peaks. She seems to stare at my arousal and gives me an alluring smile, staring dreamily into my eyes.
I saunter off, giving a few quick glances back, as the woman of my dreams disappears to a now-forgotten meadow. She was quite attractive and had a cute nose and pretty brown eyes, but she was probably taken, and now I can get some relief and calm down and save all this for later when my friend comes over. Oh, I have to go by one of the Heurigens/vineyard-restaurants, and buy some good local wine on the way home.
Boy, is my face flushed. I should have gone back and flirted, found out who she was, taken a risk, gone for it. That’s good, Jessie. Beat yourself up. This life is made of female conquests and getting off, and the endless macho quest. No it wasn’t macho, just innocent and natural. I wasn’t looking for her. Maybe it’s a missed opportunity. “You will never know”, I hear myself say. She was on my path, in my sphere of nature, in my horizon line, my panorama of beingness. “The missed opportunities”, the same voice says, hounding me. Or maybe it was a lucky thing that nothing else happened. She is a book worm, probably bitchy, the usual man’s grievance package about the typical woman.
15.
MEINE MISCHPOKE
UND DRINNEN . . . UND
Harris has been married all those years. He pretends to be happy in his million dollar plus American house in the suburbs of the well to do, no problems with life circumstances. All the good schools for the kids and playing the American capitalist game that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. All this leads to stability and disappointment. Making it, whatever that is. The good life, whatever that is.
Success! He had married his high school sweetheart, and now the three kids, dog and cat live happily ever after. Besides, I think he really missed the sixties. What a shame. He couldn’t take it on the road. Stability has its costs. The Wandering Jew takes risks and goes with the flow, takes it easy living on the edge, daring, and being scared, and living in a fantasy world, or so it seems to "Them," those others leading that apparent other life, which you have little to do with, except for the customs of shared family to put up with. That is so far away now, and the birds I hear sing not in German, either. It’s the universal language, as are the sounds of the wind, the walking shoes on terra firma, or the sound of a motorcycle off in the distance.
It’s those sub-personalities, I hear myself say. They really bug me. I don’t know which Jesse is talking, and when. Is it adult Jesse, or little child, or inner child, or one of the many emotional, melancholic Jesses’, yakking at the other one and having an inner battle, a conflict of interest? Just whose interest, I can’t say. Roberto Assagioli looked at all of this. He wanted to help us understand ourselves better, and so it’s another way to map-out these sub-personalities. Those creatures that seem to take so much of our attention and control us, and just show us who is in control. Would we be happier in an institution where all these crowds of people are inside us, talking and trying to get our attention, having their day, acting out and feeling OK? Being categorized as this phobia or that neurosis or that paranoia, that dysfunctional #513A of the latest DSM book of charms and diagnoses?
This man, this Jesse, doesn’t like to be categorized, and spends all his time rebelling and fighting authority figures galore, ready for a fight or a flight, a fling perhaps, nothing enduring or permanent, god-forbid. This man is too afraid of the dark, of heights, of forgetting, of getting too close, to really love: either himself or others.
Is this too confessional? Sound like anyone you know? Is this a secret diary of the mind, a road map to planet X, hitchhiker’s guide to which galaxy? In fact, I think man’s dilemma is all too confusing, what with all these cures and healings and solutions.
Why don’t we all just live, and not read into things? Make it simple, stupid. It’s easy for me to say. I seem to be wading in mud and enjoying it. I may be going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I’m enjoying the show. Something like that. What can I say that already hasn’t been said and said enough for a Roger Corman B-movie with a simple plot and one camera angle, a memorized script, no make-up, and a cast of thousands: the real world? Actors on the make in tinseltown, a la Lotusland. It’s all for free as we go through our lives in quiet desperation.
The wine is now bought, and I don’t even remember buying it. I do remember hopping or running up those steps, and asking for three bottles of white wine. It was only about twenty Euros. What’s the password? “Pass!” Old Groucho Marx used to be quite grouchy.
I love this old car, this red Visa with the good gas mileage. I never had a new car like Harris has. Nor have I had a mobile phone before now, either. I wouldn’t want to sell-out, give notice to my so-called radical friends in America sucking off the materialistic tit or red-in-the-face, with fat bellies and big garages and a new remodeling job just completed for that third bedroom that used to be a storeroom. It’s all been bootlegged, man, like, so cool.
We want to fool Uncle Sam and face the fool in the mirror, staring back at thee.
16.
WIEN NOT,
RECALLING RENDEZVOUS
Guertel, cruising along at 50kp/h when the tail lights light up. It’s rush hour, like the L.A. 5:30pm crowd, and it’s only 2:00pm on Sunday, that is, 14:00 in Austria, and a mild Stau/traffic jam, anyway. I think I’ll put on a little Dylan, maybe that “Biograph” tape, and regress, refresh my brain, light up the air waves with a little grain of sand . . . I am suddenly feeling good, I don’t know why. It’s been a good day. I don’t know how what’s next looks, but I don’t care. Life will take care of itself. If I get in the way, that’s OK, too.
There’s the flat now. How did I get to this Bezirk/district, already? Too busy living to notice the progress, movement, time passing. Time passes when you’re having fun, I guess. Now what am I doing first? It’s the second stage: I turn the key and head for the shower. I can’t wait to get under that hot shower. I must have walked farther than I thought. How could I be this messy? I throw the shirt into the dirty clothes bin. It’s really the same all over the world: Only the scenery changes. It’s all an illusion, a maya, so to speak.
Gee, that feels good. That water is nice and hot. The soapy suds wash all that dirt down the drain. My hair follows: the clean machine, the lathering hands, rub a dub dub. I drift to that woman and get a little horny for a moment. I start to lather suds over my cock and give it a few strokes as I recall that scene. Hard in a flash. It only takes a few seconds, it seems: I let out a guttural cry of release as semen is sprayed out and down the drain.
It’s only a mirage, a real-life story. Choices. It’s all choices and energy and living. It’s sweet and it’s frustrating. I was only minding my own business. I don’t want to keep wondering what-if, thus and so. I tell myself to shut up: that part that wants to have the zipless fuck, without any involvement. These aren’t the seventies, eighties, or nineties even, after all, nor is this the real Western, the cowboy-casual, laid back world of my earlier years. The California Kid returns. Native Son. Saunter on down the road, bunky, the reverb is in the back room where the hassle-free environment is replayed in time sequence.
“Timothy Leary’s dead,” went the old song, and now he is, on that extraterrestrial space teleportation, moving off Earth-base to settle onto friendlier planets or celestial bodies unknown: a great thinker and manipulator of the big myth of the normal life led with nonchalance in conformity by twentieth century man, out-of-focus and disconnected from his surroundings. He’s laughing now at those of us humming that song. The studied Harvard halls of madness, the Millbrook escapades on the white horse galloping on into cyberspace, the virtual-reality man. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” was what was needed at the time.
The word-speak, the program, the pioneer life led by running from the feds. The Texas charges of green substances:one joint, I think it was. Escaping to Algeria; the media had a circus. The white hair, effervescent energy-plus, exploring interior circuits that most of us aren’t willing to confront.
Timothy Leary