored universes of stars.
Each
one exploded with the intensity of the grand finale of a Fourth of July
fireworks display, showering humanity with shimmering rainbow sparklers.
The crowd sings
oohs and
aahs and gasps in
delight.
They applaud wildly
with gratitude and appreciation.
The wind died down.
I
opened my eyes.
I felt
wonderfully satiated and fatigued.
I
pushed myself up until I was leaning on my elbows.
Somehow unsurprised, I found myself naked.
I let my legs dangle around the branch and surveyed my body as if
it were something separate from me.
I
watched my cock reluctantly subside to a less rigid position, stiffening
momentarily now and then on its way down.
The inside of my thighs, my lower abdomen, my cock, and my groin
were sweetly sticky from what could only have been banyan sap.
Too
bad I had to end up in the hospital.
Equestrian
judges would not have regarded the dismount from my wooden steed highly.
I assumed I had achieved oneness with the banyan, but we parted
company unexpectedly and I hit my head on the terrazzo floor of the patio.
Jon
and Rosie were far more freaked than I, though my vision was very blurred
and my head was pounding with excruciating pain.
I think it was all the blood that got to them.
At the small, one story hospital, Jon provided no useful
information whatsoever. He avoided with indignation the questions the
admitting nurse asked regarding payment for services and instead lashed
back at her about the hospital’s obvious lack of adequate personnel to
attend to my immediate needs.
These
were mere formalities that could be dealt with later.
She
didn’t pursue the questioning any further, but pointed out that it was
three o’clock in the morning and now Christmas Day.
We waited a long time.
A
doctor eventually arrived and looked me over. A concussion was his
diagnosis and a two to three day stay in the hospital was in order plus a
full battery of tests and X-rays.
I
resisted as best I could, but everyone, including Jon and Rosie, thought I
should stay.
I wonder if the
doctor noticed that the three of us were still tripping.
While
visiting me late that afternoon, Jon picked up a magazine.
One of those expensive rags meant for a very select demographic
group, in this case, nutritionists.
In
it was an article about a group of researchers seeking the one place on
the planet with the most perfect diet.
Their
consensus was a little island named Puka Puka.
The team of doctors who wrote the article began on a scientific
note, itemizing the kinds of foods the native population ate and the
quantity of each.
But the
article quickly degenerated into a more personal recounting of their
experiences, including the lack of clothing worn by the women, and the
morality that was equally scant.
Their
peculiar kind of puka puka “mead” was very instrumental in defining
their culture, so the scientists mentioned more than once.
Jon’s wanderlust was increasing with an intensity of which only
he was capable.
But it was not
the perfect diet that he searched for.
The
morning of my third and last day in the hospital, Jon announced it was
time to move on.
We had
learned all we would learn in
I
can’t explain why that administrative guy seemed to distrust us, but we
could see he was loitering in the hall within eyesight of my room a little
too long for comfort.
Jon
very assuredly and calmly strolled about the room, admiring the few wall
decorations that didn’t have tubes coming out of them.
As he did so, he gathered up my clothes.
Or rather, cloth.
There
wasn’t much to gather since Jon and Rosie had brought me to the hospital
virtually naked except for one of Rosie’s sarongs that she had hastily
tied around me.
Following
Jon’s eye movements and mouthing
one,
two, three, we bolted for the window and jumped out of it into a
hibiscus bush.
The
administrator ran immediately into the room and leaned out the window.
He yelled for security.
Jon
and I ran toe to heel as fast as we could.
Me with my hospital gown flapping in the tropical breeze,
unintentionally mooning the poor man.
Jon, giggling and waving Rosie’s sarong above him like Isadora
Duncan, we ran toe to heel down the street.
We ran toe to heel through people’s yards.
We ran toe to heel through dirt paths walled on both sides by sugar
cane.
We ran toe to heel all
the way down to the sea.
We
ran toe to heel until we were back at Queen’s Surf beach, and, of
course, our Rosie.
We felt
like embassy staff with diplomatic immunity.
We could do no harm, we could get into no trouble.
Nevertheless,
we decided to leave the next day, just in case.
Good Friday, March 31,
1972
Now
where was I?
I had a
temperature of 104+ degrees.
My
bedding was soaked with sweat.
I
was delirious. I love delirium!
If
you’re going to have a fever, it may as well be fun!
What could be more fun than drifting in and out of dreams while
bathing in the luxury of
When
I drifted in, which was briefer than my drifting outs, I noticed Jon
tending a fire in the freestanding stove in the middle of a squat hut.
The dwelling was poorly sided and uninsulated.
Daylight filtered through cracks in the wood.
Rosie
leaned over me and dabbed my forehead every so often.
She tried to get me to drink some tea, but was unsuccessful.
Drifting out was so comforting, I required nothing.
During
a moment of drifting in, I heard Jon and Rosie talking.
Though I couldn’t really understand the literal conversation, the
gist came through: It was Good Friday.
I was the Poet-warrior, Chazan. If not enlightened, I had at least
done the most spiritually honorable thing to do, “Accept all, deny
nothing.” Jon and Rose also seemed to be saying it was fitting that I
should die here in
It
was an easy date to remember, that’s for sure!
Just like people who remember their friends and relatives whose
births or deaths fall on Christmas or New Year’s.
Valentines Day or the Fourth of July.
The
others are so easy to forget.
But
they’ll remember mine!
Because
it will be easy! I was just so
damned accommodating!
I
drifted back out.
I would have
liked to stay out a while longer.
But
there was this young, handsome Englishman.
He was a traveling hippie like us, but a nurse by trade.
He very reluctantly gave up some magic potions he’d been hoarding
should he ever find himself in similar circumstances.
I
was completely better in two days.
Completely!
Not a sign of illness.
I
was feeling as good as the Ascension itself!
All
who knew what had happened hailed the English nurse as an angel and his
magic potion, Lomotil, as a gift from his god.
Lomotil, a name that was very conducive to a chant.
Many
travelers in Kathmandu chanted “Lo-mo-til, lo-mo-til” over and over
and with great feeling, and the English nurse became very popular and
revered along with anyone else who had any of the magic potion.
And the company that made the magic potion was removed from our
“industrial/military complex” bashings list.
“The
Resurrection,” as Jon and Rosie kept calling it.
They admitted to me that they truly thought I was going to leave my
body.
Jon had been preparing
by rereading portions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
He showed me the passages he had dog-eared.
Rosie was wondering how she would break the news to my parents,
especially when she would tell them how she and Jon had taken the liberty
to have me cremated atop a burning ghat along the
If
On
the 29th of December, we were on a flight destined for
Not
at all to his delight, however, flights from
Jon
and Rosie spent every day visiting temples and monasteries. Sometimes they
would spend a whole day in a temple trying their best to “sit”
cross-legged in silent bliss watching their thoughts pass by.
A few times, Rosie, much more limber than Jon, would have to help
him out of his lotus position, gently undoing one locked leg at a time and
massaging his knees.
They
sought out every Buddhist monk, holy man, or anyone who looked holy,
though most of them were just homeless, wandering, and seeking food and
shelter.
Often they would
corner one of them, and quiz them incessantly for some gem of truth or
clue as to where they could find a teacher who would immediately recognize
them as the genuine seekers they were and give them the truth they sought.
I
tagged along as usual, but tired quickly of the silence and meditating,
too curious about the hubbub that blasted us every time we were out on the
streets again.
So I decided to
go solo and stopped tagging.
I
visited the floating market and the sex side of
I
took buses to the outskirts of town and spent hours watching women tending
terraced paddy fields and vegetable gardens.
I made my way to the delta of the
When
I stayed in town, I inevitably ended up relaxing in the gardens of upscale
hotels.
The noise of
They
were from
Jerry, on the other hand, was something to behold while I was
holding back the something that was tickling my libido.
He was a visually striking man; easy to recognize even from afar.
He
had a totally shaved, perfectly shaped head, a face whose features would
stun anyone with its radiance and manliness, and a body he reveled in
revealing and that I reveled in surreptitiously regarding as flawless.
More
importantly, and probably this is what enhanced his other attributes, was
the constant serenity and surety that made him a candidate for
infatuation.
So, of course, I was infatuated with him.
I had only known him a few hours and already I was smitten!
As I spent the following days with them, I realized my schoolgirl
crush wasn’t unwarranted.
And
by the time we left for
They were devout Buddhists.
At
least Jerry was. Linda was Buddhist by contagion and determination.
Determined not to let this man get away from her.
She also had a trust that he was her teacher, in much the same way
Rosie and I regarded Jon.
She
knew all too well what a find Jerry was.
A spiritual man trapped in an exquisite physical vessel.
They were seasoned travelers and had already hitchhiked through
places other seekers would not have dared.
Like war-torn
Despite
maintaining this demeanor, the travels had taken their toll and they made
their way to
When Jerry talked, I never let my eyes leave his nor did his ever
leave mine.
They were so clear
and blue and riveting, which was a good thing because my eyes desperately
wanted to wander and explore the landscape of his body.
But
I worried that Linda would notice if my eyes wandered.
So I didn’t let them.
I worked at being attentive to Linda and showed great interest in
her, because after all, it was the right thing to do and she was
interesting and she was a sister on the path and I wanted to earn her
trust, though I have to admit the motives for all this may have been
somewhat ulterior.
The
connection we felt was strong, mutual, and almost magical.
Jerry
suggested I join them when they continued their journey.
Linda seconded the motion.
“Next
stop,
And
it was tempting.
Merely
considering it made me feel like a traitor to Jon and Rosie.
But at the same time, I realized how all of us are interchangeable.
That when left alone or abandoned, we will by nature gravitate to
those who will fulfill our needs.
They
were leaving the next day and were hoping for a “yes” from me.
That’s
when I told them about John and Rosie.
In a way, they
were Jon and Rosie, which made deciding even harder.
But in the end, loyalty won out, maybe because of history or
momentum.
Nevertheless, as
difficult as it was to do, I resolved to stick to the plan and stick with
Jon and Rosie.
Jerry and Linda
were disappointed to say the least, but understood.
Jerry,
Linda, and I parted at sunset that last day, certain our paths would cross
again.
I conjured them up
often in my mind, especially Jerry, partly as an exercise in keeping fresh
an image I might need when whacking off.
My way of meditating on sex.
Linda
and I hugged each other as the neon lights of the hotel came on.
It was then, as our bodies touched, that I realized the plumpness I
had attributed to Linda, was not a plump.
It was a baby in the making!
That
explained a lot. That gave a
more comprehensive explanation of Linda’s use of the word “family”
and it made me understand more completely Linda’s emotional and physical
clinginess to Jerry.
Did
he know?
How could he not?
Why had they never mentioned it?
Not for me to say, but if there had been the slightest bit of envy
toward Linda, it dissipated immediately and I felt guilty for finding
myself more drawn to Jerry than to Linda.
Suddenly I saw her pre-pregnant.
Slim and sexy.
For the
first time, visions of a three-way seemed tasty.
And the thought of being party to a birthing made me feel very
special.
All those suppressed
libidinous thoughts turned paternal and I felt purged.
Jerry
hugged me tight and long until, through his strong will, he made our
chests breathe in rhythm.
Then
he gently pulled away, his hands on my shoulders.
He looked right at me and through me.
His eyes actually misted over as he said, “Giacco, we know our
relationship is permanent because it is infinite.”
He
dropped his arms to his side, resigned but trusting we’d bump into one
another somewhere along the line.
He
walked over to Linda, draped an arm around her shoulder, and without
looking back, walked away.
I
watched as they got smaller and smaller.
Then I sat back down on the grass and looked at the slip of paper
on which Jerry had written his address.
There was something else in his handwriting on the other side:
A little zoo
Where gibbons playly free,
And weavers in a sala
Weave patterns so
Intricately
The movements and
The colors make you
Wonder
Who’s the thread and
Who’s the weaver?
And when I haven’t the
Faintest idea,
It is still too much
On
the plane, a stewardess passed out newspapers and magazines.
When she came to me, I took that day’s copy of THE SUN, which all
in caps, dominated the banner.
On
one side of THE SUN was a picture of an orb, with the obligatory flashing
shards of light shooting out from a perfect circle.
In the middle was a face, neither smiling nor pouting, just
non-committal.
I
leafed through it, and one column caught my eye.
It ran the length of the page with HOROSCOPE in bold letters at the
top.
Since I was really only
interested in mine, I ran my finger down the page to CANCER, where I was
ordered:
You
will attend to matters with enthusiasm.
Extensive travel is indicated.
I
liked that!
A good omen.
I needed one!
If I had
any doubts about continuing my journey with Jon and Rosie, they were
dashed by those two simple sentences.
January 1972
A
smooth landing.
We waited for
the stairs to be wheeled up to the door.
Just as when I landed in
Beggars!
Some were young, some were old.
Some
were healthy, but most were frail, infirm, and decrepit.
Little
boys with big dark eyes implored, “baksheesh, sa’ab,” over and over
again.
Relentless.
Clinging.
Gently
frisking our jeans.
Coveting
all we wore and represented.
Brazen
enough to reach up and touch Rosie’s hair.
Even though we were just
“Heepees,”
white oddities to be stared at and made fun of, we were worthy enough to
hound for a rupee, a piece of clothing, a scrap of food, a book of
matches.
Conspicuous!
We felt ridiculously outstanding.
Standing out is something we did not want.
If we couldn’t be completely inconspicuous, we wanted at least
not to be thrown in with the wealthy tourists going to
Colors!
A 360-degree survey of our surroundings provided a palette that
shocked our eyes.
Gaudy,
vibrant, and clashing.
They
must’ve been picked out by a blind interior decorator. Yet somehow they
worked.
Noise!
People loudly hawking their wares.
Vehicles honking incessantly as they swerved in and out and around
each other, vying for a piece of cracked pavement on which to further
their way to who knows where.
Many
swerved at us.
Taxi drivers
not wanting to give us just a ride, but a ride to their cousin’s hotel,
the best in town, and guarantees in broken English of their encyclopedic
knowledge of everything we might be interested in.
Only later in
We
found a guesthouse in the center of town.
The Lakni Wesa.
Jon
immediately struck up a conversation with the English-speaking owner and
learned a few phrases in Sinhalese he thought might come in handy.
I was overwhelmed and just wanted to rest.
Rosie, as soon as she had settled her belongings in the room,
disappeared into the market down the street.
I
must have slept the entire afternoon.
When I awoke, there was a white cloth bag on my bed.
It was zippered closed.
Carefully
arranged around it were a thin blanket and a pair of pajamas made of
lightweight white muslin.
“Pajama
whites” as we called them were de rigueur for the well-dressed man and
we saved them for special occasions.
Next
to the pajama whites was a small stack of colorful rupees, my passport and
plane ticket, and a couple of long, colorfully striped pieces of cloth,
hemmed on one side, forming a huge cylinder.
This last item was called a
lungi,
the sarong-like piece of clothing most working class men, wore for pants.
It
took me a while to master the lungi.
Skinny
as I was I never could step into it and wrap it tightly enough around my
waist so it wouldn’t slide off my hips every few minutes.
Yet the young men I would watch wrapping it around them after
bathing or swimming were so adept at it, they could wrap it in a way that
was not only secure, but had built in pockets in the folds to hold what we
would usually hold in wallets.
I
did eventually get the knack of the lungi and learned to love it.
The climate here was so deliciously hot and humid, even skin was
too heavy a garment.
The lungi
was the next best thing to being naked.
Why men back home didn’t wear skirts was beyond me.
How did we get to the point where men wore the pants, and women,
the skirts?
The opposite is
obviously more comfortable anatomically speaking.
Isn’t there any common sense left anymore?
The
lungi!
The ease of dressing.
The freedom the cock and balls yearned for from the sweltering and
almost debilitating heat.
Pants!
I never wanted to wear pants again!
And
conveniently, I was also a natural squatter.
All the men would sit on their haunches when it came time to rest,
to talk, to socialize, to eat, and, of course, to shit.
Well!
I’d been
sitting on my haunches since I was a kid!
Always did sit like that, even as an adult!
So I was a natural, and I sometimes thought that in a previous
life, I was Ceylonese.
How
refreshing to squat and let my cock and balls dangle in peace.
One
item was missing, however, which I didn’t realize was required until a
few weeks later when a young girl, effortlessly balancing a basket of
rotti on her head, passed me by and giggled.
Then I caught the glance of a wizened old man who rolled his eyes
and shook his head as he squatted across the road in front of his open-air
thatched hut that was his store but also doubled as his home.
What
was missing was the length of cloth you’re supposed to wrap around your
privates under your lungi!
A
diaper of sorts. A
lungoti.
When I was hanging out, squatting, I was literally hanging out!
I
should have been too embarrassed
not
to wear one, but I refused to smother my privates.
Once they had felt the air of freedom, they would never go back.
After all,
it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
So I simply learned to squat in such a way that I could tuck my
lungi under my crotch and thought how nice it would be to have someone
fluff my balls in the suspiring tropical breeze.
But
this was all tangential to the most important items I found at the foot of
my bed that afternoon.
Or
rather the items that were missing!
My
jeans.
My T-shirts, all my
clothes.
I had been robbed!
I
yelled and cursed.
Jon and
Rosie rushed into the room.
Jon
was wearing a lungi and Rosie a sarong.
She was topless.
What a
vision she was.
Oh my god, she
was so beautiful in those yards of burgundy fabric wrapped around her slim
waist and long legs.
She
wrapped a yard or so of light orange cloth around her breasts and tied it
behind her.
The orange
halter-top complemented the burgundy sarong perfectly.
Very
classy!
It screamed, “I’m
not a tourist!”
Or so she
thought.
With her dark hair
falling straight down to her waist and her beautifully tanned skin and
alluring looks, she was a goddess.
On
the other hand, Jon, in his lungi, looked ridiculous.
But who was I to talk after wrestling with mine, getting all
tangled in it, trying to get it to stay in place for a minute before it
would drop down around my ankles.
Rosie
informed me she had taken the liberty of giving away all our clothes!
We were going native!
Everything
we needed would fit in our white cloth bags, which hung comfortably over
our shoulders.
It was just as
Florence had ordered Rosie to do on Queens Surf Beach.
We would give up our Western ways.
We would bring no cameras or anything that would hint we were mere
tourists.
No, not us!
We were sadhus on a quest.
If
we needed anything more than she allowed, whatever it was would be
provided unto us.
Her one
concession was that I could carry a pen and a notebook, and Little
Richard’s embroidered duck.
Traveling
light took on a whole new meaning.
We
stayed in Colombo just a few days.
Then
we were off in search of The Teacher.
Jon
had heard rumors of a well-regarded guru on the east coast of the island.
But there were ruins and temples as well that we didn’t want to
miss.
We knew that wherever
worshippers flocked there would always be the chance of catching on to
some gossip that would lead us to the guru.
We
took a very colorful train out of Colombo heading east toward Trincomalee.
The old steam engine alone was a trip to the past, and the cars
were multi-colored.
Narrowly
gauged, it could have been a circus train from the Depression replicated
by Lionel.
If a train could be
called “cute,” then this was it.
It
was cute.
It was charming.
It was dirty.
It was a
cute, charming, and dirty little train.
The seats were amenable only to the softest-rumped which left me
out.
But my eyes were amazed
at the landscape.
It didn’t
take long to leave the bustle of Colombo behind and find ourselves
chugging rickety-rick through lush jungles, our journey interrupted by
stops in every village, large and small, where masses of people charged
the train, some to board as passengers, others to make quick sales.
We were regarded as a potentially lucrative source of income and
given much too much attention.
Children
stared at us from the platform in wide-eyed amazement as if they had never
seen a white person before.
Their
mothers pushed them to beg from us, but we feigned ignorance as best we
could.
Vendors
walked down the aisle with baskets of luscious looking papayas, mangoes,
bananas and avocados.
Other
vendors conducted their business through the windows.
Their hands and those of their customers reaching in and out,
exchanging food, beedies, and sweets for a few rupees and running beside
the train as it pulled out trying to make that one more sale which might
mean the difference between feeding their family that night or not.
The vendors on board hastily did the same and jumped off the train
just in time.
The
train became so crowded that people rode on top of the cars along with
their chickens and goats and broken suitcases likely used decades ago by
their English masters.
Everything
that may have been Western seemed a hand-me-down and down, and down again.
The
man sitting across from me wore a loose white shirt and pajama whites,
which distinguished him somehow as being of a different class than the
bare-chested men in lungis and the women in saris of inferior quality.
Next
to me was a young man with very long hair wearing a less than fresh lungi.
He regarded my long hair and decided we had something in common.
Then he placed his forearm next to mine to compare skin color.
My “healthy” looking tan from Hawaii was turning into a dark
matte brown.
This did not
compute with their image of a Westerner, which was fine by me.
By the time we left Ceylon, I might have passed for a native had it
not been for my sometimes indiscreet way of squatting.
The young man kept his arm next to mine.
His skin was smooth and beautiful.
His body was sinewy and lean, I would imagine not by choice, but by
his undernourishment.
His face
had very fine features with a smear of sacred ash called
vibhuti
on his forehead.
And though
his teeth were stained, they were easy to disregard because his smile was
broad and genuine.
The
man in white lit up a real cigarette, not the customary
beedi.
The young man in
the lungi kept smiling at me as he lit up a chillum, which brought a look
of scorn from the gentleman, but a gleam to my eye.
“Ayubowan!
Kohomadha?”
He asked.
I looked at him twisting my face into “I’m sorry, I don’t
understand.” Jon leaned over
from the booth behind me where he and Rosie were sitting and responded for
me, “Ayubowan! Bohama hondai! Stuthi!”
The
young man laughed and said,
“Ayubowan!
Bohama hondai!”
Then he
passed the chillum to me.
“Rasai!”
I
could see he was impressed by the way I held it between my fingers and
sucked in through the circle made by my thumb and index finger.
The hash was primo!
I
passed it back to him, but he said no in that yes-like manner all South
Asians seem to have, and pointed to Jon.
So I passed the chillum to Jon who took a long drag.
“Better, much better,” He sighed through the exhaling smoke.
Then Jon relit the chillum for Rosie.
Watching a woman smoke a chillum made our friend with the matted
hair laugh uproariously.
He
said softly, “Lassanai!”
The
man in white now looked at the four of us with disdain.
But I think he was just jealous.
I thought that because he opened his English language newspaper
with such flair and fanfare.
He
wanted to let us know that he was educated and anxious to use his English
on us. He was bothered we were
not responding appropriately.
But
we were too busy passing the chillum around.
After all, this was the first time we had gotten stoned since
Hawaii.
Well at least for Jon
and Rosie.
Jerry, Linda, and I
had shared some nice Thai bud the days we spent together, but I never let
on.
Besides, that was among
the manicured gardens of the Siam Hilton.
This was an entirely new setting.
And getting newer with every puff I took.
I
looked forward now to every village we came to, taking in stride the
hundreds of arms reaching in and out and the entreaties of the vendors and
begging children.
The noise,
the hard wood seats of the train bouncing my bony ass up and down, the man
in white now on the verge of outrage.
They all could have been a bother to me.
But the never ending chillums did away with all the bothers.
Even
when the train slowed to a crawl as it chugged over a river and we noticed
six bloated bodies floating downstream, it was not a bother.
It just was.
The man in
white looked at me and said, “The Troubles.”
I just stared back.
Where
was I, Northern Ireland?
Pointing
at the bloated corpses, Jon said, “Oh that is better, much better.”
The man in white gave Jon the most curious look.
The young man stared at the bodies too, but the expression on his
face was void of meaning.
He
said something in Sinhala, or maybe it was Tamil, and that gave the man in
white his opening.
Jon
and Rosie turned around to listen in.
“Your young friend here says this is why he is going to
Trincomalee. To free himself
from the illusions of this world by making a pilgrimage on foot to Jaffna
to see Guaribala.”
Jon’s
eyes widened.
He heard that
name back in Colombo.
The
rumor of the guru.
Jon turned
to Rosie and said, “It just doesn’t get much better than this!”
“But
he is crazy, this man you smoke with.
Pay him no mind.”
To
his chagrin, Jon paid the man in white no mind and started rummaging
through our scant belongings.
“Rosie.
Where’s that map?” He asked.
Rosie
retrieved a map of Ceylon out of her bag.
I knew what was coming.
So
did Rosie.
Jon studied the map
and I felt a detour about to be announced.
While
Jon traced a finger from Trincomalee north to Jaffna, Rosie kept stabbing
a few other places on the map with her fingernail and looked at Jon as if
he had done something wrong and if he kept it up, he’d get punished!
She did all the talking with her fingers.
But her message was loud and clear.
Jon’s impulsive detour would be gratefully postponed for a while.
I
don’t recall a day since that train ride that we weren’t stoned.
And I regard that loco motive to be the first time I really felt I
was being pulled on a journey that would transform my life.
January 1972
We
arrived in Trincomalee to a sliver of sun setting into the Indian Ocean.
We were in a trance as we walked through town in search of a place
to stay.
Maybe it was all the
hash.
Maybe it was the smells
and colors of the market, the people eyeing us as we passed, staring
unabashedly as if we were oddities from a carnival placed on a sideshow
display for their scrutiny and amusement.
We
inquired about a place to stay from a man who was squatting in front of
his store sipping chai.
We
went in the direction of his bobbing head toward a dirt road that
paralleled the beach.
It was
getting dark and the night rapidly with glittering stars.
Just south of town, which transitioned somewhat abruptly from
hustle and bustle to quiet and calm, we came upon the Chinese Guest House.
Though quite late, the owner was still up.
His name was Mr. Yo and he greeted us with glee.
The guesthouse seemed virtually empty of lodgers.
Mr. Yo showed us to a spotlessly clean, but sparsely furnished
large room with four beds in it.
One
wall of windows looked out at the ocean, which we could clearly hear, but
only see, when the shallow moon brought out the phosphorescence in the
waves that lapped at the sand.
The
guesthouse had only one common bathroom used by all the lodgers.
The toilet was a cement hole with foot rests on either side, ribbed
to keep your feet from slipping when you squatted to take a shit or pee.
The price of the room was absurdly cheap, at least for us, and even
more absurdly cheap if we stayed a week or more.
And that’s what we wound up doing.
The
Chinese Guest House was perfect.
Mr.
Yo spoke excellent English, which made life easier.
And in all the subsequent places we would stay on our journeys, we
would look back at the Chinese Guest House as the cleanest and most
comfortable of them all.
What
a great way to start a sojourn!
Early
the first couple of mornings, Rosie went to the market and brought back
small clay pots of buffalo curd and an assortment of tropical fruits.
Our breakfasts were the best!
Fresh
curd with papaya and bananas!
Just
looking at it made my mouth water.
This
became the morning ritual, taking turns returning the empty clay pots for
new ones filled with creamy curd and choosing the most luscious looking of
the many fruits.
Some were
very unusual looking, and we briefly experimented with them.
We ended up sticking with the ones we knew.
The
Chinese Guest House became our refuge.
And Trinco, as we began to call this town, became home and
headquarters for trips to different parts of the island.
One
morning we woke up to find we were not the sole residents of the Guest
House anymore.
A young hippie
man named Henry, from Shepherd’s Cross in England, greeted us with a
bright smile and brighter eyes. His skin was so white we did not think it
possible.
He wasn’t an
albino or anything.
He was
just very, very white, as if being English prevented him from tanning.
He approached us as we were finishing our breakfast.
Henry may not have had the ability to tan, but shy was not a trait
he possessed.
“Hey,
mates!” he said, squatting next to Jon.
“Henry’s my name.
Yours?”
“Jon
here.
And this is Rose and
Chazan.”
I liked hearing Jon
use that name for me, but it wasn’t meant for the general public. So I
added, “But you can call me Giacco.”
“Nah,
mate!
Chazan is a bloody good
tag.
I like it heaps.”
I
surrendered, while giving Jon a chiding look.
After
a few more exchanges of small talk, Henry withdrew from his lungi a huge
spliff, lit it, and passed it to Rosie.
Jon took if off Rosie’s hands while she was in the middle of a
coughing fit.
Then I did the
same to Jon, and passed it back to Henry.
We were very impressed. “So,
my friend, where did you come upon this excellent herb?” Jon asked.
Henry
called over a little boy, seven or eight years old, and said something to
him in a mixture of mime and words, the magic word being “ganja.”
The young boy’s eyes lit up with understanding, and off he ran.
Jon,
Rosie, and Henry discussed philosophy and spirituality for hours.
Henry would include me every so often by asking, “So, Chazan,
what do you think of that?”
I
knew he really didn’t care and I usually answered with inane phrases
like “Cool.
Very far out!
Sounds right to me!”
“Too
right, sport!” was Henry’s usual retort, regarding me as if I were in
a minor league compared to Jon and Rosie, and then having made the lame
effort to include me, would return to his jabbering with Jon and Rose.
Henry
ended up hanging out with us a lot.
He
was as totally enamored with Jon and Rosie as they were with him.
They thought Henry was a perfect addition.
I was not as smitten and didn’t like people who talked too much.
And
maybe, just maybe, I was a little jealous.
He
seemed to invite trouble with his loud voice and arrogantly fearless ways.
I did not like attracting attention to ourselves.
As nice as he was to me, I felt he did so out of deference to Jon
and Rosie, not because he truly liked me, just as I did not truly like
him.
This, of course, violated
the rules of being a flower child.
So
we hid as best we could our antipathy for one another beneath superficial
expressions of brotherly love.
I
did secretly thank him, however, because once he had sent that young boy
off for ganja, other kids would stop by and open their cupped hands from
which would fall beautiful buds and for which we gave them a few rupees.
We were never without dope.
We
were swimming in it!
These
kids were contributing to the delinquency of adults!
This
was a curious reversal from stateside morality.
I felt sorry for all the “felons” who got caught buying beer
for their local high school football teams.
A
few days later, an Australian couple arrived.
Both were very pleasing to look at.
“Debra and Peter,” they both said simultaneously pointing at
each other, and then again in unison, “G’day mate!”
I
laughed at them.
Their accents
were so friendly.
“Giacco,”
I said. “But if you hear someone calling “Chazan”, well that’s me
too.
Guess I have multiple
personalities!
But all of them
are harmless!” I said kidding around.
“Now
don’t go getting’ us up a gum tree!” Peter laughed.
Though I didn’t get the metaphor, I laughed with them.
They
must have been no older than 19 and 20 respectively.
And when they told me they were on their honeymoon, I was so
surprised I lost my fine-tuned squatting form.
I fell over and exposed my genitals to their handsome, young faces.
It should have been very embarrassing!
But Debra spoke before I could turn red.
“Looks
like you lost your nappy!” she said, giggling.
“You
look good arse over tit, mate! Peter added with good-natured sarcasm. “A
dazzler, you are!
You do that
trick often?”
And
they both chuckled.
I liked
them already, but still had a hard time believing they were married.
They just looked too young!
And
Peter’s remark and Debra’s nonchalance at my being a flasher, made me
feel they were open to all experiences that came their way.
I
tried to push myself up, but rolled over again.
The three of us got the giggle fits and Peter extended a hand and
pulled me up.
His firm grip
made me feel a strong bond with them and I hoped they felt it too.
They
both had an outback athleticism about them, a healthiness and innocence
that made them seem the essence of purity and naiveté, which I learned
later was totally off the mark.
Debra
had bright blue eyes and long dirty blond hair.
Her skin glowed with health.
She
always looked beautiful and could wrap a sari around her with the deftness
of a native.
She only had a
couple of saris, but both were very tasteful.
In her white one, she was pure.
In
blue, she was pure.
And in the
colors galore of her assortment of sarongs and tops, she was still pure,
with a gold ring on her toe and a gold bracelet around her ankle and a
gold ring pierced through her nose.
When
she was naked, she looked like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.
As she stepped off her shell to slip into her one pair of jeans,
she still had the pure glowing look of a virgin, though given their
virility, I assumed that was unlikely.
Peter
was what I called a “sleeper.”
That
his face was handsome was obvious.
But
there was an unpretentiousness about it, as if he had never looked in a
mirror before.
He had an
exotic look about him.
His
dark brown hair dangled in tight kinky curls.
His eyes were a deep hazel.
His
skin was tanned to the brown of a man with an aboriginal gene.
Maybe that was the allure.
Maybe
that’s what made him so exciting.
He
preferred baggy clothes and wore his pajama whites rolled up to just above
the knees.
His calves were
muscular which gave the rest of his body away to my x-ray vision.
And he could roll “fair dinkum beauties” with the best of them!
It
was only after sharing a particularly tasty joint that Debra and I were
able to persuade Peter to try on one of my lungis.
He unabashedly took off his clothes and stood there naked while
stonily contemplating this new apparel.
I stonily contemplated his perfect body.
He turned to model the garment and Debra and I applauded in
approval.
She ran up to him
and they embraced.
I was sorry
we had brought no cameras.
I
would have to rely on my ganja-seared mind to remember how wonderful they
looked, which was asking a lot of myself.
I did my best to imprint them in my brain.
For
a moment I wondered why all the men and women I befriended or who
befriended me were real beauties.
Could
that really be true?
Or was
there some axiom which stated “the hornier you are, the better looking
people get?”
No!
I decided that was not the case.
All of them were beautiful in their own way.
And that was as it should be.
To
top it off, things were once again in balance.
Rosie, Jon, and Henry.
Peter,
Debra, and me.
Not that this
was a permanent arrangement.
It
was just part of the cosmic dance spent in the arms of brothers and
sisters who recognized they were, indeed, related.
Every
evening after dinner, all of us would dance our way through the old Dutch
fort to Swami Rock at the northeast end of the bay.
There, perched on a high cliff overlooking the Bay of Bengal, stood
Koneswaram, an impressive temple dedicated to Lord Siva with shrines
honoring Lord Muruga, Shakti, and Ganapathi as well.
It was the only place in town for a worshipper to be.
I always ended up hanging out around the shrine honoring Ganapathi,
or Ganesh as I soon began to call him.
Ganesh was my kind of guy.
He
required only fervor of worship and it didn’t matter how a devotee
displayed that fervor.
Decorum
to Ganesh was unnecessary.
I
always had the feeling that the less decorum and the more feverish the
fervor, the more Ganesh liked it!
Needless
to say, this encouraged madness and magic!
Offerings
of food, flowers, and money were the most sedate ways of worshipping
Ganesh.
But it was not
uncommon to see a man rolling on the hard rock around the shrine like the
hand of a clock or banging his head against the stone.
Maybe it was the Hindu version of “Punch Thyself.”
Men
and women danced in a trance, which entranced us.
They wore the most dazzling garb and moved so delicately and
flowingly, especially their hands and fingers, which seemed to strum
invisible lyres.
The sounds of
strange stringed instruments, drums, and flutes played and collided
because each musician was seemingly playing a different song.
Singers
sang. Chanters chanted.
Incense
of every kind filled the nostrils with dizzying smells that mingled with
the odors of the food cooking on makeshift grills.
But as redolent as they were, the smell of hashish and ganja
dominated the air and wafted their way to the nose, easily distinguishable
from the other aromas.
The
small colorful statue of Ganesh was decorated every night with flowers and
other offerings at his feet.
He
stood on one foot, the other raised as if in mid-step of a dance.
His trunk curled to the left, and under his tusks it looked like he
was smiling.
He just stood
there inanimate and yet on the verge of coming to life on top of this dome
of rock, with crazy people everywhere, the carnival-like atmosphere so
powerful it transformed the most demure and introverted into the kind of
people you crossed the street to avoid back in the States.
Worshipping
Ganesh was so different from the reverence demanded by Christianity.
It was so far removed from the standing, kneeling, and perfunctory
responsorials of the Catholic Mass, and very much on the other end of the
spectrum from the Chinese doing Tai Chi in unison like synchronized
swimming teams.
This was
spontaneous and improvisational worship, each individual worshipping in
his or her own special and sometimes insane way.
God
of prosperity, health and knowledge, Ganesh played the guardian of all the
temples to other gods.
I fell
in love with him.
It was a
love that would last a lifetime; a love anyone could express anyway they
wanted.
And any way was
accepted unconditionally.
Though
Jon was still eager to travel north to Jaffna to find Swami Guaribala, we
cajoled him to explore sites in the vicinity.
Eventually we needed to be in Talaimannar where we would take the
ferry to Dhanushkodi, our portal to India.
Why backtrack, when there was so much more to be experienced in the
rest of the island?
He
reluctantly agreed, especially when Rosie said, “But Jon, it just
doesn’t get much better than this!”
“Touché,”
Jon replied. “Or as they say in Australia, ‘Touchy,’” teasing
Debra and Peter with an affectionate glance. And so we would dance our way
to well known and not so well known places.
Sometimes all six of us, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Mix and match, change your partners, do-si-do and, depending on
what we had eaten that day, skip to the loo.
But
most of the time, we traveled as a sextet.
February 1972
The first pilgrimage we made was to Parakrama
Samudra, its three ancient lakes mirroring trees of every shade of green.
In the distance, clouds rested on two flat-topped mountains, the
closer, purple gray, and the farther grayer blue.
Men in their lungis and women in their saris bathed in the cool
waters. Young boys slid down a
mud sluice and splashed each other as they flew airborne into the lake.
We watched them and they stared at us.
The boys mirrored our curious smiles or whatever other expressions
were bouncing off our innermost thoughts.
Suddenly,
the reflection by the light of the setting sun was that of Michael,
sliding down the sluice at the Celebration of Life way back in New
Orleans.
I got goose bumps
thinking about him.
Where he
might be.
What he was doing.
What kind of husband and father he was.
Why he hadn’t written.
And
of course, I thought of my Hunga Dunga.
I
thought of them all with such a deep longing, it almost ached.
I
realized I hadn’t thought of them at all since Bangkok.
And
I was a bit unnerved by how quickly one can forget his past by being in
the present of another culture, one in which all your previous frames of
reference are destroyed, allowing you to become a child again where
everything is for the first time.
We visited Anuradhapura, the most ancient of Ceylon’s many
ancient cities dating back to the 4th century B.C.
It boasted nine-story dagobas and ostentatious palaces and
mansions.
Now it was all
rubble, the most enchanting rubble I had ever seen.
At Polonnaruwa, the ancient ruins and sleeping Buddha were more
wondrous than we had imagined.
We
were overwhelmed and out of respect, we got ruined in the ruins and two
white-bearded
monkeys stared back at me for what seemed an eternity.
Mesmerizing mantras whispered through the trees and grasses, and
how exquisitely peaceful it was in comparison to nothing else.
Outings to such places as these seemed to quiet our constant
chattering.
They put us in
very reflective, meditative moods.
Seldom
had I seen us so silent.
That
is, except for Henry, who never shut up.
I once overheard Peter quietly telling Debra, “What an ear
basher!”
I took that to be a
derogatory remark but what a colorfully apt one.
From Polonnaruwa we took a train to Batticaloa, only to find all
the guesthouses full.
So we
took a taxi twenty miles up the coast to a small town called Kalkudah.
There, too, The Rest House, the only “hotel” in town, was
filled and so we had to sleep on the beach.
The beach was beautiful, curving off into jutting peninsulas on
both sides.
It sloped gently
upwards to small dunes.
Beyond
them, the land was thick with coconut palms.
So thick that from the air, it must have looked like a huge lawn
that needed mowing.
These
trees, whose trunks were taller and more graceful than a giraffe’s neck,
not only satisfied me aesthetically, but satisfied so many of the needs of
the locals.
Cooking oil, food,
milk, mattress stuffing, fuel, candy, and liquor were just some of their
gifts.
And since then the
coconut palm has always been my favorite tree.
Merely seeing one on a calendar brings my tropical nature to the
surface.
I felt this place was
where I truly belonged.
We camped on a far end of the scalloped beach that faced northwest.
That evening, we witnessed a sunset only the most eloquent of the
many gods could describe.
It
was possibly the inspiration for the wild pastels used everywhere in the
temples, huts, clothing and even the cosmetics the natives so generously
applied to their bodies.
The
colors were so luscious they looked fake.
And if we had had a camera and took the most accurate photograph,
people would still think it had been touched up if they hadn’t seen it
for themselves.
The days were always hot, but I guess temperature is relative
because that night felt downright cold.
We made a small fire and tried to fall asleep.
Our thin blankets seemed totally inadequate.
Jon and Rosie clung to each other for warmth and possibly sex.
Henry shivered by himself inching his way closer to the fire and
keeping it going with coconut husks and twigs.
And though my soul was kept warm by Peter and Debra, the three of
us inching closer and closer to one another trying to get that little bit
of extra body heat, I froze my ass off as did everyone else.
Just as I was about to drift off, I heard Jon quietly say to Rose,
“Punch thyself!”
The village of Kalkudah was small and from the unending stares we
received, we were sure we were the first white people to ever step foot on
their ground. But when we woke
up the next day, we noticed a few other campsites scattered down the
beach.
How jealous we were of
their tents.
We walked toward
them and met these other foreigners who had found their way here,
attracted, I assumed, by the incredible setting and the peacefulness.
But it was the surf and not the setting that attracted them.
Two Germans, one Dane, a very shy French boy and three freaks from
Laguna Beach had already set up camp on the beach, their boards either
standing tall in the sand or strewn around their campsites.
Surfers were truly the new Magellans and Cooks.
They were always the first to discover places that shortly
afterwards would gain the notoriety that would ruin the pristine beauty of
places no one would’ve thought of visiting before.
That’s
why it’s always dangerous to revisit a place that was once special to
you.
I would not be surprised
to go back someday and find the beach littered with T-shirt and hamburger
stands.
It wasn’t the surfers’ fault.
It’s just that they were there to find the perfect wave and we
were there to find the perfect way.
Embarrassing
in retrospect, we felt our reasons for being on this beach took priority
over theirs.
How egotistical
of us!
Nevertheless, we all got along fine because in addition to the
perfect wave they were also in search of the most primo dope.
So we had that in common and we easily found the latter and smoked
together on the beach in perfect harmony, despite some language barriers.
The Dane, as one would expect, was the translator for everyone.
The boardheads found the weed and hash so fine, they had trouble
rousing themselves off their blankets to test the waters.
Even someone like me who had never surfed before could recognize
this exceptional find of beautifully consistent, but scarily enormous
waves, curling and cresting just beyond the reef.
For me, the most exceptional finds were the shells that made beach
combing much too easy.
Huge
conch shells dotted the beach every few steps.
I amused myself for hours just walking the fine sand, letting the
sudsing surf tickle my ankles while admiring the most amazing shells an
ocean had ever tossed ashore.
While
I walked, local children joined me and filled my hands and arms with them.
Their dark, sparkling eyes and sweet smiles beseeched me to take
them as gestures of friendship to the strange white man in a lungi.
Either that or the greater likelihood was they were hoping for some
rupees!
The next day, we played in the surf and on the beach, and just
relaxed.
I read from J.
Krishnamurti’s “First and Last Freedom,” which I borrowed from some
left-behind paperbacks at the Chinese Guest House.
Oh,
J.!
Why did you deny you were
the new Christ for the Aquarian Age?
You
deserved the title!
I read him slowly, the words once again striking chords within me.
Sometimes I drifted off into a reverie that included Bruttar from
the “Wayside of the Maitreya Buddha” commune and the Celebration of
Life debacle.
Not
surprisingly, I thought again of Michael and the two of us drifting
downstream through the muddy waters of the Atchafalaya River.
I was still drifting, when Jon’s shadow blocked me from the last
rays of the sun.
“Chazan,”
he said, “I think it’s time for us to move on.”
“Move on!
I am in
heaven!
How can I move on?”
I replied, my face full of disappointment.
Jon admitted that he, Rose, and I had been experiencing a weird,
subtle form of alienation from each other.
Maybe it was the injection of Jerry and Linda or Peter and Debra or
Henry into our insular threesome.
It
had happened so gradually, neither of us was sure it was true.
It was hard to verbalize because its roots lay in the heart.
But we both knew something was amiss.
I stood up and Jon and I walked along the beach.
We reached the end of the bay where the glow from lanterns on small
fishing boats bobbed up and down; distant, yet they provided a feeling of
warmth from the cooling air.
We sat down and got loaded.
I
was quiet and inward.
Jon
started talking god talk.
When
he did that, I was always turned into mush.
I knew he was just laying a cosmic groundwork so that I might keep
everything in perspective when he suggested that we split up for a while.
“Split up?” I asked like a kid whose Dad has just told him he
and Mom were getting a divorce.
“Did
I do something wrong?
Is it my
fault?”
“Chazan, we love you and this is just for the time being.
Rose and I need to be alone for a while.
Henry’s going to continue on solo.
We want to go north to Jaffna and find Swami Guaribala.
You can join us if you wish, but I think you’re happy here and
aren’t ready to move on.”
Oh, better.
Muuuuch better,
I said to myself.
Not ready to move on?
What
the hell did that mean?
Not
evolved enough to appreciate the wisdom of a teacher?
Not eager enough to give up this idyllic setting, my beloved palm
trees, my beach-combing, my Debra and Peter?
Not ready?
He was right.
And
maybe so was Florence.
I felt
a little badly. Maybe my
subliminal libidinal passions were preventing me from staying on the path
I thought I had chosen.
As
Florence had intimated, I guess it just wasn’t in the cards. Despite Jon’s invitation, once having said he and Rosie needed to be alone for a while, I felt I had no choice but to decline. I didn’t want to be an albatross around their necks, which were stretching for the guru. So I reluctantly agreed. At the same time I anticipated the adventures I could have on my own or with Debra and Peter, should they want me around. After all, they were on their honeymoon. A very strange honeymoon, but a honeymoon all the same. If anyone had wanted to be alone for a while, it should have been them!
February 1972
When I woke up the next morning, I carefully lifted Peter’s hand
off my shoulder.
His arm had
spanned both Debra and me.
He
must have done it unconsciously, pulling us all closer together in the
middle of the night for added warmth against the coolest hour before dawn.
I quietly disentangled myself, and walked over to where Jon and
Rosie were sleeping, rearranging my lungi on the way.
They were gone!
The
only thing they left behind was the depression in the sand where they had
slept and a note under a conch shell.
Meet
us at the Lakni Wesa Guest House in Colombo
Beginning of March.
Lorf you immensely,
JonPon
and the Rose
I dropped to the sand, their note in hand, looking at the outline
of their bodies.
I started
getting all choked up, though I wasn’t sure why.
A feeling of abandonment?
Who
abandoned whom?
Did it matter?
The choked up turned into some tears, and before I knew it, the
tears turned into a purge and then into a detachment.
Wasn’t
that Buddha’s answer to suffering?
Detachment?
The tears were already falling when I realized Peter and Debra were
at my side.
They also said it
was time to move on.
For all
three of us to move on.
Together.
I declined their invitation as
well.
“You guys are on your honeymoon!” I said looking up at them.
“You’re due for some alone time don’t you think?
I never heard of anything so ridiculous, wanting a third wheel on
your honeymoon!
Have ya gone
completely troppo on me?”
Peter and Debra looked at each other with amazement and a touch of
pride that I had picked up some of their slang.
They burst into laughter.
“You’re a good bloke, you are,” said Peter still laughing,
“and a bloody funny one at that!”
“And we’ve been doin’ this ‘honeymoon’ thing for over a
year now!” Debra added.
“It’s
been yonks since we did the ‘honeymoon’ thing!
It’s no big fuckin’ deal, Giacco!
Just think of us as three bloody good friends!”
“And right now, if you didn’t hang with us, we’d go wonky in
the noggin!
You wouldn’t
want to be responsible for that, eh mate?” Peter said, trying to guilt
trip me with disarming, if somewhat notorious Australian slang.
“Are you absolutely sure?” I asked.
Don’t you want to think it over?”
“She’ll be apples, she will!” Peter said with confidence. “Beg yours?” I questioned, trying to outdo Peter at his own
slang game.
“No worries mate!” And Peter started laughing all over again.
“It’s a dead cert!” Debra said.
“I can feel it in me little toe.
And me little toe is never wrong!”
“Dinkum? I asked.
With that, they both looked at each other and fell to the sand
laughing.
They scooted on
their ‘arses’ over to me and gave me big hugs.
“Dinkum!” they reassured me and then laughed some more.
Their
embrace was all the reassurance I needed.
To this day, the sound of an Australian accent brings me great
comfort, for no matter what the content of the conversation, I always
think of them.
When we had pulled ourselves together, Peter suggested we go back
to Batticaloa and with luck we would find a room where we could really get
a few nights of sound and comfortable sleep.
We took a bus to Batticaloa and on it, a very nice looking, and
gentle-mannered man named Rudramoorthy timidly approached us.
He was inquisitive.
He
was educated.
He spoke fairly
good English and was anxious to put it to use.
He had many questions for us and he spoke of wondrous places we
should visit.
He had such a
warmth about him, we became fast friends.
And he invited us to stay at his house.
His wife, Jasmin, and their two beautiful children, a boy and a
girl, greeted us.
The kids
stared at us in wide-eyed amazement, as if their father had brought home
some exotic souvenirs from his trip.
His
wife’s gaze kept changing from a welcoming smile at us to a mild, “Now
what have you done?” glare directed at her husband.
But once Rudramoorthy said something in a mixture of Tamil and
Sinhala, their chins swinging like pendulums, she opened the door wide and
invited us in, wondering where she would get the extra food she needed to
host us adequately.
The house was modest to say the least.
They seemed poor to me, but from what I saw of the town as we
entered it, they probably were considered middle class to some.
We talked awhile and Rudramoorthy explained that he was Hindu and
his wife, Sinhalese.
He was
Hindu, and in this part of Ceylon, a first-class citizen in an area
controlled by Tamil Hindus.
She
was Buddhist, as were the vast majority of the people in other parts of
the island.
By all rights, she was in dangerous territory.
Even more so for having married a Hindu.
But who can explain love, Rudramoorthy happily lamented.
He told us of the seemingly never-ending uprisings of the
well-educated, but disenfranchised youth in Ceylon and the repressive
government killing them.
Rudramoorthy’s
eyes were moist and sad before they changed to reluctant acceptance of
both his family’s fate and that of his country.
I could think only of Krishnamurti:
“The threat from the outside is now and forever a lie!”
If only everyone would look inward.
If only they would realize they’re all made of the same stuff.
If they chose not to, why couldn’t they just throw whipped cream
pies at each other, instead of using bullets.
Again, where were Larry, Moe and Curly when we needed them!
It was late, and we were very tired.
Jasmin offered to cook us a meal, but we politely refused saying we
had already eaten along the way.
Nonetheless,
she made a pot of chai and brought out a plate of sweetmeats and we all
fell in love with Rudramoorthy and his wonderfully shy family as we shared
tea, ate delicious treats, and spoke of our native lands.
The kids slept with them, and they let us sleep on the kids’ mats
in a corner of the one-room house.
They
gave us extra blankets and we slept fairly well for a change.
In the morning, we had more tea and some rotti with buffalo butter
and jam.
Then Rudramoorthy,
Peter, Debra, and I were off to see the sights of Batticaloa.
Rudramoorthy was an excellent guide and when we found ourselves
alone at the town’s old fort, he pulled out some hash, wrapping a
dampened handkerchief around the narrow part of the chillum.
We all got very high.
Rudramoorthy
warned us not to tell his wife!
We
found that amusing and assured him, “No worries.”
He had none, so he said.
He
was the perfect person to get stoned with.
Always gentle, always centered.
We spent two days in Batticaloa.
Each
day, we’d stop at a market, and Peter, Debra, and I would buy fruit,
vegetables, rice, sweetmeats and teas to bring back to his house.
The second day, we also brought gifts for his wife, including a
gold earring Debra had picked out, and toys for the kids.
Though he wouldn’t find it until after we left, we hid a bunch of
rupees under Rudramoorthy’s pillow, enough to make his life relatively
easy for a couple of months we hoped.
We were so happy to be able to do it.
Rudramoorthy proved to be such a very good and generous friend.
Five-thirty in the morning, Rudramoorthy roused us from a sound
sleep so that we wouldn’t miss the 6:30 bus to Nuwara Eliya.
At the station, he sheepishly offered a hand to Debra, who rushed
him with a big hug.
Peter and
I did the same.
He was flush
with emotion and I never met a man who cried so readily.
Then again, given his situation, he may have had many good reasons
to cry.
Peter, Debra, and I boarded the bus.
It was full to the brim with people.
It was full above the brim with baggage and boxes tethered to the
roof.
The bus looked so
top-heavy I thought it would fall over before we even left the station.
The 10-and-a-half-hour, bumpy, dusty, dirty, wonderfully horrific
ride would take us to the 6,000-foot-high city of Nuwara Eliya which sat
on the top of the Hatton plateau in the high country I had seen in the
distance from Parakrama Samudra.
We drove through dense jungle for a while, passing frond-roofed mud
huts, thickets of banana trees and palms, fields of sugarcane,
fantastically colorful flowers, and the lushest of vegetation.
The bus struggled around curves and lurched us higher and higher.
It
lurched so often, I was tempted to pinball my way to the front and teach
the driver how to use the clutch.
But
I restrained myself, and Peter, Debra and I merely laughed anxiously with
each missed gear.
As we gained elevation, the vegetation looked similar to that of
the mountains in Northern California.
As we entered the city, the potholed, worn and dusty road gradually
became better maintained and therefore more comfortable.
The road turned into a smoothly-paved boulevard lined with trees.
Where mud huts had dominated the landscape, suddenly, or so it
seemed, enormous Tudor mansions appeared.
They once belonged to British and German land barons.
Now they were gone.
The
memory of them lingers, as do the artifacts of their occupation.
There were sidewalks for chrissakes!
The locals walking them wore overcoats and carried umbrellas!
I noticed a Catholic church and a small movie theater whose marquee
read “Easy Rider.”
Well!
That explained a lot about the looks we were getting from passersby
on the street!
What must they
think of us?
We exited the bus at a very nice station.
As soon as an older man, whose curiosity got the better of him,
asked us a question, others gathered round, some joined in.
All of those that did not only spoke English, but spoke it very
well with and with a decidedly British accent softened by their native
tongues into a lilt.
It was
very pleasing.
A dark-skinned
man, obviously a gentleman, offered to escort us to a nice hotel in town,
the Pedro.
The Pedro Hotel was old and beautiful in that prudish Tudor way,
with large windows and heavy furniture.
It had a snooker table!
And
the menu in the dining room even featured fried eggs with bacon!
And this is still
Ceylon?
What happened to the
tropical beaches?
How could
the tea plantations, the terraced rice paddies, the water buffalo, the
monkeys, all have given way to this hotel, which could be any popular
resort in any number of alpine settings around the world!
The pure air and chilling altitude reminded me how good it felt to
be in the high country.
And
the journey from the beaches to the mountain-top retreats explained why
this place is rightly known as the “resplendent isle.”
We were shown to a ground-floor room, which had a great view of
Mount Pedro.
But there was
only one bed and a small settee that could be slept on if you didn’t
mind your legs dangling over its edge.
I
felt a twinge of discomfort for the first time since the three of us
started hanging out together.
Cuddling together for warmth on the beach, still in our clothes,
was one thing.
It seemed
natural, innocent, and necessary.
Cramped
on the kids’ mats on the floor of Rudramoorthy’s home was another.
You’d often see three or four men taking a nap together on one
small mat.
No one was shy
about it. No one raised an
eyebrow.
If this had been a thatched hut in the middle of the jungle, it
would be a no-brainer.
If this
had been cold sand under swaying palms, no one would think twice about
doing whatever it took to stay warm.
But
this place was so Western it brought out the Motel 6 in me!
Despite the fact that the room was as cold as sleeping outdoors,
despite the fact that I often jumped into bed with any number of people at
Hunga Dunga with absolutely no reservations, we were now faced with
options and therefore conscious decisions.
But I was thinking for the three of us and once again
underestimated Pete and Deb.
I offered to take the settee and threw my bag on it.
They looked at each other, and then me, and threw their “dilly
bags” on the settee as well.
“Looks like this will do us just fine!
Plenty of room for three!”
Debra
said easily as she looked at the bed and then up at Peter.
“So why you throwin’ that squizz at me?” Peter said.
“It’s an easy go!” he agreed.
I just shrugged with no objections.
Who was I to be the prude?
I
shivered, not from the cold of the room, but from thinking about how much
self-control I would be able to muster.
After settling in, we went downstairs to the restaurant and had a
delicious meal.
Debra and I
had a few bottles of the local brew, but when Peter noticed they had
Guinness Stout, he ordered a schooner.
Then another.
Then
another.
After dinner, Peter invited me to play a game of snooker and stood
up a bit tentatively.
He was
inspecting cue sticks and rolling them on the table to test for the
straightest.
Debra whispered in my ear, “I think ol’ Petey is a bit plonked!”
I was a lightweight when it came to alcohol and my tongue was
already getting a bit thick.
“I think he has company.” I slurred.
Debra laughed at the both of us as I made my way to the table.
Peter racked the balls and ordered another schooner.
I loved to shoot pool, but I never even tried to play snooker.
Peter
was very good.
Maybe better
than usual because of the condition he was in.
He
sank one ball after another and I thought I would never get a turn.
He took each shot with such studiousness I thought maybe there was
money on the line or something.
That
is until he stretched his torso over the table to make a difficult shot
and as he stroked the stick forth and back in preparation to launch the
cue ball, his lungi got caught on a backstroke, came undone and fell
around his ankles.
He turned beet red.
Debra,
a few onlookers, and I, burst out laughing.
“That’s it!” Peter said with an embarrassed smile on his
face. He pulled the lungi up
and tightened it around his waist.
“You
win.
I hereby forfeit this
game.”
We were tired, a bit tipsy, and with Debra and me on either side of
Peter, steadying him, went back to our room.
The bed stared at me once again as we let loose of Peter and let
him fall on the bed, his lungi partially unfurling.
I rolled him to the middle of the bed.
Debra, without the slighted hint of self-consciousness, started to
undress.
“We are going to sleep in the altogether, aren’t we?”
I thought she meant we were all going to sleep together.
But then she asked, “So why do you still have your clothes on?”
I guess I still had a long way to go before mastering Australian.
But following her lead, I took off my shirt and my lungi and lay as
close to the edge of the bed as I could.
Debra crawled in on the other side of Peter, pulling the light
blanket over the three of us.
In the middle of the night, it got so cold, Debra and I awoke
shivering, while Peter seemed to be in a dead sleep, sprawled all over the
bed, hogging most of it.
Debra
rolled him over on his side toward me.
And without a smidgen of the nervousness I would’ve had, she
reached over Peter and put her hand on my chest and drew us all closer,
skin to skin.
Debra spooning
Peter spooning me.
It was a
good thing that was the order.
Because
if I had been in Debra’s place, Peter would have felt a huge hard-on
between his legs!
I might have
found myself very embarrassed if a poke were enough to bring Peter out of
his stupor.
Surprisingly, it was Peter whom I felt getting hard against
my
ass.
I tried to ignore it
giving Peter the benefit of the doubt that his oblivion was for real.
But
then in that oblivion, he threw his hand around my body and it came to
rest on my stomach just under Debra’s hand on my chest.
I
hoped my loudly pounding heart would not keep Debra awake.
I hoped Peter’s hand would not slip farther south.
I did not trust myself.
I
thought of dead puppies.
Eventually we all fell asleep and in the morning when we woke up,
Peter and I both had the horny male, early-morning hard-ons.
Or were they the remnants of a brotherly love unconsummated?
Since
we were strangers in a strange land, no one found it strange, including
Debra, whose perfect breasts were taut from the cold and to me, absolutely
taunting!
She merely laughed
and said, “Oh you men are all alike!
Just ‘ave a gander at those beautiful willies!”
Once dressed, we rushed into the large kitchen, surprising the hell
out of the cooks, and hurried to huddle over the wood stove.
The cooks laughed at us, our attire totally unsuited to this
climate.
They made us
breakfast. Fried eggs over
easy, bacon, toast of freshly baked bread, jam, juice and coffee.
Coffee?
What a treat!
They tried to show us to a table in the dining room, but we were so
cold, we chose to eat in the kitchen with the cooks.
After breakfast, we “borrowed” a blanket from the room next to
ours and threw it on our bed, hoping it would fend off the cold that
night.
Then we ventured out
into the streets.
We may as
well have been in England.
Nicely
landscaped city parks, a library, Christian churches, well-maintained
cars, old as they were; even a garbage truck.
Nuwara Eliya, you are one spiffy town!
People stared at us in our lowland garments.
“Have you no decorum or common sense?” they seemed to ask as
they passed us, so “fashionably dressed” in the well-worn wool pants
and double-breasted jackets left behind by the British.
We just assumed they had seen “Easy Rider” and ignored them,
though we wanted to yell, “We’re hippies, not Hell’s Angels!”
But when we did get a chance to engage any of them in conversation,
we found them to be very polite and helpful and I think we dispelled any
notion that they should fear us.
In a market, we found some very nice red bananas, big avocadoes or
“alligator pears,” as Debra called them, and juicy red tomatoes.
The day was warming up to a reasonably comfortable temperature and
that afternoon, we hiked halfway up Mount Pedro or
what
the locals call Pidurutalagala, The Rock of Peter.
It’s the highest point in Ceylon, and we had a very nice picnic
with a panoramic view.
Then we
meandered back to the hotel.
It was a Poya day, the monthly celebration of the full moon and
therefore a public holiday.
Maybe
there’d be a party.
We
didn’t care.
We were too
tired to be festive, especially me having had little sleep the night
before.
We were completely
content to sit in the overstuffed chairs in the lobby, just being quiet;
each of us immersed in our own thoughts.
It was nice.
We had an early dinner in the hotel and once again, Peter could not
stop himself from sampling the many different beers that were available.
He
started with a stubbie of Three Coins.
After one sip, he declared it was piss!
So he ordered a second bottle, this time Lion Lager.
Much better.
He had a
few of those, when he noticed a bottle of XXXX on the shelf.
Pure nostalgia in an alcoholic liquid.
Peter
walked up to the beautiful and highly polished bar.
The bartender, poised in his white shirt and black-suspendered
slacks, walked over to Peter and said, “May I be of service to you,
sir?”
“Toss me over a nice cold Four X, mate, would ya please?
And
maybe a shot of Mendis.”
Mendis
was the best arrack around.
Triple-distilled
whiskey made from the coconut palm.
Debra looked annoyed.
“You
OK?” I asked.
“I’m a bit cheesed off right now,” she said quietly.
“Peter never drinks like this!
He’s going to be completely off his face if he doesn’t stop!
Men!
What they will do
to get up their courage!”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but once again, we had to
help Peter to the room.
Once
again, we flopped him on the bed but this time pushed him over to the
side.
Then Debra and I
undressed and fell on the bed in the “nick” and pulled the blankets
over us.
She reached across,
shook Peter a bit, and said, “Peter.
Peter, you OK?
You’re
not going to chuck up or anything, are you?”
Peter just mumbled something and drifted off.
As Debra removed her hand from Peter’s back she slid it across my
chest and let it loiter there a bit too long.
It felt good, but tickled a little when she started exploring my
chest and stomach.
I could
feel her breasts at my side and a nipple caressing a rib.
Her hand slid down and found me rock hard.
She slithered on top of me and leaned down to kiss me while she
worked my cock inside her.
We
were getting into a very sweet rhythm, me lifting her up slightly with my
hips and she gently pushing against me.
The rhythm was accelerating when we felt something move that
wasn’t us and noticed Peter sitting upright staring at us.
I couldn’t read the expression on Peter’s face.
Debra was all smiles.
“Well you look pretty wrapped!” he said to Debra.
That didn’t help me at all.
Then
he looked me right in the eyes, his face a magnet that wouldn’t let me
look away, and said, “Fair go mate?”
He said it in such a way, I didn’t know if it was a question, a
statement, or a threat.
I looked at him quizzically, not knowing what to expect.
I looked at Debra for a clue.
She
just laughed and said, “Aw, Pete’s just feeling’ a bit left out.
Giacco.
No worries!”
Nevertheless, my woody started changing back into a willie.
But before I could change the expression on my face, I felt one of
Peter’s hands on my hip and the other running under Debra’s ass toward
my crotch.
By the time he was
jostling my balls, I had already begun to harden again inside Debra.
Without warning, he changed positions, jumping behind my head and
kneeling with his knees pushed against my shoulders, his inner thighs
close to my ears.
He leaned
over my head toward Debra and I appreciated this new perspective of his
wonderful body.
Debra took Peter’s cock in her mouth and must have had a most
talented tongue because Peter was moaning in ecstasy.
His hands were all over her breasts and my chest.
My hands didn’t know where to go first.
They wanted to be everywhere at once.
It was so exciting!
Debra
and I were going at it in a frenzy now.
Peter was arching his back.
Debra
was working him over good.
I
roughly explored his hard stomach and worked my way up to his pecs.
I
grabbed them hard enough to leave fingerprints and twisted a nipple.
As soon as I did that, he exploded without warning.
I could feel his cum dribbling out of Debra’s mouth onto my
chest.
It felt hot.
Puffing and sweating, Peter slowly withdrew from Debra’s mouth.
Debra and I were just about there too, groaning and gyrating, and
Peter quickly moved to our sides, wrestling us into some sort of obscure
hold that made me penetrate her even deeper, if that were at all possible.
Just as we approached orgasm, he jumped behind Debra, his ass on my
legs, his chest against Deb’s back, his arms around both of us,
squeezing the three of us together so tightly I thought we were in a vice
grip!
I’m sure all of Nura
Eliya could hear our moans when we climaxed!
Debra collapsed upon me, and Peter upon her.
I could hardly breathe from the weight of both of them, but it felt
good!
Peter rolled off to one side.
Debra
rolled off to the other.
I lay
in the middle, waiting for the usual post coitus tension.
There was none.
The
only tension was that of the blankets Peter was drawing tightly around us
as he tucked us in.
He leaned
over Debra, gave her a kiss, and said softly, “That was spot on, eh?
You
maniac.”
“And you didn’t need all that beer after all now, did ya?”
she said, just as softly but knowingly.
Then he leaned over me.
“You
are a legend, mate!”
And he
gave me a kiss.
“Now hit the
sack!”
We all lay there quietly, trying to breathe normally.
It was too quiet.
Our
breathing was so normal it was abnormal.
That’s when we simultaneously burst out laughing.
It was a lighthearted, happy, from-the-gut-laughter.
A laughter that said we had conquered awkwardness and satisfied the
desires we were repressing all along.
A laughter that felt even better than the sex!
The chill of dawn arrived.
It
is always sleep’s thief and we woke up with a shiver that we chased into
the ash-blackened kitchen.
The
shiver disappeared into the flames of the wood stove.
We rubbed cold hands over it and exchanged warm smiles.
Everything was right.
Everything
was sweet.
Everything was
apples.
The calm face of our soft-spoken waiter entered and greeted us with
a smile.
He made us milk tea
to warm our bellies and we began another day.
We left the hotel through the kitchen door and discovered back
streets we didn’t know were there, back streets that were hiding from
the colonial pretentiousness of the paved avenues.
We walked past the maintenance shed of a golf course.
The manicured greens seemed totally out of place.
But the dilapidated shed blended in perfectly with the sordidness
of the alley.
Dirty,
disheveled, bleary-eyed, and gaunt men huddled in the shadows.
Their “home” seemed to fit them to a tee.
As we passed, they were too weak to beg and simply held out their
hands in hope of a rupee.
We
gave them some.
Once word got out that we had given money away, other beggars
besieged us where we had noticed none before.
Word travels fast when there is a soft touch around.
You have to give rupees judiciously otherwise you will be
surrounded with children, invalids, the deformed and the demented,
circling you, clinging to your garments, pleading incessantly until you
feel so guilty either you make yourself a pauper or you learn to make them
invisible.
It was a battle of
self-scrutiny, and always an unpleasant investigation.
A fortune-teller at the end of the alley stood up from her little
table and tried to seduce us as we approached by singing that she could
see all and know all.
We had
great luck coming our way.
But
she changed her tune as we passed her by, shouting dire predictions at us
for not giving her money.
We made our way as quickly as possible to the boulevard lined with
beautiful trees and the beautiful buildings once enjoyed by rich
plantation owners and merchants.
Now
they were merely facades of civility that hid the dirt, noise and squalor
lining the alleys behind the back door kitchens of grand hotels.
Speaking of grand.
Nothing
was quite as grand as The Grand Hotel.
It was so grand it was a joke.
A doorman, wearing what looked like a costume an organ grinder’s
monkey would wear, opened the door for us with a flourish.
We walked in and could not believe our eyes.
There were at least 10 tuxedoed waiters standing at attention,
waiting for someone to wait on.
They
looked simply grand!
And since
it was still morning, we had breakfast there.
It too, was simply grand.
When
we finished, we rubbed our bellies and walked out grandly, and promised
never to speak of The Grand again!
Obviously, we were beginning to forget where we were.
We needed to get back to the humid and humble, the tropical and
topical, the present, not the past.
We
rambled back to our room where the rest of the day we spent consuming our
morning, afternoon and evening rations of “beauties.”
I loved watching Peter roll joints.
He would sit tall, cross-legged on the bed.
His vibrations were so constant and even; his fingers so steady as
he wrapped a paper cocoon around the ganja.
When he was very stoned, he would close his eyes and sway forth and
back and swells of warm air seemed to move across the space.
I was having a love affair with them both.
I don’t think it would have worked out with either of them as
individuals.
But as a duo, it
was definitely love, especially at times like this, when we were
thoroughly wasted.
We listened to our thoughts.
We
wrote letters and postcards to friends, or to ourselves in our diaries.
We asked questions like “Whose hand is this doing the writing and
why?”
And our soft spoken
waiter came knockin’ at our window with a smile on his face and hot,
fresh, coconut cakes for no good reason at all.
As soon as he was gone, I noticed Debra trying to get Peter’s
attention by making strange movements with her eyes and chin.
Peter finally noticed while I played dumb.
They were up to something.
And
I think Debra was behind it.
He said to Debra, “I dunno if I’m any gun at it, but I think
I’d like to ‘ave a go.
If
it’s OK with you, that is.”
Debra replied, “Onya then!”
Peter stood up and approached me.
He grabbed me under the arms and lifted me into the air.
I came crashing down on the bed, the springs squeaking in surprise.
Peter ripped off my lungi and sat on my legs while he ripped off
his own.
Then he pinned me
down with his whole body.
He
shoved his tongue in my mouth and kissed me almost violently.
He worked his way down my body with his tongue, his hard cock
dragging along my inner thigh and then my calf.
His tongue was at the head of my cock and he looked up briefly to
watch me watching him.
Then he
glanced at Debra looking for approval.
She had her feet up on the chair, legs spread, and her fingers up
her sarong.
“Do it Peter!
Watch
them ivories though!”
Peter got back to work.
He
tongued the head of my cock for a while building up his nerve, then slowly
engulfed me, one hand on my chest, the other grabbing my balls.
His technique wasn’t perfect, but it
is
the thought that counts!
I
figured I should show him how it’s done.
I twisted him over on his back, my cock still halfway down his
throat.
I felt him gag some,
so I retreated a bit.
Then I
did a clever 180-degree spin and licked him all the way down his fine body
until I had his cock in my mouth as well.
I
roughly grabbed his ass and pushed him in deeper.
We finally got into sync.
I
peered over at Debra who was fingering herself into a sweat, her head
tossed back, and her eyes fluttering.
I could tell she was close.
So was I.
So was Peter.
He was uncontrollable now.
I
could feel the head of his cock swell inside my mouth and a muffled scream
came from deep within his chest.
As
soon as I felt his first fiery squirt, I came too.
Each of us, rivers!
As we lay there exhausted, still in our sixty-nine position, Debra
joined us on the bed and gave both of us hugs.
“You guys are bloody hot!
I
thoroughly enjoyed that I did.
From
go to whoa.
And Peter!
You are bloody full of surprises.”
“I surprised myself, Deb.
I
didn’t know I had it in me.”
Debra laughed, “Yeah, but I did.
That’s why I fell in love with ya, ya bum.”
I scrambled over him and sat on his stomach.
I stared down at his face.
He
met my eyes and said, “Mate!
That
was bloody terrific!
Was it
good for you too?”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I
wondered how many times in how many beds those words of insecurity were
spoken.
I answered his
concerned look with a deep kiss giving him a taste of his own cum.
“You are a bloody legend you are,” I said.
“And
so’s your old lady!” I added smiling at Debra.
She beamed back at me.
Peter looked at Debra.
“OK,
Deb.
I did it.
You satisfied now?”
“More than, sweets.
Are
you?” she asked with just the faintest look of wonder and concern”
“I am!” Peter replied emphatically.
“It was a hum dinger!”
Then maybe to reassure her, he added, “But ya bloody well know I
ain’t ever gonna do this again with anyone else besides me mate here,
don’t ya?
So give us some
truth.”
Debra looked unconvinced, but lightheartedly said, “Well, as far
as male bonding goes, I think you were both bloody amazin’!
But if this were a gymnastics event at the Olympics, I’d give you
boys about an eight point five.”
“Eight point five!” we both protested.
“We were bloody gun, Deb!”
Peter insisted.
“Maybe dinkum, but not gun.
There’s
always room for improvement, Peter.
Remember,
practice makes perfect.”
She
gave me a wink.
And practice we did.
Throughout
the rest of our trip, the three of us practiced until we knew each
other’s bodies intimately and they knew each other’s bodies better
than ever.
Not a centimeter of
flesh was ignored.
I hoped
they learned a few new tricks in the process that would serve their
marriage well.
In every
guesthouse and hut, on every river bank and beach, we practiced.
And when we weren’t practicing, we were cuddling and keeping each
other warm and close to our hearts.
February 1972
The next day we left the West that was.
We took a bus to Nanu-oya.
Then
a train to Hatton.
Then a
twenty-three-mile blood-curdling bus ride past beautiful, deep-cleavaged
mountains to Sri Pada or Adam’s Peak.
On top was a footprint embedded in the stone.
Though Buddhists believed it to be the footprint of Buddha, Hindus
believed it to be that of Shiva.
Muslims
revered this site as the place where Adam landed after being tossed out of
Eden, while Christians prayed to an indentation in stone they believed was
made by the foot of Thomas the Apostle.
I didn’t believe or disbelieve these claims.
What I couldn’t believe was the constant stream of pilgrims
coming down and going up the peak.
They
lent this mountain so much spiritual energy, the peak really was all that
it is believed to be.
They all flocked to worship.
Buddhists,
Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.
And
except for us, they all came without the slightest doubt that the
footprint belonged to the source of their particular belief.
All
worshipped at this shrine on top of a 7,300-foot peak, yet nobody showed
any sign that one God was superior to another’s.
Sri Pada gave refuge to people of all beliefs.
How nice for a change.
Joyful chanting and Spartan cheers gave strength of will to
everyone who climbed the six miles to the base of the mountain and the
extremely vertical 9,000 steps to the summit.
The steps were chiseled into the stone more than a thousand years
ago.
At one time, the treads
must’ve been flat, but over the centuries, innumerable pairs of feet
wore them down into nearly forty-five degree sloping angles.
It’s
a good thing there were ropes and chains on either side to hold on to.
Without them to help pull us up, climbing them would’ve been
almost impossible.
It was the middle of the night and should have been pitch black,
but lanterns lighted the stairs.
Every
so often, we’d reach a small landing, a natural flat area of rock.
Here the obsessively faithful had built little huts, where entire
families permanently lived.
They
served food and tea and a provided a place for us to catch our breaths.
We didn’t rest long because we had to get to the top before dawn,
where we would see not one, but two sunrises, the only place in the world
where this miracle occurred.
So we scrambled with the most intent of the hundreds upon hundreds
of people eager to reach the summit; trying to gain altitude while
excusing ourselves from jostling those making their way down and they
excusing themselves for jostling us on our way up.
Our
feet and legs were exhausted; our arms ached from constantly pulling on
the ropes and chains.
It was
not a race against each other, but a race against the spinning of the
earth.
We made it with time to spare.
Time to watch each other’s sweat pouring down our faces by the
light of torches surrounding the small and beautiful temple that housed
the footprint.
Debra, Peter,
and I cuddled each other against the cold of pre-dawn and thought of
revelations, and then thought some more of how
not
to think about them.
The “footprint” was a large indentation in the rock, larger
than a human footprint.
Actually,
it didn’t look like a foot at all. Where were the toes?
They may have been worn away over the centuries by the millions of
hands of millions of pilgrims rubbing, groping and fondling them until the
toes blended in with the foot which became just a shallow, irregular hole
that was smooth as marble.
We, too, couldn’t resist touching it, sensually of course, as you
might a Calder sculpture in a fine museum.
We
added six hands more of imperceptible, but definite, erosion.
The sun rose above the horizon.
Everyone was quiet out of reverence.
It climbed higher in the sky and began to warm us.
As predicted, a second sun followed!
This second orb was less orange, and without heat.
It was amazing.
But
only as a phenomenon of the atmosphere, I concluded.
I kept that conclusion to myself though, because the vibrations of
these pilgrims of so many different faiths, staring in awe at the two
sunrises, were so peaceful, harmonious, and synchronous, who was I to
burst anyone’s bubble?
After the phantom sun had blended in with the real one, we began
the descent along with hundreds of others.
Most everyone took the stairs toe to heel, the same way we had
climbed them.
Not
intentionally, but naturally.
And
at that pace, we noticed everything we were supposed to notice.
When we reached one of the lower landings, we could look over the
village at the base of the mountain.
It
was a village with no name.
It
existed only to serve the needs of the pilgrims.
A steady stream of them kept arriving.
By bus, foot, oxen, and makeshift stretchers and carts for the
handicapped and disabled.
They
too would crawl their way to the top on their hands and knees if they had
to, drag their lifeless legs behind them if they had to, take a week to do
it if they had to.
But they
would reach the top, arriving with bloodied knees and battered fingers.
They didn’t care.
It
wasn’t a bother.
And they
would touch the place where Buddha, Shiva, Adam or the doubting Thomas had
briefly stepped while walking the sky.
We had been up for more than 24 hours and we were getting rummy
from sleep deprivation and exhaustion.
Somehow, we managed to find a bus back to Hatton.
We fell asleep immediately and what should have been another
blood-curdling ride was merely a rocking chair.
It was lucky the driver woke us up just in time to make a
connecting bus to Butalla.
We
drove through the night and slept the whole way on that ride too.
We were still in a daze, when the next morning, we found ourselves
on the outskirts of Butalla on the banks of the Menik Ganja, the “river
of gems.” None of us could
remember how we got there.
We
each made up a different story, and they all seemed true.
The water looked clean and we were anxious to “rise and shine.”
We could think of no better
place to “shine” than in this river of gems.
While we splashed each other, we noticed a trickle of people
walking downstream along a jeep trail that followed the river.
They passed us in groups of anywhere from five to 30 at a time.
How many had passed before we got there?
How many more were coming?
Where
did they come from?
Where were
they going?
They paid us
little mind, and walked unhurried yet determined along the trail,
chanting, singing, praying.
Straight
lines, forget it!
Walking in
circles, weaving in and out, strolling diagonally, of course!
Much better!
We thought they must be going to a local festival and it must be
close by.
A young man broke
‘ranks’ if you could call it that, to cool himself in the river.
He spoke a bit of English and that’s how we found out this was
part of a major pilgrimage, The Pada Yatra, that started near Jaffna and
ended 300 miles and 40 days later in Kataragama, Ceylon’s most holy and
notorious destination resort for the spiritually afflicted.
It was only later we found out that this was an alternative route.
The primary route and the safer one, was along the coast.
Only at Okanda would the majority of
these
“bhakta” enter the jungle.
We
were, however, going to go straight through it.
There were twenty five to thirty miles left for them.
For us as well if we chose to follow suit.
Or should I say chose to follow lungi?
Or sari?
Or pajama
whites?
Or bare butt-naked
butts?
Or bodies
somersaulting, rolling, skipping backwards, or crawling?
“‘Ave a gander at that wouldja now!
Looks like a walkabout to a woop woop!” said Peter
“It looks bonzer!” Debra exclaimed.
“Should we?” I asked them.
Peter stroked his chin, dripping with gems, and said, “Well, it
looks like there’s a few kangaroos loose in the upper paddocks, but I
say ‘abso-bloody-lutely!”
I only understood a part of what he said, but I took it as a
“yes!”
We dried off and threaded our way into the parade that seemed to
have no beginning and have no end.
But
the jeep trail did.
It ended
about a mile later, when the trail narrowed and split into multiple,
meandering smaller trails.
Only
occasionally did it widen enough to allow a vehicle to maneuver through
the encroaching brush and trees.
The
Menik Ganja had disappeared somewhere to our west, about a mile away,
though the path followed its course due south.
Passing joints forth and back, we entered the Yala Sanctuary, which
I expected to be a jungle full of Tarzan vines hanging from tall canopies
of dense trees, and brush that would require a machete.
It wasn’t.
It was a
dry jungle, with little brush, and trees whose leaves were delicate and
did little to shade us from the hot sun.
Nevertheless, it was still a jungle and home to elephants, water
buffalo, crocodiles, leopards, monkeys, seven varieties of deadly snakes,
and a host of other beasts, large and small.
I
tried to convince myself that the steady stream of singing and chanting
pilgrims would keep them at bay, but I guess I wasn’t very convincing.
I found myself on constant sentry duty for any predators that might
enjoy the hors d’oeuvre of a skinny Sicilian.
Debra
and Peter seemed totally at ease, so I felt obliged to be nervous for the
three of us, and was that the hiss of a snake inches from my foot, or just
a pilgrim rolling by?
I noticed men walking heavily now and then, purposely making loud
thuds with their feet.
I
caught one man’s attention.
With
the largest vocabulary of body language ever exhibited, he told me they
walked that way to keep the cobras and vipers away.
Better!
Oh
so much better!
We were just a half mile or so outside Galge, the only place
between Buttala and Kataragama where a bhakta could rest and bathe, and
except for the few who were fasting, bargain for food.
A small shrine, just off the trail, yet appearing to be in the
middle of nowhere, caught my attention.
I
easily persuaded Deb and Pete to leave the path and check it out.
It was a shrine to Ganesh and I felt I had been drawn to it as if
personally invited.
It was so
simple, but so beautiful.
The
gray of the lovingly hewn stone blocks, intricately meshed, embraced a
small statue of Ganesh sculpted out of the same gray rock.
The gray was interrupted only by the colors of flower garlands
placed around his neck and assorted fruit at his feet.
We walked all the way around it before noticing a swami sitting in
a lotus position, meditating at the side of the shrine.
His skin was completely covered with sacred ash.
He
blended in perfectly with the stone of the shrine.
He sat so motionless he could have been mistaken for a sculpture.
He paid us no mind whatsoever as we studied him.
He was in another world, peaceful and sublime.
He made me wonder whether Jon was right when he said, “I wasn’t
ready.”
Did he mean that I
didn’t want enlightenment enough?
I
asked Ganesh to teach me supplication, to teach me how to wear the sacred
ash on my forehead without knowing it’s there.
And I suddenly missed Jon and Rosie terribly.
The tableau of the shrine and the swami was so soothing, we decided
to make camp there for the night, and we felt sure that Ganesh and the
vibrations of the swami would keep us from harm.
But just to play it safe, we thunderously stamped out a clearing
for ourselves to frighten off the predators.
The swami still paid us no mind, and the devotees passing by must
have thought we were performing a ritual dance because they looked at us
with approval.
We smoothed out
two thin blankets on the flattened grass and covered ourselves with the
third and last.
We lay down
close to one another and tried to catch some Zs.
We didn’t catch many that night.
We hardly slept at all.
At
least one of us, throughout the night, sat up to have a look around.
We scouted the area with squinted eyes.
There were howling monkeys.
They
seemed to be right above us in the tops of the trees.
We could hear them gossiping about us.
One of them was piercingly loud and obnoxious.
“Rack off!” Peter yelled at him.
The monkey yelled back louder.
As did some of his buddies.
Peter
gave up immediately.
There were so many different kinds of frogs, croaking incessantly
in so many different languages, it drove us crazy.
At first they were just background singers for the monkees.
As it got darker, the frogs got louder.
I had a brief flashback to that awful day in New York when Dennis
dove out the third-story window to his death.
How many lifetimes
ago was that!
“What a bloody kafuffle!”
Debra
cried out wildly flailing her arms about her, “but it’s these bloody
mozzies driving me loony!”
An elderly woman, wearing a thin saffron-colored sari, left the
stream of pilgrims and trickled her way slowly, but deliberately, to
Debra.
The end of the sari was
loosely wrapped about her head and face.
She was barefoot and her feet were large and flat from having gone
that way all her life.
Mosquitoes
were all over her as well, but the muslin sari was her natural mosquito
netting.
She kneeled down and
pulled a container made of hammered tin out of her basket.
She placed it on the ground and opened it.
A silvery white goop was inside.
It looked beautifully alien and smelled just as unearthly.
It smelled of herbs, some familiar and recognizable; others exotic
and unknowable.
The scent
carried me away and for a split second I was in an episode of Star Trek
and she was a kindly alien that had beamed herself aboard the Enterprise.
The old woman pretended to scoop a dollop out of the can and rub it
all over her body.
Then she
pushed the can toward Debra.
Debra
put two fingers in the can and shoveled out a small mound, about the size
of an ounce of temple hash, and following the old woman’s example,
rubbed it all over herself.
The wrinkled hands then pushed the can toward Peter and me.
We scooped some of it out.
It
had the texture of gritty mud.
We
rubbed it vigorously up and down our arms and legs, necks and faces, and
took turns doing each other’s backs.
Then we both did Debra’s.
We
were starting to look like the gray swami.
Swinging her chin forth and back, she capped the tin.
She
replaced it in her basket and pulled out a few bundles of small twigs,
each tightly wrapped with a wide flat ribbon.
These she stuck in the ground around our clearing.
As she did so, she lingered for a moment in front of each of us and
put her face close to ours.
She
studied our eyes carefully and pulled the saffron cloth down from her face
so we could see hers.
They
were cloudy, yet deep.
They
seemed to have so much pity for us in them, as if we were the oddest of
the odd, the most vulnerable, and the neediest.
Then she reached into Peter’s bag and pulled out a pack of
matches.
How did she know they
were there?
It didn’t matter
anymore.
We were already
hypnotized.
She lit each of
the bundles and after she was sure they were smoldering properly, she
gently replaced the matches in Peter’s bag.
She bowed her head to us, and as she stood up, bowed to Ganesh.
Then she hobbled backwards a few feet before joining the other
pilgrims.
We wanted to thank her, but by the time we snapped out of our spell
she had disappeared.
So had
the mosquitoes. And the
ointment salved the bites we’d already gotten.
“No more mozzies!” Debra cheered.
Even the monkeys and frogs had turned down the volume.
Debra started croaking, Peter started howling, and I howled and
croaked with them, mocking our animal neighbors and ourselves.
We laughed and slept a bit and hoped the mosquito repellant worked
on snakes and spiders, too.
A few hours later, I sat up abruptly awakened by a horrible sound.
I had goose bumps.
I
thought it was a panther.
It
was only Debra loudly yawning, sitting up and stretching her arms wide.
The strange noise woke Peter up too.
He forced his eyes open, looked up at us, and asked matter of
factly, “Should I be scared of anything?”
We smiled.
“Only us
my dear.” she said, “Only us.”
There was a tank of water near the shrine. The water was cool,
clear, and refreshing.
We
splashed our faces and washed the sleep out of our eyes.
The rays of the morning sun caught the ripples we had made and the
water sparkled stars of sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.
We were now feeling fit for public consumption, so we joined the
pilgrims on the path once again.
“You a bit peckish, Pete?” asked Debra.
“‘ow
‘bout you, Giacco?”
“Oh yeah, Deb, I’m starving!” answered Peter.
“What
ya got?”
“Not a bloody thing, sweets.”
“I think we’re fasting,” I offered, “but we have to pretend
we’re doing it on purpose.
Otherwise
it doesn’t work.”
“Oh, better!
Much
better!” mocked Peter.
I was
flattered that he was using my expression.
Well, actually it was the expression I picked up from Jon and which
had worked its way into my repertoire of sarcastic remarks.
I supposed that others would pick it up from Peter and Debra during
their travels, and when they were back home in Australia.
It would be passed on and multiplied.
And though the source might never be known, it would make Jon a
legend in his own time!
We had walked for a day and a half.
It would be two full days in a few hours.
Peter grabbed my elbow.
“I
think Deb’s a bit puffed.
Can
we rest a bit?”
“I think it’s just a few more miles, sport, but we can take a
break.”
“Nah.
I’m good,
guys,” Debra said.
“Let’s
keep going.
I don’t want to
be pushing up zeds in the middle of the jungle one more night.”
“We’ll get there soon.
I
can feel the anticipation in the others.
Just take it one step at a time.
Walk in the way of the lord.”
“And whose lord might that be Giacco?” Peter asked in all
seriousness.
“Any lord you like, mate.
Any
lord at all!”
And I taught
them how to walk toe to heel.
After about half an hour, we noticed we were no longer passing
people, as was usually the case.
No.
Now we seemed to walk at precisely the same pace as everyone else.
Everyone seemed to be walking in the way of the lord.
And suddenly we saw how beautiful the people were, how amazing the
landscape was, how wondrous the whole world was, and how lucky we were to
be sharing it together.
February, 1972
We were lordwalking when the trail widened quickly.
There were now large open spaces ringed with ancient rock
outcroppings.
The trees
thinned.
The earth was nude.
Trails merged to become a road.
Streams of pilgrims merged to become a river.
We were lordwalking, toe to heel, toe to heel, as the road gently
angled downhill.
We were
lordwalking when just around a bend we saw the sun beginning its descent
over the long-awaited vista of the temples and shrines of Kataragama.
The road spilled us out onto the northeastern corner of the sacred
grounds.
We had seen so many
strange, beautiful, and dreamlike places, but this topped them all for
homespun simplicity!
We were a
bit dumbfounded as to what made this unpretentious site such an auspicious
one.
By that evening, we
understood.
Seven distinct hills dominated the southern horizon.
A perfectly flat plain dominated the foreground.
It was divided by the Kirivehera Road, a boulevard of dirt, which
ran the length of the plain.
Countless
other dusty roads branched off in wild directions, some taking to the
hills.
Between the roads were
fields of light green grass that looked like little parks.
The
Menik Ganja shimmered not far away, cupping the western side of the temple
grounds, separating them from the town of Kataragama itself.
The temples and shrines that dotted the area seemed organic, as if
they had emerged slowly over the ages from the dirt itself, and belonged
where they stood, deeply rooted.
Their
inelaborate architecture lent them an aura of mystery.
We were sure each of them concealed a brilliant gem of truth inside
to make up for the homeliness of their exteriors.
The largest and most intriguing was the temple to Lord Murugan at
the north end of the Kirivehera Road.
At the southern end of the road was the temple to the Goddess
Valli-amma, Lord Muruga’s consort.
Both
structures were rectangular and exceedingly plain.
Both had porches made of tree branches.
They looked like they could be forest dwellings.
The lesser shrines were randomly scattered about the grounds, along
with ashrams and shops that catered to the needs of the pilgrims.
Behind the temple to Lord Muruga was an ancient Buddhist dagoba.
Nearby
was a great Bodhi tree said to have been planted in the third century BC.
To the west of the temple to Valli-amma grew a huge Kohomba tree,
and in the southwest corner of the grounds, a mosque, whose weathered and
worn dome still retained enough gilding to bounce the sun’s light onto
the backdrop of golden hills.
Pilgrims worshipped at all the shrines, coming and going in
brilliantly colored garb.
But
the vast majority was here to worship Lord Murugan.
He was the main man.
The
main act.
In comparison, the
others were just side shows, opening acts for the rock star.
Groupies
of the Lord rolled forth and back on the hard stone entrance to the
temple, vying for his attention.
The late afternoon turned into evening.
Torches, lanterns and candles were lit, filling the air with
columns of smoke.
Smells of
many kinds tickled our noses, but camphor and coconut seemed to overpower
the rest.
Music, chanting,
singing or praying continually bombarded our eardrums.
Vendors lined the roads, each selling their particular specialty:
flowers, fruits, incense, herbs, beads, fabrics, powdered dyes, feathers,
various sizes of needles and hooks, and oddities I had never seen before
in my life.
I had no idea what
they were used for, but they were presented with great artistry on tables
that fronted their rickety stalls.
The service industries were not lacking either.
There were men and women who could cook you up a delicious meal,
stir you up a refreshing drink, give you a massage your muscle memory
would never forget, pierce any part of your body, braid your hair, tell
your fortune, read your mind.
Some in the crowd turned to wonder and admire Debra, all aglow with
her golden skin and her pierced nose and ears.
Peter and I had to dissuade her from getting anything else pierced!
We used hygiene as our primary reason.
She didn’t need much dissuasion when we came upon a high wooden
swing with a man dangling from wire cables whose ends had hooks pierced
through his back.
He willed
himself painless. He divorced
his mind from his body as the man at the bottom of the swing pushed him
higher and higher.
Another man was pushing a long and fairly thick needle through his
mouth.
First he pushed it
through one cheek, and then, his mouth open with the needle visible for
all to see, he pushed it through the other side.
Still others walked around dragging heavy objects tied to dozens of
hooks in their backs.
These
acts of self-mutilation were one way to
perform
kavadi to the Lord, the
spiritual rewards a thousand fold greater than the pain, or so they
believed.
Ceylon’s three main religions were here.
Every sect of every religion had shown up.
Every cult of every sect titillated the mind and body with their
own unique rituals, rites and ceremonies.
Some of them were beautiful and contemplative.
Others were monotonous and hypnotic.
Still others were just plain weird and sadomasochistic.
We
couldn’t comprehend such diversity of worship on such a grand scale as
this.
Yet a vendor who spoke
very good English said that this was only a precursor to
the
festival.
The Esala Festival
would occur during the height of summer, under a full moon.
He went on and on, describing the festival in detail and with more
adjectives than I knew existed.
He
enthralled and entertained us for a long time.
He beseeched us to come back again in a few months.
If we did, we would see Kataragama at the height of religious
intensity and madness.
If we
didn’t, we would miss the devotees who worked themselves into a trance
before walking paths of red-hot coals.
We would miss the grand mayhem and beauty of the water-cutting
ceremony.
We would miss the
horns blaring and the bells ringing, announcing the epic myth of a
prince-like deity who falls in love with a local girl.
A grand elephant procession parades through the crowds.
The elephants are adorned with large brocades made of silver and
gold threads, and beaded with gems and baubles.
The elephant who is the “chosen one” waits with thrill in his
big eyes when he reaches Lord Murugan’s temple.
Tonight, on this last day of the festival, he will get to be the
bearer of the Lord as manifested into the Kataragama yantram, a six-sided
star.
No one, except a few
priests, has ever actually seen the yantram, but it said to be made of
bronze and gold leaf.
The
priest reverently places the casketed yantram in an ornate carriage on the
elephant’s back.
The
elephant knows his Lord goes to his love who awaits him across the
universe, though in this case it was just down the street.
The bulky beast lumbers around the shrines in the vicinity of Lord
Murugan’s temple and then down the length of the boulevard.
Devotees, three and four deep, line the road, throwing flowers and
chanting.
When the elephant
reaches the Temple to Valli-amma, the yantram is placed inside where it
spends the night.
In the wee
hours of the morning, it is returned to Lord Murugan’s temple.
I asked the vendor what happens inside Valli’s temple once the
yantram is placed there.
He stage-whispered, “It is too powerful to talk about.
You must be here to feel it.
Then
you will understand the expressions of ecstasy on the faces of the
devotees.
But if you do not
return, all of this you will miss.”
He told his story with such passion and color, we felt we were
there, under that full moon during the height of summer.
We felt the climax of climaxes.
Just thinking about what must go on in Valli’s temple gave me a
hard-on.
If the religious
intensity were any more mad than what we were experiencing now, we might
go mad ourselves.
But it was
true.
Except for our
imaginations, we would miss out on this most sacred ritual.
What we didn’t miss out on were the swamis.
There were so many swamis I thought maybe it was a convention.
The International Association of Swamis.
Local 108!
Some just
sat quietly.
Others had small
groups around them listening attentively as they spoke, their chins tick-tocking
a timeless clock.
There were so many damn holy guys here, I thought there must be at
least one or two for me.
But
that didn’t do me any good, strolling among the hundreds of them.
I wouldn’t have known where to start.
How to cull the pros from the cons, the real from the false, the
illusion from the disillusion.
But
I reminded myself that I didn’t have to look for a teacher.
If I were meant to have one, he would find me.
Oh damn!
Wasn’t I always saying that?
Our ears were ringing, our eyes were rolling, and our heads were
spinning.
It was too much.
We couldn’t absorb one more bit of color, taste, sound, smell, or
touch, except maybe the touch of one another.
So we began to head for town.
We
drifted past the mosque, past the Goddess Valli, past the huge Kohomba
tree, and were half-way across the bridge that spanned the Menik Ganja
where we stopped to take a break.
I looked down into the shallow water and tried to imagine the
water-cutting ceremony that was the finale of the big summer festival.
It was a ceremony shared by both Buddhists and Hindus.
I tried to imagine men standing half-naked, body to body in the
shallow water, some genuflecting in it, others drinking it or filling
vessels to take home, while sacred elephants guarded the banks.
I tried to imagine all this, but was sure my imagination could not
come close to the reality of it.
How
could the summer festival be any grander or crazier than what we had
already experienced? What
we had already witnessed was enough to last a lifetime.
We crossed the bridge over the Menik Ganja into town.
It was hard to find a place to stay.
It took a couple of hours of asking directions.
Hardly anyone knew how to say, “I don’t know.”
Instead,
they always gave an answer that often brought us to dead-end, darkened
streets. We were more tired
than ever.
Eventually, we did find a decent guesthouse near the center of
town, close to the bus station.
We
stayed there a few nights, exploring each day the wonders of the temple
grounds and its visitors.
But
the guesthouse was noisy.
And
each night, odd smells drifted through our window.
Flares of dancing light brushed the walls.
It was only the smell and touch of each other that brought us any
peace.
Rising earlier than desired the last morning, I suggested we
perform our own water-cutting ceremony by taking a dip in the river.
We walked down to the Menik Ganja and slipped into the water.
It was only waist deep.
We
splashed and let the holy water rush past our bodies.
But because Peter and I were wearing no lungotis, our improvised
water-cutting ceremony turned into a cock and balls nibbling ritual for
small fish with little sharp teeth!
“Ouch! Peter cried, grabbing his balls.
“What we got here mate?” he asked, “bloody pirhana?”
“Ouch!
Ouch!
Ouch!” I blurted as the two of us made for the bank.
“Yikes!
That one hurt
bad!” I yelled.
Debra was in hysterics.
“Well,
you sports have such bloody tasty bait dangling, what’d ya expect?”
To end our stay in Kataragama on a positive note, I yelled across
the river to Lord Murugan, “That’s our kavadi to you and you’d
better give us a million-fold back in good karma for all the pain, you
bastard!” Debra could not keep from cracking up as Peter and I sat on the bank, lifting our lungis to inspect the damage. | |