Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (10 page)

I opened the vial and let the green-brown resin ooze onto the cannabis in a thin, honeylike trail. Twisted up a bone and offered it to Billy. He shook his head.

“It's for the two of you.”

“Ambassador?”

Dengue made a peace sign, and I lodged the joint between his fingers. He brought it to his lips, sucked when he heard the
flick-whoosh
of the lighter, then leaned back and puffed until smoke encircled his dome like clouds around some bulbous mountaintop.

You had to be vigilant, blazing with Dengue. He hit a spliff until you stopped him or his fingers burned—got lost in the experience, forgot the protocols. This time, though, his head lolled after the third hit, one palm covering his eyes and the other resting on his rising-falling stomach, joint forgotten between two knuckles and a trail still twirling from the tip.

I leaned over and extracted it, then mean-mugged Billy.

“You and me,” I said, “after this, we've got some shit to sort out.”

I'd been going for
don't think you're off the hook
, but I failed to tough up the inflection, and instead it came out more like
you're gonna call me, right?

“Travel willingly and well,” my father said, and made one of those palms-pressed-together prayer-bows, which I fucking hate. Corny on old white yoga dudes, peace-and-blessings-type Negroes, and everybody else who buys weed from me.

“I'll try,” I said, and took a wicked draw.

The smoke hit the back of my throat, and right away I knew this was different from any drug I'd ever fucked with. I pulled again and felt as if every organ and muscle, every molecule in my body, wanted to simultaneously shit and puke and come.

Just so you know, I did plenty of research in anticipation of committing these events to paper, went so far as to email my former Whoopty Whoo Ivy League We's A Comin' Academy faculty road dog, David “D-Fine” Feingold, and read every drug book he recommended: Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson on himself, even old A-Hux strolling through the doors of perception. I was hoping I could jack somebody's approach.

But first of all, with all due respect to the 1960s and LSD and ether and mescaline and Timothy Leary, none of that synthesized domestic product can carry the jockstrap of a single vial Billy brought back from the rainforest. With acid and MDMA, the chemicals sort of drape themselves over your consciousness, and you peer through them at the world. This was another thing entirely—world-obliterating, world-creating—and it was coming at me fast.

And second of all, I don't get what's supposed to be so great about Hunter Thompson. His shtick gets old about fifty pages in, if you ask me.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
was better, but it didn't give me anything I could steal, since a) it's pretty clear that Tom is sticking to what they taught him in journalism school, i.e. “get as close to your subject as possible by listening and talking and observing, but under no circumstances zonk out together in a Day-Glo school bus crawling with venereal diseases, no matter how tempting it may be,” and b) as expressive and zeitgeisty as his punctuation is, it's not the kind of thing you can bite without looking like a biter. Only one person per grammatical system is allowed to express psychotropic euphoria by writing shit like psycho::::::tropic!!!!freaking::::::eu—pho—ri:::::: a::::a::::a!!!!, and it kind of reads like a cheerleading routine even when he does it.

I went shuddery and weak and closed my eyes, trying to go with the feeling, get beyond it, breathe deep and steady. I don't know how long I did that, but it seemed like forever, and when I opened my eyes again the sensation had passed and everything was pitch black. All around me was a huge vibrating sound, a constant hum that if you listened to carefully you began to understand was made up of the rustling of plants in the breeze and the rush of the breeze through the air and the syncopated drip-splash-evaporation of water droplets and the buzz of insects and the call of parrots and the dart of lizards and the decomposition of dead leaves and the growth of trees. And yet it was all one web of sound, so harmonious that if you didn't concentrate on listening it disappeared, became like silence.

I listened for maybe half an hour, isolating and digging on different parts the way you might check out the drums, then the bass, then the piano. Light started to suffuse the world, a little at a time, as if the sun was rising, but I knew it was midday and my vision was coming back. I saw what I'd heard—and heard so well that seeing it was no surprise. That made me trust the resin, whose choice it must have been for me to listen before I looked.

First were the trees, so lush and massive they canopied the sky. Then great shafts of mottled light, beaming through them like reverse searchlights and playing over the fluorescent, spongy moss and loamy earth. And finally the countless layers and levels of green that lay between, intertwined and restless and alive: with birds, with bugs, with monkeys I heard but could not see, and most of all alive with itself, as if Life were—I don't know, maybe this sounds stupid, but as if Life were this string of energy extending from each plant and animal and connecting each of them to all the others in a pattern so complex it formed a web like the web of sound. To be somewhere so peaceful and chaotic and unbent by human desire was to understand how dead and colonized most of the planet is. And also to glimpse something of the circular eternity of an experience we only see as a straight line, running from birth to death.

As I stood thinking these thoughts, a new sound, strange and foreign, imposed itself over the others. I turned toward it and saw three men, a hundred feet away, walking in single file. They followed the course of a path so faint I never would have picked it out. But now, tracing the distance between us, I saw that I was standing on it. I braced myself to be seen, and just as quickly realized I would not be, understood that although I saw and heard, I did not
stand
, would not follow them by
walking
. I was not here bodily, but in some other way. I knew that one of those approaching was Billy, and that whatever I experienced was what the resin—or the consciousness behind it, which was and was not his—deemed essential.

The first man came upon me: brown-skinned and black-haired, with eyes like polished onyx. He was clothed in two strings of red and white beads, one laid diagonally across each shoulder to form an
X
over his chest. A thin cord encircled his waist, and his foreskin was attached to it by a small clasp—so he didn't flop around when he walked, I guess. Through his septum ran a copper rod; hammered silver-dollar circles of the metal sat in both earlobes. His chest was flat, his body smooth and faintly muscled. He walked neither slowly nor fast, looked not at the ground before him but at the tops of trees and the flight paths of birds, as another man would scan a newspaper. I might have put his age at fifty, and been off by a decade in either direction.

The next man walked twenty paces behind. He wore the same beads and cord. A copper rod pierced each cheek like a set of whiskers. He was younger and taller, with the same teardrop-shaped eyes, and he sang to himself in a high, flutey voice, so quietly that the jungle swallowed up the song the instant he passed.

Last came Billy, thin and haggard, in cutoff jeans and sneaks, the straps of a rucksack digging into his bare shoulders. His hair was pulled into a wisp of a ponytail, his face scarlet and scaly-raw beneath his tan. He glanced up from the path and our eyes met, or at least I stared straight into his, and in that instant I went from thinking Billy's skin looked like it hurt to feeling the sting myself—and also knowing that it was the farthest thing from his mind, which was muddled by deprivation and electric with excitement, fear.

Getting delirious and lightheaded is a bitch when you're not even there. But that's what Billy felt, so the sensation hit me too, and I had to retreat a little ways into myself to keep my shit together. My father could barely put one foot in front of the other, and if the Dickclip Brothers noticed, they didn't seem to care. For a few seconds I felt helpless, irate, and then I kind of reached into Billy's consciousness, and realized I was wrong. Billy's state was deliberate, necessary, a preparation for the ritual to come. The knowledge bloomed inside me, the way the light had spread across the rainforest. I no more questioned it than I had the gift of vision.

Each moment, Billy's mind and body were becoming more and more my own. Following him along the path involved no choice. Knowing what he knew required no exertion. He was an apprentice to the men leading the way, and under their supervision he'd undertaken
La Dieta
, the diet: forsaken salt, sugar and human contact for months, made himself like a man wandering the desert so that his ego might recede and the spirits he sought to know would respond to his body's calls for help.

The path led to a small clearing, a spot where fire had burned back the jungle. The shamans were seated on a fallen log. Billy crouched before them, slid his backpack to the ground, unzipped it and removed a plastic kid's mug festooned with pictures of Gobots. The poor fucking Gobots, man. It was perfect, somehow. I don't know if you remember, but Gobots were the wack American-made answer to Transformers. Even their names were stupid. The leader was called Leader-1. The helicopter was Cop-Tur.

Billy passed the elder shaman a plastic bottle, half full of murky liquid. The man held it up to the light, uttered a few jungle-bitten syllables, and the word
bazaguanco
passed into my mind: from his lips or Billy's brain, I don't know which. My father trickled some bazaguanco into the Gobots cup and swirled it around, heart thudding in his/my chest. It smelled of warm, vegetative decay, like the garden compost bin at Karen's married-to-a-doctor homegirl's place in Woodstock, where we used to spend weekends once in a while until they got divorced.

The bazaguanco tasted like it smelled, and Billy gulped it down with eyes squeezed shut. I remembered what he'd said about the recipe for the resin, and as the brew bubbled in the cauldron of Billy's gut and the shattering of this reality by the next grew imminent, I decided it made sense. There were a gazillion plants up in this motherfucker. Which three or four could be combined into drugs or medicine was not the kind of thing you puzzled out by trial-and-error.

I'd like to keep coming up with fresh ways to describe the sensation of getting knocked dick-in-the-dirt by unfathomable rainforest drugs, but honestly, I don't even know where to begin. I read up on bazaguanco later, and what every new age gringo seeker and traditional-yet-Internet-savvy herbal healer and psychopharmacology doctoral candidate seems to agree on is that if there is a God, this is the shit that gets
Him
high.

People drink it and fall down energetic wormholes into fiery hells; they float through internal eternities as specks of light and then return to earth with the worst hangovers of their lives and no more pesky heroin addiction, no more crippling lifelong depression. No more cancer. They write lengthy accounts of interdimensional sojourns and terrifying confrontations, talk about vomiting up the dark matter of their deepest fears and traumas, poking at the goo with a stick the next day unable to discern what it could be. They fucking ramble on and on, and even if you've taken bazaguanco yourself, or smoked some other crazy shit and done the virtual tour, these accounts read as half amazing, half gobbledygook, which is why I'm dancing around all of it like that fucking dude Britney Spears married who tried to rap.

The younger shaman took a thin mat from the pack and unrolled it on the ground. Billy lay down. The elder leaned toward him, elbows on his knees.

Now our teachers will be yours
. Billy nodded, exhaled a long, shuddery breath, and closed his eyes. As scared and
dieta
-diminished as he was, I sensed relief. He'd had his fill of these guys, these middlemen.

And then the bazaguanco took over and we were falling through blackness—and I mean fast, none of this tra-la-la trippy float-falling you see in movies, I'm talking a straight plummet like somebody threw us off a rooftop. Flailing, windmilling, bracing to hit bottom any second and pancake, and all the while it was getting colder and colder until breathing hurt, the lungs too tender for the harsh air. From the depths came a fast-rushing sound and then bats were everywhere, thousands of them shooting past us, their stink and screams filling the emptiness, the bright yellow malevolent streaks of their eyes all that was visible.

We fell through them and then everything slowed down. The air grew warmer, thicker, turned gelatinous. Instead of falling we slid through it, slower and slower and then not at all, and it oozed into every orifice, filled our noses and ears and assholes, our mouths and eyes, the most invasive and unpleasant sensation you can imagine. I could hear my teeth grinding, or rather Billy's—this snot-air conducted sound the way water does, amplified and nuanced it. You know what I mean if you've ever cracked your knuckles while lying in a bathtub, ears submerged, and skeeved yourself out at how calcified and loud and brittle the bone-on-bone grind sounds.

A rhythmic pounding shook the world, and for an instant I imagined us from the outside, if there was an outside: we were slivers of orange rind suspended in a giant Jell-O mold, and somebody, Bill Cosby probably, was banging his fist against the table.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Each reverberation loosened the mucus for a moment and we slid, stopped, slid again. Suddenly we were through it, free of the awful suck and squelch. I'd imagine being born felt something like this, except instead of blinding hospital lights and sweat-drenched maternal ecstasy there was only greater panic because we were underwater and whereas before, mollycoddled by snot, we had somehow been able to breathe, now we most certainly could not.

The water was clear, tasted like river—subtle hints of stone, lichen and mud, a sweet finish that lingers on the palate, pairs well with poached salmon and death by drowning—and it was writhing with snakes, yellow-and-black striped, above and below us, a goddamn commuter highway. The name
naka naka
popped into my mind,
poisonous
hot on its heels. And still the
boom, boom
tremoring the water, riling the snakes. We swam toward it. My/Billy's lungs burned. Any second they were sure to forfeit, fill with water and doom us to a mossy riverbed demise.