Journal of an Insect Living in Excrement - Chapter 1

Wednesday
30 June 1976
New York City, JFK Airport
10:30 p.m.

Sitting at the rear of an Icelandic DC-8 an hour and a half after we were supposed to take off. Torrential rains, thunder and lightning are delaying all aircraft. The plane is packed with Germans returning home from excursion tours of Amerika. With the delay, most of them are already drunk. A very large German frau is next to me … on the aisle seat, naturally. She has the biggest hands and fattest fingers I’ve ever seen on man, woman or beast.

It’s almost — but not quite — a relief that she isn’t young and desirable. At least I can relax now, the entire trip free of lust brought on by aromas of musky hair and warm perfumed skin. No cross-Atlantic wriggling for position to accidentally touch a blouse or the blonde hairs of an arm, a thin wrist or long, slender fingers. And no bare knees to sproing forth mes yeux for hour after hour, with the requisite accidental dropping of items so I can get a glimpse up the skirt. Kind of hard on airplanes, but always worth a try.

I’m flying into a future whose foundations are planted firmly in jelly. Am I scared? Terrified is more like it. Water dripping from the ceiling of the aircraft doesn’t help. I ask a stewardess if it is coming from outside. She laughs, this Icelandic beauty with skin like creamy snow and the red lips of a sated vampire. “It is caused because of the humidity of everyone for so long without air conditioning,” she explains. It’s true that we are all uncomfortably hot and sweaty.

I have US dollars 313 and Belgian Francs 150. An old friend from my old life gave me the Francs. Too bad there wasn’t an old friend with thousands of French Francs. Aye, the old friends with their front lawns and little league games … no driving themselves into the unknown comme moi. Least easy, most better, I always say, heh-heh. But then it’s not easy for them, either. Their day-to-day routines camouflage the yawning abyss. What drives me? I fear it’s that Scorpio Moon in the first house. A predator barely contained. I dare not ask myself if what I really want is to uncage the beast.

Still, compared to the flight to London in 1972, heading for Afghanistan and India, I’m rich. Then, I landed in London with $66, gone by the time I got to Istanbul, where a money order for $20 from a poet friend in Oregon managed to get me all the way to Kabul. That was a harrowing couple of years, but at least I had a mission then: to follow in the footsteps of Milarepa. Well, maybe not exactly. Those were the days when damn near a whole generation went east seeking nirvana and/or fuhst clahss quality dope.

Of course I failed miserably in the quest, distracted as usual by samsaric lust. Eventually I rationalised that Buddha nature could best be attained by throwing myself into the tropical wetlands of succulent pussy. I should have become a Tantric Buddhist, but the meditation and arcane preparations were ill fitting to my manic persona, so I just went for the pussy.

Now, the plan is simple and flexible. My old motto: Die, Motherfucker (adopted after a henna-haired vegetarian greeted me thus as I entered a tea house in Bodhnath), has been replaced by the venerable: Be here now. Which is why I’m terrified. I’ve managed to be present for roughly 20 seconds covering two different times in my entire life. Both were brought on by extreme anxiety.

While wandering the streets of Kathmandu in an increasingly agonized state over whether I should take the harrowing 30-day course in Tibetan Buddhism at Kopan monastery (where the teahouse greeter was enrolled), or bugger off back to the plains of India and the joys of samsara, I did something as mundane as stepping off a curb and somehow instantly became indivisible from every molecule of existence. I remember looking up at the buildings with the understanding that every room was known to me because I was part of everyone who lived in them. The decision was made.

The same thing happened a few weeks later as I walked down the hill from Kopan to the little cave I had rented for rupees hardly-any from a farmer who sold water buffalo yoghurt to the teashops in Bodhnath. Thupten Tzopa, the Rinpoche who led the month long course, was chatting to another monk. As I passed them, Tzopa looked at me and smiled. Outwardly, that’s all he did, but for the next few seconds, the oppressive gravity of human existence disappeared. I scampered down the hill like a mountain goat, free and weightless and indescribably happy. In both instances, as soon as my mind reactivated and I tried to think about it, the feelings evaporated.

Something like this happens to you, and you’re never the same again. No matter how you try.

Hey … the plane is taking off…

Rough weather, the plane drops often, pushing our stomachs up to our throats and then into the part of the brain that ignites stark raving fear. Am I the only one thinking about that Uruguayan Rugby team? At least they had the Andes to land in. Below us is an infinite waterworld chock full of monsters worse than Alien. Amazing how we think everything will be just fine, despite the imminent break-up of this sodden aircraft. If the plane were full of Muslims, there would be unceasing recitals of Al Fatiha, beads clicking for the dearness of life. Ah, the no-smoking sign is off at last…

I’ve ordered a bourbon and water for lack of any reason not to. Haven’t drunk the stuff in at least fifteen years. Bourbon? How crass! Somehow this flight calls for it. I recall the endless Gin and Tonics from four years ago on the flight from Seattle to London with G and the girls. G and I were in the toilets for half the flight while the girls slept, two solid memberships in the 30,000-foot club. I left them in London for the trip east. Or so I thought. But that’s another story. One I will probably never tell because I threw the journals into the Kabul River afterwards in a fit of despair over my spiritual weakness.

Oh well, one thing I have learned over the years is that nothing ultimately matters. As Tzopa said, the only purpose of human life is to achieve enlightenment. The rest is just farting around. So that journal and this journal and all but about twenty seconds of my life have been superfluous. I could have easily not existed at all. And that goes for you too, chum.

But wait, does that apply to the likes of, say, Van Gogh and Einstein and Edith Piaf and all the other men and women who have given pleasure and hope to the human race? To all of us who have ever lived, we thank them. But try to imagine all the people who could have been equally as great but for some reason never did. Think of the poor souls who were extinguished in the Holocaust. How many vital to the evolution of the human race were among them? It’s almost random, a Van Gogh or an Edith Piaf. We live in a consensual reality with what is given to us in order to ward off chaos.

Ha-ha. Big words now, but I will forget them as soon as I can.

Stopover at Reykjavik Airport. Christ, I’ve got the shits.

The Diarrheic Journal of the Bourbonic Plague continueth

Back there in New York 1968

Me and my cross-country buddy
Were on shave-headed bail
From a possession charge
In Hackensack, New Jersey

It was Charlie Liffman bailed us out
A good friend of Gene Bloom
I called Gene for help
And he called Charlie

And Charlie put us up in his flat
At toid and toidy-toid
Out the window I could see
My old Cadillac being towed away

Buddy fled to Canada
One step ahead of a Parole violation
But I stayed around
To read bad poetry in Tompkins Square

Charlie worked on Wall Street
And so did I, eventually
A stubble-pated Kelly Girl
In Kafka’s Big Apple branch office

Me and a hundred typewriters
Manned by a hundred women
And for lunch a pizza slice
Tough and tasty, and American coffee

Jack Micheline came by one night
Stayed for several days
Always up at 7 a.m.
Even if he went to sleep a half hour earlier

I never told Jack about Charlie’s liquor
Gifts from clients and Charlie didn’t drink
Must’ve been 30 bottles in all
And I drank every last one

Few months later, Hackensack dropped the charges
I left quietly for Canada
Charlie was relieved
And I never thanked him enough

As is my custom

Thursday
1 July
Luxembourg, Hotel Windsor

Feel like a hick here in the hotel restaurant. From the glances of the other diners, my pale blue Seersucker sports coat, bought in Sacramento on the cheap with a hot European summer in mind, is the last word in gauche couture. Nevertheless, I dive into a meal of Mussels and Pomme Frites with a bottle of Riesling. As I drain the last drop, the beads of sweat forming on my forehead are those of a man who has just spent what will later amount to a week’s worth of survival food.

Tomorrow I take the train to Holland, to see my old friend Jurriën. We’ve kept in touch by letter, but I haven’t seen him for three years, not since I left him standing in front of his little hut in Burua, below the Rohtang Pass near the Beas River in Himachal Pradesh.

Other than that, not much to report from the Grand Duchy of. Well, that’s not exactly true. When I arrived this afternoon, the weather was stifling and humid and I had no sooner flopped on the bed after a long, cooling shower than what did I see outside the half-open window of my second floor room but a little chambermaid hanging linen out to dry. How was this possible? Was she standing in mid-air?

I stood up to investigate this unnerving phenomenon and was relieved to see that she was standing on solid ground. Or roof, as it turned out. The layout of the hotel is such that all second floor rooms look out on the roof of the restaurant below. The chambermaid was not performing feats of Luxembourgian magic after all.

So there I was, naked, exhausted and horny as hell from all that travelling. There is nothing like a long distance flight or a drive across country to whet the appetite of He Who Must Be Obeyed.

The woman was not exactly my type: in her late thirties, a tad matronly but not unattractive, she had this air of dogged efficiency about her as she went about pegging the sheets. Pity she wasn’t a saucy domestique in the style of Jeanne Moreau. Never mind, a stealthy peep and a pull seemed in order. She didn’t need to know.

Before I could lay a hand on His Tumescent Nibs, that old Scorpio Moon stepped in and grabbed him for me, making sure I made enough noise for the woman to notice. She looked, she saw, she squeaked, she looked away, and fell to pegging with greater intent than ever. And yet, I was sure she was keeping a keen side-eye.

“Normal” folks have no idea how exciting is this wondrous perversion. I pity them. They prefer the safe coupling “between consenting adults”, and who doesn’t? But there is so much more to the endless and complex forms of sexual pleasure. There are times when the consent between adults is unspoken, an unacknowledged consent between strangers whose eyes may never meet. The power of this consent lies in its illicitness. In the end, isn’t sex the only redemption from being stuck with this fragile, gravity-oppressed, ultimately diseased and rotting body? I should say so.

I masturbated languidly, changing position on the bed so that my little Gargantua was in profile for her better viewing pleasure. When it seemed she was about to finish hanging up the washing, I strolled leisurely to the basin near the window and blew my load into the sink. She let go a mighty sigh and scampered away. Was it a sigh of relief? Or had she been holding her breath all this time?

Typically, I had massaged the monolith first and thought of the consequences after. What if I should be arrested for indecent exposure or violating the sensibilities of a matron of the realm? All within a day of arriving in Europe! But I heard nothing, and the thought that she may have repaired to her chambermaid’s room for a compensatory clitero-labial massage and review of the latest show put on by a hotel guest gave me comfort as I fell into a deep sleep.

Chapter 2: Gurdjieff Says No

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