Willie (45 page)

I kept an eye on Willie for eleven years, after I met him in Charlie's Bar in Piai near his house on Maui. Willie has an Indian bloodline. He is one of us. He will be very important in drawing the native races together.

There are Vietnam veterans living in caves in the mountains of Hawaii, guys who are fed up with society, who have turned their backs on the world, guys who are very violent toward intruders. But I have seen Willie go and talk to these veterans and coax them down from the mountains to take their place in peace once again. Willie has all the tools to accomplish great things, to cause the ancient mysteries to be revealed for healing and peace and power.

That is why he came to Maui in the first place. So we keep watch over him, because he is in fact an Old King.

Budrock is production manager and lighting director for the band
.

Poodie is Willie's stage manager
.

Gates Moore has driven Willie's bus for the last eight years
.

Kimo Alo is a Kahuna—one of the magician-priests of Hawaii
.

PART EIGHT

They're working while I'm missing you,

Those healing hands of time.

Soon they'll be dismissing you

From this heart of mine.

They'll lead me safely through the night,

And I'll follow as though blind;

My future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time.

They let me close my eyes just then,

Those healing hands of time.

Soon they'll let me sleep again,

Those healing hands of time.

So already I've reached mountain peaks,

And I've just begun to climb;

I'll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time.

In the winter of 1980, Connie and I slipped off for a vacation to the Kauai Surf, a beach hotel in the town of Lahaina on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. We'd been there about two days when Bud Shrake phoned me from Hanalei on the north end of the island. He had big news. Our three-year-old movie project,
Songwriter
, was a cinch deal again, for at least the fourth time in the past eight months. Yet another agreement with a studio was set in wet concrete. “No bullshit,” Bud told me. “No way any assholes will back out on us this time. The concrete is drying around their knees even as I speak.”

He said why didn't Connie and me come up to Hanalei and celebrate? Red Johnson, who owns Mariposa Air in Princeville, would fly down and pick us up in a helicopter.

Red planted his helicopter on the lawn of the Kauai Surf. Connie and me got aboard with the rotor blades whipping the leaves in the palm trees and fanning sand out of the grass. Red is a Korean War chopper vet who came to the islands and stayed. He has a red beard and sly, mischievous eyes and smile, like he's only giving you about half the clues but you must trust he knows what's he's doing. We flew north to Hanalei over maybe the most dramatic and sensual scenery on this earth. Kauai is called the garden island. Green mountains
rise straight up from the jungle behind the beaches and disappear into the clouds. Waterfalls come down the mountains in constant torrents from the forests in the clouds where it rains sixty feet a year. From Red's helicopter we could see brown lava peaks poking through the breaks in the clouds above the timberline.

We fluttered down in a field near Dan and June Jenkins' house, where Bud was staying. They had mountains and waterfalls out their back door, white beach and the surf in front beyond a stand of ironwood trees.

Dan and Bud ran out, ducking under the rotor blades, and climbed into the helicopter. Red shot us into the sky again.

Some of us—not Red Johnson, I hope to this day—lit up cigars rolled out of Kauai supernatural weed. Red instructed us to put on the big, padded earphones at each seat. He was playing one of my albums. I settled back in the seat, next to Connie and Dan, dragging deeply off the local herb, listening to a familiar voice in the stereo earphones, and I was totally at one with the universe, like an eagle, when—
Whoa! What the fuck was this?

The earphones became silent. We were flying straight into the side of a huge green mountain. We were going fast, and J could see the treetops just below us, and the vast green wall looming straight ahead. I glanced at Red. He was leaning back, his hand on the stick, grinning like a maniac. I realized I was utterly stoned. Heading directly and rapidly into certain death against the green wall of the mountain with a madman at the wheel. Connie squeezed my arm. She understood. We loved each other. The big moment of transition was at hand.

Suddenly the stereo earphones boomed in “Zarathustra” by Strauss—the
2001
movie music. It was a shattering, soul-shaking sound: the enormous horns and strings, zinging electrically through our entire bodies as Red shot the copter absolutely straight up. The green foliage was only a few feet in front of our eyes. Overwhelmed by Strauss pouring through the stereo earphones, I was ready to experience death—and here we went, up and up and impossibly up, zooming straight up the green wall of the mountain. And now we popped over the peak into the glorious light of a setting sun in the Pacific—just as the music struck a heart-stunning crescendo and our spirits flew off into the universe.

You talk about a rush! It was a mystical experience. By mystical I do not mean mysterious, weird, inexplicable, or unreal. Mysticism is all about the self and knowledge of the universe.

Have you ever wondered how it is possible for music to give you
the rush I am talking about? The feeling is like the power of the stars exploding inside your body. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what it really is.

The purely physical impact of music works this way: the nerves of your body feel the vibrations of the music. The vibrations of your nervous system pick up the tempo with the vibrations of the music until you feel pumped up mentally, physically, and emotionally. What is it that passes through the air from the piano or the violin or the orchestra that sets your nerves into spontaneous arousal? You can't see it. A great law is at work here.

After the Strauss rush, we were still tingling when Red set down the copter on another peak. There was just enough room for the machine and the five of us to stand on it without a foot to spare. We looked out at the fire of the sunset rolling on the ocean waves, and down at the green fields and blue rivers of Hanalei far below. It was like standing on the roof of Eden. My heart was full with the thrill and beauty of it. I don't fear death, because there is no death. I am afraid of a root canal or a barium enema but I am not at all afraid of what we call death.

The next time I saw Dan and June Jenkins was at Elaine's saloon in Manhattan. It was a year after our soul flight with Red Johnson. My lung had collapsed in Maui. I had written the
Tougher than Leather
album in the hospital. We were crowded around a table in the front room.

Dan said, “What's your new album?”

It was very noisy. Elaine was hugging the writers and the stars who came in, directing them to tables, confronting the corporate biggies with their ladies in high-heeled shoes waiting in line at the register.

“Reincarnation,” I said.

Dan squinted at me over the top of his glasses and lit another Winston with his gold Dunhill. Pepi, the waiter, put down another J&B and water—Dan calls them “young scotches.”

“Red Carnations?” Dan said. “Great title.”

I leaned forward through the noise.

“It's about reincarnation,” I said.

“About what?” Dan said, bending toward me and cocking an ear.

“Reincarnation,” I yelled.

Dan sat up. He pondered a moment and sipped his young scotch.

“No,” he said. “Red Carnations is a much better title.”

June, who is a beautiful black-haired woman with Cherokee blood, shifted over to me and said, “What's he talking about?”

I said, “Dan don't think I know what reincarnation means.”

Even as a child, I believed I had been born for a purpose. I had never heard the words reincarnation or Karma, but I already believed them, and I believed in the spirit world.

I remember walking down the road toward the cotton fields in Abbott when I was six or seven years old, and finding a piece of quartz. I didn't know it was a mineral. I thought it was a rock, a curious shiny purple stone. The more I looked at it in the morning sunlight, the deeper I saw the shapes and colors and intricate intensity in the quartz. It felt very warm in my hand. I glanced down at the ground and saw tiny bits of rock shining up at me from the dirt, and I had a flash of illumination. This piece of quartz was not a separate thing from the shiny bits, or from anything else. Everything was one thing held together by some power.

In school and in church they tried to knock this awareness out of me by teaching other ways of viewing the world, but I never lost it entirely.

Now I know that what I was feeling in the quartz was the energy of the spirit. Glass and metal, flesh and wood, stone and plants—all are formed by the great force that radiates through space as vibrating spirit. It is hard to understand that just because your five senses tell you the chair you are sitting in is solid, your chair is in fact vibrating with energy as the atoms and molecules that form the chair are held together by a force strong enough not to dump you on your ass. Some people can feel these vibrations through their nervous system. But you can't see the vibrations any more than you can see music or see the vibrations that make a magnet work.

I recently saw an interview with one of the hostages who had escaped his kidnappers in Lebanon after a few months of being blindfolded and chained alone in a room. He told the interviewer that during the first week of confinement, he started talking to himself. Then suddenly he realized he wasn't talking only to himself—he was talking to God. “It's true,” he said. “I can talk to God, and it's real. Those guys in the Old Testament who said they talked to God, they really did it. I never believed any of this stuff before. I thought anybody who said they talked to God was crazy. But in that room I found out I was talking to God, and God was answering me through my intuition—not a Charlton Heston voice booming through the roof. God was talking to me through my inner being. You can talk to God, too. Try it, you can do it.”

The interviewer switched the subject, clearly a little nervous, but you could tell from the look on the ex-hostage's face that he was a changed person. It had taken an extreme circumstance to get his full
attention, but when he began to hear his inner voice responding to his cries and his anger, he learned to talk to God.

You can learn to do it.

Sit on top of a mountain in the Hill Country at sunset, looking off at the mountains and ridges poking up as far as you can see to the west, and pretty soon your inner self begins to see the smoke signals put up by the ancient Indians on the distant ridges, one after the other, and you will reach an inner peace that becomes a conversation with God. This is called meditation, and it is a much easier way to reach God than being handcuffed in a bare room in Beirut. But you don't need either a peaceful, meditative situation or a hostile, threatening situation to talk to God. I talk to God all the time.