Long Past Stopping (38 page)

The light in the room was blinding. I had to squint as I threw my legs over the side of the bed. My sight adjusted quickly, and I could see the two other figures in their beds. God only knew what was really going on with them. We were told to never try to get out of bed without the nurse, but she was slumped over in a chair. I just wanted to take my piss and get back to the desert scene as soon as possible. I was worried I would miss the person who was supposed to bring me the message while I was in the bathroom. I disconnected myself from the EKG machine, rolled the IV stand around so the cord wouldn't get caught on the bed, and stood up to walk to the bathroom.

My leg didn't do what it was told, though. It came up when I leaned forward to take a step, but for some reason it didn't go back down to catch me. I reached out to grab the IV stand and catch my balance, but my arms weren't following directions either. I fell down and knocked over the IV stand, waking the nurse, who quickly ran over to help and, with some effort, got me back on the bed. She kept shushing me as I tried unsuccessfully to apologize. My mouth was doing the same thing as the rest of my body. My brain was sending it very clear signals, but I could hear my voice coming out like mush. The nurse got me one of those old-person walkers, and, with her help, I was able to get to the bathroom, where she insisted that I sit down on the toilet since she didn't want to have to pick me up again.

I didn't like it in there. It was way too bright, and staring at my hairy ivory-white legs made me sick to my stomach. But I could tell that there was a vital message here in the bathroom that I desperately needed to find. My pale legs, the jet-black hairs sticking out of them, the sterile bathroom, the window covered in dark plastic, the bottle of liquid disinfectant hand soap, the plunger. Every object in the bathroom was vibrating at its own frequency, but coming together as a whole to create an overwhelming hum that was coming from everywhere and nowhere. The key I was looking for was somehow hidden in all these things, but I couldn't find it. Sitting on the toilet to take a piss seemed extremely symbolic of something, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out of what. I needed to get back to the desert and try to get some more information.

With the help of the walker I was able to stand and pull up my sweatpants all by myself, and was even doing a slow but okay job of making my
way to the door, when I caught my reflection in the mirror, and stopped dead in my tracks. Staring back at me was an ashy-looking dead person. I could make it move, but there was no sign of life behind it, just gray flesh with a week's worth of stubble sticking out of it. I wasn't so much shocked as fascinated that every inanimate object in the room was vibrantly pulsing with some kind of inner life, while the face looking back at me—the only living thing in the room—appeared dead. I leaned in real close to see if there was anything in my eyes…a spark…a message…a hidden meaning…. All I saw was nothing.

The nurse came in before I had a chance to get too deep into thinking about the mirror. She was clearly alive, colors and vibrations flying off her like a sprinkler system.

“Now, whach you lookin fo in dat mirra?” she chuckled. “Come now, and hush yo'self, fo you bother dem othas.” I barely understood the nurse through her heavy Caribbean accent, but I had a pretty good idea what that chuckle meant. Our housekeeper, Laurel, had made the same sound whenever she laid eyes on me.
You white folks sho is crazy
was how I translated it, and I couldn't have agreed more.

When she put the headphones back on and I closed my eyes, I expected to be back in the desert, but the desert was gone. I would never get to meet whomever was supposed to give me the message. Instead I'm in a basement at the Art Institute watching what appears to be a student art film. It's a loop of a fast zoom-in on a five-year-old kid sitting on a set of stairs staring vacantly at the camera. The film loops over, and over, and over, and over, and the kid looks so sad, incomprehensibly sad. I can feel the sadness, and I know what he feels like because it's me. No big revelation there. We were told we would probably confront scenes from the past, but why is he so fucking sad?

I get up and walk toward the screen. I want to see the kid's eyes, but the closer I get, the more I can feel the sadness coming from him. I realize too late that, instead of looking at the kid's eyes, I should get the fuck out of there and go looking for some ancient Celts, or wise elders, or wood nymphs…or whomever else I'm supposed to meet in a psychedelic journey. It's too late, however. His gaze controls me, and I can't escape. I get closer, hoping my shadow will block out the image coming from the projector, along with incredible sadness that's coming from him, but this movie doesn't work that way. It just keeps looping, and, as I expect, the kid's eyes are the same ones I just saw in the bathroom mirror.

The eyes suck me in, and now I'm sitting on the stairs watching, trying to figure it all out, as new scenes loop before me. They're no longer
film loops, though, and I can't connect any of it. A mushroom cloud, then me landing on my bloody knees while attempting to ride my new unicycle. All I can do is watch as my knees get bloodier every time the loop repeats. Then a new scene starts creeping: a mass grave with hundreds of rotting bodies in it. Small dark bodies with huge bellies, and the deafening sound of buzzing flies. Then I'm in a car with my mom trying to pronounce the word
XING
underneath the two kids on the street sign that we've now passed at least fifty times. I can't figure it out for the life of me, no matter how many chances I get when the loop starts again, and again, and again…but she was so proud of me when I figured out yield. Then a stranger is handing me a twenty-dollar bill in the bathroom airport and telling me I am a good whistler. Then I'm trying to pop a zit on my back. I get the zit, and it pops over and over, zooming in, leading into more weird nonsense.
What the fuck is this shit? What's the fucking relationship? Why don't I get it? The answer has to be here,
I'm thinking.

I'm now desperately trying to figure it out. It's becoming unbearable. A neglected Big Wheel…stepping on a cockroach…husking corn…none of it makes any sense, but the more I try to figure it out, the darker it becomes. Rows of carcasses hanging from meat hooks…open wounds…pork rinds…unrecognizable gelatinous ooze, rotting fish…all of it looping…all of it throbbing. I no longer possess a physical form, but have become free-floating anxiety without a body to absorb it or a brain to rationalize it. And it occurs to me that there could be a way out.

People had died on this shit before, so it could happen again, I reasoned. I could stand anything for a certain period of time, but there was no time here. None. I couldn't count the moments of eternity I had already been through or the moments that passed so quickly as to almost go unnoticed. I knew that the “journey” lasted twenty-four hours, but I didn't have a clue if it had been two hours or twenty-two. I start looking for a way out and…

…I find myself on a beach. An ugly-ass beach covered with lumps of tar. A bunch of tankers and off-shore oil wells dot the horizon. I look down to see a pair of scrawny nine-year-old legs sticking out of a pair of cutoff jeans. One of my feet is covered in a glob of tar. Turning my head, I see the school bus parked on the highway shoulder while cars and trucks whizz past it. Then, with no warning, I'm suddenly way out in the ocean, gasping for breath. I cut back to the beach, where I'm hopping around on one leg, trying to scrape the chunk of tar from my foot. It seems like a weird thing to do for someone who wants to kill himself, and then I'm back in the water trying to keep my head up. And then I'm back on the
beach, this time trying to get the tar off my hands. The loops are unending, each one slightly different or displaced in time from the one before, and I realize it might take an eternity for me to die this way. Could I die in one loop and still be alive in the other? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I start to sink. It feels good to stop struggling, and when I can no longer hold my breath, I exhale and watch the bubbles shoot up toward a distorted image of the sun. Just as quickly, I'm back on the beach looking for a rock to try to scrape off this nasty tar shit, which is now all over both my hands. I sink even further, keeping my eyes on the sun, before I rub my feet on a patch of sea grass, still unable to get the tar off. I'm just about to inhale when a shadow blocks the sun and an arm reaches down and grabs my hair. Then I'm back on the beach using a stick to try to clean my foot. Then the hand violently yanks me upward, and it fucking hurts as it rips out a bunch of my hair. It hurts just as much in the second loop, and then in the third, and then I surface, and gasp, and try not to inhale water.

It's Denis. He's trying to get his arm around me, but he's not being very gentle about it. He's squeezing me so fucking hard.

“Fuck, man. It hurts,” I try to tell him between breaths.

“It's going to be okay,” he says, but it's not Denis, it's my old dance teacher, Roger.

“It's not okay,” I tell him, but I'm talking to Anna, who saved my life in high school.

“It's going to be okay, Oran” is all she says before turning into my old heroin dealer, who turns into the woman who gave Kyle and me a ride home after we washed ashore in our little blow-up raft. Then my mom…Jake…Dr. Mash…Dawn…Inga…Eli…Mr. Lutkenhouse…Andy from The Farm turns into Andrew from the Pickle Family Circus…Heather…Eileen…All of them holding on to me so tightly it hurts, and then telling me it will be okay.

There is no sense or order to any of it. One moment, I'm almost at the shore; the next moment, I'm so far away it looks as though I'll never get back. There's always someone holding me, telling me I'm going to be okay. Some people I vaguely recognize (Dan Millman, my old trampoline teacher), some whom I fucking hate (Fred/Surya), some whom I don't know how I feel about (my dad), and some who have always been there and will always be there (Kyle, Aaron, Grandma). I just wish they would loosen their grip a little. Thom…Carroll Ono…Miguel…Mario and Snoo…Akbar Be…Claudia and Helen…And there are people I've never even met getting thrown into the mix…Eric Dolphy…Ronald Reagan…Captain Beefheart…My
grandfather Arthur…Jay DeFeo…Al Jolson…Zora Neale Hurston…Stu Martin…Diane Arbus…George Clinton…Dubuffet…Eartha Kitt…Anton LaVey…Gibby Haynes…Lucille Ball…St. Francis…Paul Bowles…Woody Allen…Malcolm X…and Audrey Hepburn, whom I definitely don't want to let go of, until she turns into Hitler.

“It's going to be okay,” Hitler tells me, before morphing into Wavy Gravy, who says the same thing.

I'm getting my breath back, and I'm not struggling so much anymore, but I'm still trying to figure it all out. Hitler? Eartha Kitt? What the fuck? The distance still varies back and forth without any rhyme or reason, but I'm getting closer, and more people keep appearing to tell me it's going to be okay. It's fucking endless, but they're finally starting to loosen their grip on me.

And I'm real close, almost there, and Jibz says, “It's going to be okay,” before letting go of me. I don't want her to let go, and I turn my head to see her, but it's not her anymore. I'm looking at me, but bigger, older, hairier. One of my eyebrows is higher than the other, and I've got three distinct creases on my forehead.

“It's going to be okay,” the older Oran tells me. “But you've got to do this last part by yourself, little buddy. We're all waiting for you.”

For some reason, I trust him. That it's going to be okay. I take a couple of strokes toward the shore, and I feel my feet graze the sand on the ocean floor. Everyone I've ever seen, or will see, is waiting for me on the beach. Alive, dead, past, present. Even though I have reached the shore, I still have to battle the fierce undertow from knocking me off my feet and sucking me back out, until I eventually collapse exhausted on the beach, the surf rocking me back and forth.

I'm watching the scene from above now, and I'm getting farther and farther away, and I can see that everything on earth is in an impossibly intricate balance, and the solar system is in balance, and the universe is in balance. I don't know how it works, and I don't need to know, but I know that it is.

And I can see myself, just as important and just as insignificant as anything else, lying in the fetal position on a hospital bed, attached to an EKG, an IV, and now I've got a catheter attached to my dick, which I have no recollection of anyone putting there.

I open my eyes…squint…look around…pull the catheter out of my sweatpants, which makes a loud suction pop, and I know with absolute certainty that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.

S
O, ANYWAY,
the ibogaine didn't end up being a cure exactly,” I'm saying to the crowd of nearly a hundred people who are staring at me in the church basement. My anxiety is starting to fade, since I'm getting so close to the end. “Because within half an hour of getting back to San Francisco, I found myself in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant getting high again. But what was weird was that the heroin didn't really work anymore, and for the first time, I was able to put it down without being locked up in a rehab. It was funny, because I had traveled halfway around the world hoping to get some sort of cosmic message, but the message I ended up with was the same shit people had been telling me for years: that I needed to go to these meetings, and try to stay out of my head.

“So I started going to meetings. And, well, a lot has happened in the last seven years. I moved to New York, which I always wanted to do. I got back into playing music, which is still a huge part of my life. I've got a relationship with my dad, and my mom and brother were just out here visiting, and…

“Anyway, I recently started writing a more detailed version of my story, and well…it's been fucking intense because it has meant going back inside my head and reliving all that shit.” I avoid looking up for fear of being overwhelmed, but I hear a collective sigh fill the room.

“Yeah,” I agree with them, as it had been a particularly tough week
remembering some of the darker moments in my life. “But the weird thing is that I'm now seeing all these stories from a totally different perspective, and…you know, I've spent so much of my life blaming my parents for everything I went through, and for the first time—I think from writing about this stuff—I'm actually able to see that they really were doing the best they could, and—” Out of nowhere, an image comes into my head of my mom, and dad, and Kyle, frantically trying to lock the car doors on me when I'd walked out of that first rehab so long ago. I see the look on their faces, and I can't imagine what they must have been feeling as they drove away from me. Before I can stop it, something wells up in my chest, and I choke up right as I'm completing the second half of my sentence. “—that I'm sick of hating them. That I actually love these fucking people.”

By now my face is contorted, and I'm unsuccessfully trying to hold back my tears in front of all these people (my worst nightmare come true). But even more frightening was hearing myself use the L-word in reference to my family. I have never said that in my life, and it freaks me out. It takes me a while to say anything after that, and the audience is totally silent while they wait for me to go on. I wipe my face off with my sleeve and say, “Holy shit! Where did that come from?”

I'm relieved to hear the crowd burst into laughter, and slowly I start to regain my composure.

“Man, I don't know where the fuck to go from there,” I say, taking a moment to think. “I had this profound thing I wanted to say at the end, but I can't remember it…Oh yeah. A few weeks ago I heard this woman speaking—from this same chair actually—and she didn't know what to say, so she just started rattling off every twelve-step slogan she had ever heard. I've always kind of hated the slogans, and I was sitting in the back of the room, bored, and twitching in my seat, when she said one I had never heard before. Anyway, I think it describes my experience perfectly.

“She said, ‘The only way out is through.'”