Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (15 page)

On day eleven, I called Shelly to request more analgesia. I told him that it was getting more painful. He was concerned, and having decided that I was no longer a reliable witness of my own problem, he wanted to fly up the next day without telling me. He was willing to do anything that he and I thought reasonable. He’s not opposed to pain relief, having had some pain in his life, but he really wanted me on penicillin. He said, “I’m going to prescribe some dicloxacillin. Pick it up when you go into Ukiah for the oxycodone.”

Nothing in the medical literature said anything about penicillin for
Loxosceles
bites. Surgery seemed to be the only answer. In my case, with ten bites, surgery would be a massacre. I would lose the function of one knee, maybe an elbow, and it would leave deep scars everywhere. Big hunks of my skin and my muscles would be laying there in the stainless steel bucket by the time it was over.

I decided that I had nothing to lose. I picked up the prescription in Ukiah and started with half a gram of dicloxacillin at about three in the afternoon. I took another half gram at six, another at nine, and then I went to sleep with the aid of the oxycodone. I woke up at three in the morning and amazingly, I was not sticking to the sheets! My wounds didn’t hurt. I went into the bathroom to the mirror. The wounds, although still round, were turning into skateboard abrasions. The most beautiful scabs I had ever seen were forming on my arms and legs.

My bout of necrotic arachnidism was over. Shelly Hendler had discovered the cure for brown recluse spider wounds.

We didn’t scientifically prove it because we haven’t tested it again and again. We’re busy, and I, for one, don’t care to
expose myself to the brown recluse again to see if it works. But I would definitely recommend dicloxacillin for brown recluse spider wounds. Unless you are allergic to penicillin, it won’t hurt you. I kept taking it for about a week until the scabs were dry and falling off. It worked on all ten wounds.

As for the brown recluse spider, I say kill the bastards any time you see them. They have six eyes and eight legs. I think that’s too many of each. Biodiversity be damned. I’d be glad to step on the last survivor of the
Loxosceles
genus personally.

S
OME PEOPLE HAVE
experiences that are so strange, they attribute them to alien intervention of some kind. Close encounters of the first kind, second kind, third kind, etc., as though alien intervention would always fall into certain categories. I had one of those experiences myself. To say it was aliens is to assume a lot. But to say it was weird is to understate it. It was extraordinarily weird.

In 1975 I bought some property about ten miles inland along the Navarro River in Mendocino County, California. Rather than call it “The Firs” or “Sunshine Hill” or “The Mullis Place,” I called it “The Institute for Further Study.” Somewhat later, I renamed part of it “Fire and the Rose Automatic Tree Farm.” Tree farms were favored by the IRS as a form of investment, and I was planting trees, they were automatically growing, and my pond was an earthen reservoir from which the water to grow trees was being taken. So I became a tree farmer. I still am. I never had the heart to cut the trees down, so I didn’t show a profit within five years, and I can’t claim it any more. America is stronger because of my trees, and I’m proud of them, even though my business failed. I don’t think that had anything to do with the fact that one night I got
spirited away by mysterious beings. I’m almost sure they weren’t IRS people.

I was living in Berkeley at the time, and I’d drive up to my property on Friday nights. One night in 1985 I got there just around midnight. I had driven up alone, and I had passed the functional sobriety test—I had made it through the mountains.

I turned on the kitchen lights, put my bags of groceries on the floor, and grabbed a heavy, black flashlight. I was headed to the john, which was about fifty feet west of the cabin, down a hill. Some people thought it was a little eerie at night, but I didn’t—I liked the night. I liked sitting in the dark on the custom carved redwood seat. I liked the sound of owls in the valley. But that night, I never made it to the seat.

The path down to the john heads west and then takes a sharp turn to the north after a few earthen steps. Then it runs level for about twenty feet. I walked down the steps, turned right, and then at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed. It seemed to be a raccoon. I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.

The raccoon spoke. “Good evening, doctor,” it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, “Hello.”

The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house. What went through my head as I walked down toward my house was, “What the hell am I doing here?” I had no memory of the night before. I thought maybe I had passed out and spent the night outside. But nights are damp in the summer in Mendocino, and my clothes were dry, and they weren’t dirty.

The lights in the cabin were dim. I quickly turned off the switch. Miles from Pacific Gas and Electric, I had my own solar panels and a couple of batteries under the house. It was adequate but not deluxe. I was always careful about the lights. The grocery bags were still on the floor, and I started putting them away. The freshly squeezed orange juice from the Safeway in Healdsburg was no longer cold. My memory of the night before was slowly returning. I recalled that I had headed to the john with my nice new black flashlight. Where the hell was that?

All of a sudden, it came back to me. The talking, glowing raccoon! Had that happened? It was as clear a memory as my early morning brain allowed. Yes. I remembered the little bastard and his courteous greeting. I remembered his little shifty black eyes. I remembered the way my flashlight had looked on his already glowing face. Where was my flashlight?

I walked to the john right away. I wasn’t afraid of finding something scary. I wanted that fucking raccoon to be there. It wasn’t—and neither was the flashlight. I had a feeling nothing would be there. I had a feeling I was going to feel empty, frustrated, and confused, and I was.

I was also sleepy. I went back to the house and climbed in bed and slept for several hours. When I awoke, the experience took on a much sharper reality. I checked once more for the flashlight. I still couldn’t find it, even after I expanded my search around the property. All the facts—my dry clothes, the house lights on all night, my flashlight—were things that I couldn’t deny, and yet I didn’t panic. I couldn’t call anyone because I didn’t have phone service. The whole thing seemed totally perplexing.

I searched again for my new flashlight, to no avail. I decided to go about my regular business of the day. There seemed to be no way to investigate it further. The most unusual thing about it was that it did not bother me as much as it should have. I decided to clean out a pipe.

There is a spring in the most beautiful part of my woods. Water from that spring normally flows through a pipe and feeds a pond. I’d noticed the week before that the pipe needed cleaning, so late in the afternoon, I headed into the woods with a few tools. The woods are about 200 yards from the house across an open meadow.

Just inside the shade of the trees, I began to panic. I turned around and walked as rapidly as I could toward the daylight. I didn’t run or look over my shoulder—I walked fast. I didn’t want anything to know that I was panicking. When I got well out into the open, I turned and looked back into the woods. “What the hell am I doing?” I had no idea. But I wouldn’t go back in there. Each time I looked in that direction, I felt more certain that I wouldn’t go back in there.

Whatever happened to me last night must have happened there, in those woods. I remembered that the road I had been walking on that morning when I came to my senses came toward my house from that direction. I got the hell home and didn’t go back. I didn’t tell anybody about it.

Six months later I walked in those woods with my two boys. They were five and eight, and with them I somehow felt more comfortable. We spent a little time there. I unclogged the pipe. But I didn’t return alone for some time, and I still didn’t talk about it.

It was weird having a part of my property where I didn’t feel
comfortable. I was in Mendocino a lot of the time by myself. Why had I suddenly developed an irrational fear of a place I’d always enjoyed?

A year or two passed. One Saturday night when I was up by myself for the weekend, I decided to take matters in my own hands with some therapy. I had wanted to go clear out that goddamned pipe again during the afternoon. I had assembled the tools. But I had resisted going over there. Instead of going dancing at the Rose Bud saloon that night, I would do some psychotherapy.

I had purchased another black metal flashlight to replace the one I had lost. I taped it to the barrel of an AR-15. This is a weapon not everyone has, thank God. I was excused from the Vietnam War, so the first time I saw one was when a friend brought it to Mendocino. When I saw it, it looked like a toy from Mattel. Ron assured me that it wasn’t. The clip held about twenty shells, and it would fire a new one every time you pulled the trigger. They were legal, and I felt good having it around—my place was isolated and had no phone.

With a five-D-cell flashlight strapped to the barrel of the AR-15 with black tape, I felt like John Wayne. I walked out to the woods. I stood outside the first trees and yelled into the dark. “This is my property, and I’m coming in. Anything moves—I’ll shoot it. If it doesn’t move, I may shoot it anyhow. I’m pissed off.” I was yelling really loud. “Get out of my woods. Now. If you can’t move, scream. Maybe I’ll have mercy. Maybe not. Get the fuck out of my woods.” John Wayne would not have said “fuck,” but times have changed.

I felt like that kind of screaming would at least clear out anybody who was innocently there. It was also part of the therapy. My D-cells cut a clean beam into the darkest part of the
forest. There was a giant old hollowed bay laurel growing right out of a little waterfall full of ferns. I was fifty feet away from it. I loved it, but it had become the focus of my fears. John Wayne, at my side, wearing the same kind of hat I had donned for the occasion, said, “Let ’em have it, kid.” I opened up with the AR-15 and riddled the area of the laurel. “Blow ’em to hell, kid!”

I emptied one clip and loaded another, walking around and screaming and firing at anything that looked dark. I didn’t shoot up in the air—I’m not antisocial.

The psychotherapy worked. I hoped that I hadn’t shot any holes in my water line. I walked out of the woods knowing that in the morning, without the AR-15 or the hat, I could come back. And I did.

Some time later I was in a bookstore in La Jolla. I noticed a book on display by Whitley Strieber called
Communion
. On the cover was a drawing that captured my attention. An oval-shaped head with large inky eyes staring straight ahead.

I bought the book and immediately began reading it. It was Strieber’s personal account of being abducted by aliens. He wrote of waking up in his cabin in the woods of New York State and seeing an owl staring at him. He spoke to the owl, then two beings, who looked like the figure on the cover of the book, appeared in his doorway and escorted him out of the house. He wrote that he had smelled burning cinnamon and smoldering cheese around them, so I burned some myself to see if that might excite a memory, but it didn’t.

While I was reading this book my daughter, Louise, called from Portland. “Dad, there’s a book I want you to read. It’s called
Communion.”

“I’m reading it right now.”

She began to tell me what had happened to her in Mendocino. She had arrived at the house with her fiancé late one night. And just like me, she had wandered down the hill. She was gone for three hours. Her fiancé had spent the time frantically searching for her everywhere, calling her name, but she was nowhere to be found.

The first thing she remembered was walking the same road on which I’d found myself, hearing her fiancé calling her name. She had no idea where she had been.

When she saw the book, she had experienced the same sort of vague recognition as I had. After she finished telling me her story, I told her about my experience. It was the first time I’d told anyone. I asked her about talking raccoons that glowed in the dark.

“I don’t remember anything,” she said.

Strange things have happened in Mendocino. My closest neighbor there, Alex Champion, who was in graduate school with me at Berkeley, thinks that there are a lot of mysteries in the valley. He doesn’t think they cause problems, as long as we recognize that we are the Real Things and that we are in charge. We only have to take command, he says. I think John Wayne would agree.

I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened.

O
NE SUMMER MY
elder son Christopher had three jobs. He was a hardworking boy. His younger brother Jeremy, who had zero jobs that summer, decided that Chris was a loser and a dweeb. I like Jeremy in spite of his superior attitude toward everybody in the solar system because he knows how to buy groceries for a whole week, how to transform them into splendid meals, and how to shame Christopher into cleaning up. To give Jeremy something to do over his vacation, I calculated how many days old he was and suggested he keep track of it on a calendar. After a moment of consideration, Jeremy announced that I was a loser and, sadly, also a dweeb.