And so there was a time for me that was Golden, a long summer's day of youthful awakening and carefree adventure of the spirit that need never end, or so at the time I thought.
Everything that I did was alive with meaning, for was I not a Child of Fortune in my heart of hearts, leading the life that the spirit thereof commanded, thereby contributing my small part to the mythos of the whole, and enhancing my own enjoyment thereof with the intoxicant of a noble raison d'etre for same thereby?
While I spent more and more of my time trailing after ruespielers and absorbing their tales, I neglected not, or at least not entirely, the more pragmatic aspects of the vie of the Child of Fortune, which is to say that though my deepest attention was to the entirely nouvelle monde of the imagination and intellect which had opened up before me for the first time, I certainly retained a healthy enough loathing for fressen bars to continue to perform as a tantric artist and to hawk Ali's jewelry at least with enough diligence to keep such stuff from passing through my lips.
Nor did my dedication to my newfound role as student impel me to or require a life of monkish celibacy. Indeed there was a certain enzyme of aphrodisia produced in a young brain whose cortices of imagination and intellect were aroused to the levels of excitation of the adolescent erotic backbrain.
Far more ruespielers than one were to benefit amorously from the kundalinic circuit established between my avidity for their tales and my pheromonic receptors. Upon listening to a reasonably attractive ruespieler declaim a tale to my liking, I would often develop a lusty desire to plumb its deeper meanings en boudoir, and indeed, after all his available erotic energies had been depleted, the fellow was then persuaded to discourse on his craft, if only to dissuade further challenges to his sated manhood. Moreover, once both my tantric puissance and sincere desire became general lore among the ruespielers, I was not without volunteers willing to trade instruction in their craft for demonstrations of mine.
Throughout this long golden summer's day, Pater Pan remained my friend and lover in equal measure, displaying naught but approving amusement at my self-appointed role as courtesan of the ruespielers, while demonstrating often enough that the embodiment of their collective oeuvre was also a natural man.
It seemed to me that my life had attained a plane of perfection, that I inhabited a golden dreamland designed for my own delectation, and if this was a street of dreams, I saw nothing beyond into which I ever need awake.
All that was required to raise this perfection to transcendence was the moment when I was finally moved to perform my own tale. Vraiment, there was a certain sweet tension in the contemplation of my debut as a ruespieler, not unlike the joys of contemplating one's first passage d'amour with a new object of desire, and as with such kundalinic energies, the pleasure of the charge lasts longer than the pleasure of release.
Mayhap the foregoing was the rationalization of a sluggardly soul content to drift along in a bliss without risk or change, and indeed I regarded standing alone in the street and declaiming with a certain trepidation. But in truth, since I had no tale to tell, I could hardly be faulted for lack of spiritual courage for failing to make a fool of myself by blathering in public for the sake of hearing my own empty words. Did not the true Child of Fortune wait for the spirit thereof to speak through her?
Be that as it may, all things pass, and even our days of Golden Summer must one day end as our minds do tell us, though the fact that the universe would seem to have imposed this stricture upon us will no doubt remain forever beyond the praise of the human heart.
Chapter 10
Well do I remember the true moment when the carnival ended and the morning after began, though, in point of quotidian fact, the Gypsy Jokers dissolved into legend slowly and piecemeal, even as Pater Pan had intended. For the only truly thespic moment in this otherwise gently en tropic process was the very first, the moment in which in more ways than one, the spirit left us and moved on. And that was a satori that none of us who were put through it are ever likely to forget.
The event began as a joyous extravaganza, indeed the peak experience of my time as a Gypsy Joker. Pater Pan arbitrarily declared the revival of the ancient Terrestrial festtag of Mardi Gras, in which the Children of Fortune of Woodstock had smoked their pipe of peace with the Great God Mammon in the form of a parade through the city during which all they sold during the rest of the year for profit was showered gratuit as a love offering on the populace. Pater had decided to revive this noble tradition to thank our friends, the Edojin, for their beneficence, and also because he needed a festive spectacle to celebrate the mysterious event he promised for a climax.
Who does not love a parade, ne, and most particularly, who would refrain from dancing in a joyous crowd through the streets and parklands, toxicated, celebrating, and in general encouraged to behave as extravagantly as possible, when given the license to do so, indeed when you are among those hosting this bacchanalia for the public good?
Who would be so mean-spirited as to drag her feet in the hedonic pursuit of such an enterprise, and who would expect the mystery promised for the esthetic cusp of same to be anything but lighthearted?
Not I, not anyone in the parade, and as for the Edojin, certainement they were at least amused by the spectacle of the Gypsy Jokers parading through their streets and parklands, around their public platzes, past their very dwellings, snaking through the vecino like an ancient Han Dragon Dance, its Captain and Pilot the King of the Gypsy Jokers in his Traje de Luces, and its random recomplicated course steered by the Jump of his whim.
We all marched behind our Piper in the Mardi Gras parade, for our encampment was empty, and all that was portable therein in the way of entertainment and cuisine perambulated through Edoku, offering itself to, indeed thrusting itself upon, the populace thereof. The length of our dragon was measured in terms of the intervals required to keep half a dozen musical troops from overlapping into total cacophony. Jugglers juggled, acrobats tumbled, dancers made their way dancing, singers ran up and down the parade to form ever-changing impromptu choruses. Most of the ruespielers remained mute, but a few were mad or toxicated enough to attempt to bellow tales, or at any rate disjointed fragments of same, over the general din.
Those of us who had no entertainments of our own to donate were given our entree into the spirit of the Mardi Gras in the form of bulging sacks filled with finger food, packets of toxicants, little flasks of wine, and even some simple cheap jewelry, which we tossed to the Edojin along the route at our whim and pleasure. I myself had both a sack of Dani's dim sum spiced with a double dose of toxicants and a bag of Ali's jewelry to dispense. The latter, naturellement, was not painstakingly crafted in his usual mode, but consisted of simplified versions of his true art cast in their ersatz scores from molds.
The parade wound from our encampment up through the previously quiet lanes between the residences of the hills, out across the river and along its bank, then back in a course like the body's intestines through the vecino of strogats at the feet of the glass towers, emerging therefrom in clear sight of our empty camp once more, and then across the noonday desert to the great waterfall, along the line of buttes from which it descended, to a shallowly-sunken bowl of a meadow surrounded on three sides by miniature mountain peaks over which a sun was forever in the process of setting, casting a brilliant early-sunset glow over the final proceedings.
As we paraded through the various venues of the vecino, singing, making music and circus, and tossing little treats from our bags to passersby, we collected a certain number of amused Edojin who followed in train alongside, though since no parade route had been announced, indeed since the Pied Piper seemed not to know what turn he would take from one moment to the next, we never marched formally past static throngs. We were a random bolide of a parade, and fortune rather than planning was required to place anyone along our way.
So in truth, by the time we had all reached the parade's terminus in the amphitheater of bright sunset, there were more of our tribe present than Edojin auslanders, though we retained the curious interest of a goodly number of the latter.
For the span of perhaps two hours, the meadow became the venue of a general fete into which the parade devolved, indeed gathered there in that compass were all the Gypsy Jokers of the streets as well as all those who plied their trades in the caravanserei, and here in the meadow of sunset, one could view our tribe entire and all its divertissements, stripped down to its essence, shorn of its tents and concealments, and of any strictures of pecuniary cunning.
Food and toxicants were passed from hand to hand with no thought of recompense. Musicians played, singers sang, buskers entertained, ruespielers told their tales, and all refrained from accepting the donations that many of the Edojin present persisted in tossing. As for artists of the tantra, these performed al fresco tableaus in which all were invited to join, and in which none need pay a price for pleasure.
As for me, once I had emptied my cornucopia of dim sum and bijoux, I merged myself into the generality of the fete, partaking of food and toxicants thrust into my hand, wandering from entertainment to entertainment, ruespiel to ruespiel, unmotivated, for some reason, to join in the tantric performances or seek out a lone lover for a menage a deux.
Vraiment, the only lover I would have sought out at the very midsummer's eve of the Gypsy Jokers was Pater Pan himself, and the domo of the fete was a quicksilver target whom only fortune could place in my arms. Over there, peeking up above the crowd around a ruespieler, disappearing from my sight for tens of minutes, then visible again in the distance in the act of draining a wine flagon, vanishing from view once more, Pater Pan was a mountain that must come to Mohammed, and I was a particle of random motion across a crowded stube.
And then, with the precision of a domo of the floating cultura who senses when the revelry is balanced on the razor-edge of fatigue, Pater Pan appeared as if by thespic magic, indeed in a cloud of sparks and smoke and thunderclaps, atop the rim of the natural amphitheater.
The effect was so preternaturally perfect as to verge precipitously on the comic. Pater had set off a fireworks display of some duration and complexity to attract the attention of all, and when the donner and blitzen ended and the smoke cleared, there he stood, radiant in his Suit of Many Colors, his golden mane of hair and beard transfigured into a boddhi's aura by the flaming actinic disc of the setting sun against which his noble visage was so exactly centered.
Standing there in a range of bonsai mountains and backlit by a sunset that sublimed his material corpus with the photosphere corona of legend, Pater Pan appeared a Titan, a haut turista from Olympus, even to eyes entirely cognizant of the art that went into the effect. You couldn't help but be awed, if only by the transcendental chutzpah.
"Hear me, oh my Children of Fortune!" he shouted with immense pomposity into the hush of his entrance. "Attend, all ye Gypsy Jokers! Behold the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers in all his magnificent glory standing before you! See how the puissance of his grandeur dwarfs the very mountains and towers triumphant against the firmament!"
At this truly excessive braggadocio, many present, myself included, found heckling japes forming upon our lips. But none of them quite came forth. For the transcendent image etched upon our retinas gave sufficient pause to create a moment of stasis into which Pater Pan stepped with the timing of a perfect master.
Abruptly, he sat down, leaning his back up against one mountain and draping his arm over the peak of another, converting the cordillera into his somewhat lumpy chaise.
"Of course they're very small mountains," he said in a very different voice, to general laughter. "As for my magnificent glory, it owes a good deal to thespic lighting, and the firmament against which I tower triumphant is no more than the usual Edojin ersatz of the real thing. Sometimes I forget that. You forget it too."
He stood up again, but now the magic of light and perspective was permanently shattered, and he paced in little ellipses as he spoke, as if to prevent his image of glory from reforming.
"Lest we forget, the King of the Gypsies is only a Child of Fortune, and the Prince of the Jokers is a natural man," he declared with entirely uncharacteristic modesty. "The Child of Fortune remembers that no one should follow leaders, and the natural man knows that the only guru worthy of his students is he who knows when enough is enough." He adopted a somewhat hectoring stance as he declaimed the last, as if to chide us for succumbing to his own excessively puissant charms.
"Sure, and I hope you can still all remember that," he said more conversationally. "I hope I will leave behind Children of Fortune who hear the songs of their own spirits, rather than a ragged band of acolytes who hear only the blarney of mine. For Great Edoku is but a single patch of cloth on the fabric of our Second Starfaring Age, and our time here is but a single swatch of time in the millennial story of our kind. And this natural man who stands before you swore a mighty oath to see all and be all on all the worlds of men before his race was run. So swore I, and so should you all swear, for Pater Pan would be no true Child of Fortune if he abandoned his own Yellow Brick Road for the bothersome role of your perpetual patriarch."