I wrote in UNIVERSE 1 about the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop and the new writers it’s produced. Since then science fiction writing courses have multiplied both on the campuses and sometimes in private classes; Avram Davidson taught one such course in the San Francisco area last year, and the story and author below developed there. It’s the first published story for Grania Davis, but her ability to bring places and people vividly to life will surely put her byline on more stories in the future.

Asked about the background of the story, Mrs. Davis replied that it “is indeed based on a genuine, Garden-of-Edenish spot (and thus a spot which is impossible for a 20th Century American to enjoy for any length of time without becoming bored to tears). The protagonists and ‘natives’ and myths are also genuine, as is Brother Jo—who sadly is suffering from the final and unbeatable obstacle which the shaman or witch doctor must face; in Castanada’s DON JUAN, these are fear, power and old age. All his stories and magic will die with him, since the people there have discovered land rovers and transistor radios and regard him as a quaint relic. Sigh.”

MY HEAD’S IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, NOW

by Grania Davis

Living on welfare is one of the biggest bummers in the whole world. To apply, you stand for hours in some huge, long line, your kid in your arms, all fussy and wet. When you finally get seen, some bitchy clerk tells you that you filled out line 67 in the forms wrong, and you have to redo the whole thing and go back to the end of the line.

If you’re sick, you crawl on the bus to this clinic, and hope there’ll be a seat left for you in the hot airless waiting room, cause you know it’ll be maybe three, four hours. They tell everyone to get there at eight, and send you home if you’re late, but the doctors don’t show up till maybe 9:30, and by the time it’s your turn it’s maybe eleven or (twelve is lunch for the doctors) one o’clock . . . and your lad is in your lap, screaming and drooling. (No bread for baby-sitters, man.)

And if you’re too sick to make it to the bus, but not sick enough for an ambulance, like maybe you sprained your ankle and can’t walk to the bus stop, well then, tuff titty, sister, you don’t see any doctor at all, and you end up with a bum ankle for the rest of your life.

And you can’t get into a decent apartment, cause even if you could afford the rent, they won’t rent to welfare-freaks, so you end up in some raunchy flop-house, overlooking an airshaft, where the roaches are running across your kid’s face at night and eating holes in your dirty clothes to get out the little bits of food.

The fascist papers make it sound like welfare’s some kind of groovy trip and like everyone is lying and cheating to rip-off the taxpayers’ bread . . . but, like, what the hell would you do if you had this two-year-old kid, and the day-care centers had a waiting list two miles long . . . and if you had no high-school diploma or job-training of any kind? You can get a job sometimes scrubbing floors, but nothing that’d support both you and your lad, and a full-time baby-sitter.

I was kinda thinking to put my kid in Head-Start when she’s a little older . . . and maybe take a class in something so I could get a part-time job . . . somewhere ... if I could find one. ...

My old man’s on welfare, too. He keeps psyching out. He’s into a big intellectual and revolutionary bag, an anarchist, but figures he might as well make use of the government until it can be destroyed. He’s a Leo, with Taurus rising.

People are always saying to him, “Wow, the freedom part sounds really fine, but wouldn’t people get on a heavy violence trip and start runnin’ around, doing each other in?”

His eyes get all big, and his red-bearded face starts to twitch with excitement as he explains, “People are already running around, doin’ each other in. Haven’t you heard of ‘crime in the streets’? And the government, with all its wars, has done in more people than 10,000 Jack-the-Rippers ever could. The government doesn’t give a damn about protecting you and me, it only protects the rich and the powerful, because that’s all it cares about, power, power over us with the pigs, power over other governments with missiles and bombs . . . power for the rich to get richer, power for the oil companies to pollute our water, power for the automakers to make uselessly huge, fast cars that run around, doin’ people in. But if people had a sense of individual freedom and dignity, and could do their own thing, then a lot of hate and anger would disappear.”

It’s a heavy trip, being an anarchist, and every now and then it just gets too heavy for him and he, like, just . . . freaks out . . . and has to take a little trip to the loony bin. They dope him up, and calm him down, and then he’s all right, for a while.

It’s kinda hard, never being sure if his head’s gonna be together from one day to the next, but we really have a lot of telepathy, both in and out of bed . . . and he hasn’t been bugging out, too much . . . lately. . . .

The only thing that made welfare at all groovy was our social worker, Phil, a truly righteous dude . . . truly. Not only did he turn us on whenever we came in for an interview (he always kept a few joints stashed around in his office), and lay extra bus tickets and food stamps on us, but it was him that passed on the word about the new ruling saying that if the social worker was willing to do the paper work, you could leave the city, or even the country, and still get your check.

Good news, man. First we thought of going on up to Oregon, and starting a little farm in the woods. But then we decided that this whole country is so uptight and fascist, with only plastic, expensive shit in the stores, and the air and water slowly poisoning us to death . . . and eventually Moonbeam (that’s my daughter, a Gemini and a truly tender little joy-freak) would be forced into one of their concentration camp schools, where they’d fuck her head, just like they did ours.

So we finally decided to split, entirely, and go off to Mexico to groove with the cheap prices and the warm sun and the Indians, who are a bunch of truly righteous heads, all the time bombed out on peyote and grass and magic mushrooms, and everyone’s relaxed and smiling and like, together.

But we’d also been reading in the Tribe how some of the Mexican police have been really hassling hairs, and then, neither one of us spoke Spanish, let alone Aztec, or whatever the Indians speak . . . but if karma is building you up for something, it’s gonna come. So one night this dude, a Maoist, who my old man used to know, showed up looking for a place to crash, and he tells us about how a friend of his has just come back from a tropical island, a paradise, man, right off the coast of Central America, but English speaking, cause it was once owned by England, who sent runaway slaves there as a punishment.

But these slaves really got it together and mixed with the Indians, and started little farms and built little villages, and fished and hunted and sang and danced, and shared everything they owned with anyone who needed it. And you can go down there and just sit on the beach, and get stoned, man, and pick coconuts off the trees, and everyone’s friendly and free, no bad vibes. You can rent a little hut for practically nothing, no plastic, tourist shit, and everything is really organic and together with the earth.

Wow! We got high just hearing about it . . . and the I Ching said “It furthers one to cross the great water.” So, like what further proof did we need that we had truly found the place?

* * * *

The trip down was beautiful. We hitched along the coast, past the huge cliffs covered with Redwoods and Monterey cypress. Wow, the yellow sage smelled so sweet, and the water swirling around the rocks below was all mescaline colored .. . blue, green, red.. ..

Brothers and Sisters in vans and campers gave us rides, fed us, turned us on . . . past the curving beige hills . . . through the L.A. and San Diego tracts (“Acne on an adolescent landscape,” said my old man) . . . surfing bums, beach houses. . . . Then things starting to look a little seamy and Mexican as we neared the border.

Fortunately, no hassle with the border guards, who weren’t expecting us to smuggle grass into Mexico! Tijuana ... a million places advertising Marriage/Divorce. “Shit,” says my old man, “if we believed in legal bondage, we could get married and divorced in one day . . . or vice versa.” Nightclubs, cheap Mexican schlock at high gringo prices, but you could smell the tortillas and the piss, so you knew you were in Mexico.

We went to the Three Stars bus station and waited around for a second class bus to Mexico City. When it arrived we grabbed the roomy back seat, where Moonbeam could move around a little, and turning on, we settled back to groove with the desert, and the peddlers selling hot potato tacos for 3¢ each, and the buzzards . . . and people getting on and off, little old ladies in shawls with huge bundles . . . and the bus broke down, lots, and all the men would pile out and look at the engine and jabber excitedly in Spanish, then they’d make everyone (including the old ladies) get out and help push. But we dug it; we aren’t on a heavy time trip like most gringoes.

Mexico City smelled like exhaust fumes and wood smoke. Big old churches sinking and tilting in the soft sand, Indian ladies with black-haired babies squatting nearby, selling squash seeds in neat little piles. Traffic. Noise. All day and night, lots of strong vibes, but not much hate. Big glasses of fresh, natural orange juice for 8¢. We’ve all got the shits now, but figure we’ll build up an immunity to it like the Indians. I tell my old man I’m all out of diapers. He says, “Oh, just let her crap in the street, what’s more organic than shit?” His head is in a really wise place when he isn’t freaking out.

Another bus down to Yucatan, out of the desert-mountain country, into the jungle ... a total gas . . . all the greens, I’ve always dug green. Tangled green vines, sluggish green rivers, and birds. Big white ones with long necks. “Egrets,” says my old man.

People are living in round thatched huts and old boxcars all decorated with birdcages and flowers. Naked babies and pigs are rooting around. Peddlers are selling us pineapples, and we’re sweating and shitting, man, shitting and sweating. . . .

We expected Merida to be some primitive jungle town, so our minds were slightly blown by the big fancy buildings, the tile and stained glass, and the marble love seats in the plaza, over which huge flocks of crows flew at sunset. “Right on the nineteenth century trade routes,” explained my old man. “Bourgeois capitalist pigs.”

But despite the European look, there were crowds of May ah Indians in far-out, embroidered shifts, and you could take a bus to visit ruined pyramids, all jungly and overgrown like out of a cheapy adventure flick . . . and my old man got on this trip like we were in all kinds of camp movies and books that had been laid in his brain when he was in college and still into that kind of artificial head shit. He starts rapping like what if Tarzan came swinging on that big vine, or maybe we’ll find Mighty Joe Young behind that tree, peacefully chewing on a banana. .. .

We farted around in Yucatan until it was time for our weekly “coastal-and-inter-island ferry” to leave. “Pure Joseph Conrad,” sighed my old man. “The wine dark sea . . .” Mostly a cargo boat, with benches for the passengers to sit on and a canvas awning to protect you from the sun and rain. Indians . . . blacks ... a few Chinese and Eurasian businessmen ... a couple of Australians going around the world in shorts . . . and some beautiful people that were a mixture of everything. Babies . . . lunches in earthen pots . . . animals with their legs tied together . . . bales, crates, bundles.

We lucked out with a psychedelic red and purple sunset . . . shared some of our grass . . . shared their rotgut aguardiente and thick tortillas with black beans and chilis. Then we hit a rain squall, wind. The canvas was about as useful as a torn rubber, but we didn’t let it bring us down, just grooved with it, while Moonbeam curled up on a blanket, asleep with a bunch of other kids like puppies. Stopped all through the night at little ports . . . the boat rocked and swayed, but no sweat, cause everyone knows that grass is good for seasickness. Around noon the next day we finally got to where we were going . . . the paradise, man, Jobo’s Caye.

The water was too shallow for the boat to sail in, so dugouts sail out to load and unload cargo and passengers. We climbed down the ladder with an old black woman and several chickens, and urged Moonbeam to jump into our arms.

The black boatman gave us a big smile and started rowing to the shore where we could see little white-washed wooden houses, on stilts with tin roofs glinting, and lots of palm trees. A few people in thin, nondescript clothes, the men carrying machetes, were meeting the boats and singing a little chanting song. A real upper, and we offer the boatman some grass. His smile gets even bigger.

Man, like this is really it! “Hey,” says my old man, “we’re Bob Hope and Bing Crosby starring in The Road To Jobo’s Caye. We’re making slightly dirty remarks (but only slightly) about all the sexy women and pretty soon Dorothy Lamour is going to show up with a sarong and adventures!”

The capital, Bender Creek Town, was a backwater little place. Houses and shacks, puddles in the main street, in which ducks were swimming. Public water faucets and outhouses every few blocks. A few Chinese-owned stores, a few Land-Rovers . . . old black women selling fruit, parrots and fried conch in the market ... a government building on a small square ... a fly-filled, shuttered room in a rickety hotel. The vibes were good, but it was hot, crowded and polluted.

The people were really welcoming to strangers, and would come right up to rap with us on the street. A lot of them were trying to get sponsors to come to America and make the affluence scene. My old man tried to tell them to forget that shit. In America they’d be hated and spat at. They’d have no freedom and no dignity. But they just smiled slow smiles and we could tell that their heads were into plumbing and refrigerators and cars and all the plastic crap we were trying to get away from.

We decided we wanted to go into one of the bush villages where it was really different, where the people were really into the here and now and there were no government buildings and stores and that kind of Americanized shit.

One dude we’re rapping with on the waterfront starts telling us about this village he was raised in. On a little peninsula, surrounded by a big lagoon . . . Sea Dog Bank . . . there were so many mangoes they were used to feed the pigs. Everyone sat in the sun, grooving together, sharing, singing, and digging each day. Wow! it really sounded like the place, a paradise!

The little ferry that went there, twice a month, was leaving in a few days, and when it left we were on board with the boatman, a few packages and bundles, and two drunk young brothers holding an enormous bin of cucumbers.

We started up slimy, green Bender Creek, and soon found ourselves in a shallow, twisty canal through a thick mangrove swamp. Birds we couldn’t see were screeching, fish we couldn’t see were splashing, insects we couldn’t see were biting us, and once we heard a loud “plop” and saw a small, grayish crocodile swimming alongside the boat.

“Moonbeam, get your hands out of the water, baby!” Wow, I hate to restrict her freedom like that, but there aren’t even any clinics around here!

The air was like a warm, wet washcloth and my old man was into a heavy number about how this was the African Queen, and he was Humphrey Bogart and I was Katherine Hepburn and we were being chased by Germans and blood-sucking leeches. No loony bins around here, either. ...

* * * *

“The Garden of Eden,” is what my old man started calling Sea Dog Bank, “from the oldest, campest book of all.”

And it really was a together spot. Our friend at Bender Creek Town had told us that there wasn’t much use for bread there, but if we stocked up on some presents we would get right into the good vibes of the place ... so (on his advice) we bought some cloth, honey, cheap flashlights, rum and canned stuff and (my old man feeling like Columbus) started laying it on the brothers and sisters who came to meet the boat. Well, it like really freaked them out and they started hugging us and welcoming us, without even knowing our names. Wow, their heads were in such a giving place.

The big, boss Mamma of the place, Miz Rose, finally shows up, and hearing that we aren’t planning to go back with the ferry, but are actually thinking to live here, she gets the most turned-on look on her face and starts ordering her daughters around in a shrill jabber that we later found out was a mixture of African, Carib Indian and English picked up from wandering ministers and a few transistor radios. “The Tower of Babel,” mumbles my old man. I really don’t know what he’s talking about half the time, but he’s been doing a lot less of that, lately.

Miz Rose must’ve had about a million daughters, all by her shriveled little one-legged husband who hunted crocodiles and had once had to cut off his own leg with a machete when it was bitten by a poisonous snake out in the bush. Before we could even finish a joint, the daughters had led us to this neat, funky little hut whose owner had recently died. It had dirt floors and a thatch roof (full of all kinds of creepy-crawly things, but harmless and beautiful . . . not like city bugs which reflect everyone’s hate vibes). There was a straw mattress on a wooden frame, a cooking hearth, a few candles, and tin dishes, and not much else. . . . Zen as all hell. We were told that we could crash here for $5 a month.

One of the daughters, pretty, but almost toothless, demanded all our dirty clothes and, laughing like I was a little kid when I offered to help, marched off with the bundle on her head to scrub them in the pond. Another daughter brought us a bucket of natural rain-water from the big wooden vat in which it’s collected and stored. Another one brought us a basket of fruit, and Miz Rose herself, all 250 pounds of her, jabbering orders to everyone she passed, brought us a big armadillo shell in which pieces of armadillo (tastes like chicken), fish, breadfruit, and plantain had been steamed in coconut milk.

Outa sight! A paradise! In front of our hut were coconut palms and an immense mango tree with orchids crawling up the trunk. A little white beach led to the front lagoon where people swam and the men fished. Behind the huts were the gardens, chickens and pigs, which the women tended, and eventually, the back lagoon where the outhouses were, with hungry, shit-eating catfishes swimming underneath, and where nobody swam or fished.

There was no garbage dump. What the people didn’t eat, the dogs and chickens ate . . . what they left the pigs ate. Anything that couldn’t be eaten was burned for fuel or reused in some way. A total, organic ecology trip . . . and Moonbeam could wander naked, up and down the village, playing and bumming food, with no cars or any other danger to rip her off.

Wow, we were totally into grooving with the whole scene, for a while. Of course, it was hot, bitching hot, and we couldn’t swim too far out into the lagoon, because of the sharks, or sit too long in the shallow water, because of the sun . . . and the mosquitoes and sand fleas were into a heavy hostility trip . . . and in the day, it was too hot to do much more than paddle in the lagoon or sit around getting stoned. In the night it was mostly too hot to sleep, but there was nothing else to do, so we slept anyway, with roosters crowing up and down the village at daybreak to let us know when the hour or so of coolish dawn had arrived and we could move around a little. We had read all our books and most of the cheap paperbacks which the boatman had bought for us in Bender Creek Town. (For a few bucks a month, he would pick up our check, mail any dope and any store shit we wanted for ourselves, or as presents for Miz Rose and her many daughters.) And, like there was nothing much we wanted to do, and nothing much we had to do, thanks to Miz Rose . . . and, well, after a while our energy started getting low, really low. We were kind of thinking of going to a place we heard about up in the hills, where it was cooler, and really beautiful, with pine trees, and all ... a paradise . . . but it was kind of hard to get from here to there.

One dawn morning, Miz Rose and her old man (who makes it better on one leg than most men would on three) stuck their heads into our curtained doorway and told us that the land crabs were running out in the bush, and would we like to go get us some.

We got dressed and came out. It seemed like everyone “from six to sixty” as they say in the ads, was there with big burlap bags and long wooden tongs for picking up the crabs, and singing a little number about “crab soup.” We left Moonbeam with one of the old folks and, for the first time, walked the mile or so to where the end of the village joins the low, bushy jungle.

There was a funky little tumbledown hut a little ways into the bush. It was leaning to one side, with mangy, sagging thatch. A sound of faint drumming came from inside, which was really a turn-on. We stopped in front of it, and Miz Rose boomed out, louder than ever, “Brother Jo, bring us something against de do-do-mon!”

The drumming continued. “He hearing good no more,” explained Miz Rose as she sent in one of her daughters who, after a bit, came out leading what must’ve been the oldest man I have ever seen. He was stiff, mostly blind with cataracts and half-deaf, but you could tell from the smile on his face that his head was in a truly beautiful and spiritual place.

“You get de lan’ crab, eh?” he said in a high, cracked voice. “Mind de do-do-mon don’ snatch de li’ ones!”

Miz Rose walked up and yelled directly into his ear, “Give us someting against de do-do-mon!”

“Eh?”

“Someting against de do-do-mon!” she bellowed.

He nodded and his smile got even broader. He began fumbling with some leather bags that hung around his neck. Finally he selected one and handed it to Miz Rose saying, “You bring me some crab soup, hear?”

Miz Rose assured him we would, as he tottered back in to begin drumming and singing some more. Then she began to take tiny pieces of what looked like bark out of the little bag and feed them to everyone.

Whatever it was, it was a truly righteous gas. It had a very strong, sweet odor and we felt the flash immediately, like a joyful pop inside our heads. Then we were off on the clearest non-jittery, non-paranoid speed trip, which made cocaine seem like 7-up, but we knew it was something totally different, cause we could still smell the strong, sweet smell of it on our bodies.

“Right-on, brother Methuselah,” grooved my old man. “You do deal in truly telepathic shit.”

We skipped off, giggling and talking with the rest, the men slashing the undergrowth with machetes, until we came to the crab holes. The crabs were big and blue with angry eyestalks and large, pinching claws. We couldn’t manage to catch a single one . . . but everyone else soon had a big, writhing sackful, and we knew there’d be no shortage of crab soup in the village that night Besides, the main idea in our heads was to pay a little visit to Brother Jo, to dig some of his drumming and to trip out on some more of his outa-sight, mind-bending herbs.

We mentioned this to Miz Rose on the way back and she told us that he was the bush healer, but very poor, and that he could tell us all kinds of far-out stories about the earliest people on Sea Dog Bank, and about some of the strange creatures that lived in the water and the bush. He could give you a song or a medicine for anything that was bugging you, and she was sure that if we brought a little present, he’d really dig to rap with us.

So the next morning we set off to his hut with some canned goods and a spare daughter to help us communicate.

It was almost completely dark inside, sour smelling and stifling, even in the early morning, with all kinds of creepy/crawly/biting things. There was a heap of sleeping straw and leaves in the corner, a lot of moldering food scraps, some wooden and deer-hide drums and some little piles of mushrooms, herbs, bark and other organic-looking goodies. “Nothing plastic and bourgeois here,” my old man murmured.

It wasn’t all that easy to rap with him, but he did a little joy number when we laid the canned goods on him, and gave us a great big smile when our guide-daughter blasted into his ear (in a voice that would have made her mother proud) an order to tell us some songs and stories!

He started off in an endless mixture of Spanish, African and Bible English to sing and mumble and croon and chuckle and preach . . . and like we could only dig about a third of what he was saying, and a lot of that was old-timey Christian cat-crap, but we sat there well into the afternoon, sweating and scratching, and, when the guide-daughter wasn’t looking, sampling some of the herbs and getting high, and getting sleepy, and getting the farts, and feeling our heads getting lighter and purer . . . and every now and then our heads would get into the same space-time as his, and we’d start really tripping out on some story or song.

“De Ashi-pampi, dey li’ people. Dey come at night an’ dey eat de embers from de fire-hot, but dey no harm people. . ; . An’ dis song it cure de boils. . . . An’ de Jack-O’ Lantern, it be a big boat with many lantern. It sail into de lagoon on dark nights, but when de men go out for search in de dories, it disappear. . . . An’ dis song I hear on de docks in de war . . . Run, Kaiser William, run for your life, for if the Russians get you, they’ll surely take your wife. . . . An’ dis root make a tea for quiet you liver. . . . An’ de do-do-mon, him all cover wi’ fur and he eyes be big and green an he feet be webbed like a duck an’ he live under de bushes. Sometime him sneak into de village at night and steal de baby who have lost de parents or de wife who have lost de husband. If you eat what de do-do-mon give you, you never come back, but if you no eat den de do-do-mon him let you go. . . . Dese mushroom is what de do-do-mon favor to eat, but it be poison for regular mon....”

The old brother pulled a few tiny, blackish dried mushrooms out of one of the little leather stash bags around his neck and showed them to us . . . they looked pretty wicked in the dim, fly-buzzing light. As he put them away one of them dropped to the floor, and my old man and me looked at each other and grinned. We knew all about those “poison” mushrooms, they usually contained the most turned-on shit . . . and one certainly couldn’t hurt, not shared between two people ... just a little “recreational dose,” dig?

So my old man picked up the mushroom and we began to nibble on it, nice and slow, getting together with the woodsy taste....

And the old man was droning on. “An’ de greazy mon, him crawl in de window at night and molest de woman. . . . An’ dis prayer to de Holy Mother, it be good for de toothache . . .” And the mosquitoes were biting something fierce . . . and it was hot . . . and the guide-daughter was flaked out with her mouth open, snoring slightly . . . and it was dark, too dark, we had to get into the light ... we yelled something about having to use the shithouse on the back lagoon and ran out of the hut.

Which way? Back to the village? No, too many people there . . . might run into some rip-off vibes . . . could already tell from the feeling in our stomachs that this was going to be a heavy trip. Into the bush, then, no one there... can just groove with the trees.

So we darted up the path along the first growth of bush grasses and tangled trees and vines, and noticed that these mushrooms grew there quite commonly . . . no trouble scoring if we want some more . . . and then our heads like, well just exploded, I mean we were in a completely different place!

Everything was green, man, I mean like layer upon layer of swaying green. You couldn’t see a tree or a leaf, just green . . . prisms of green . . . green that was yellow . . . green that was blue or purple, or red . . . and all kinds of strange creatures were floating around in the green.

A large frog and an egret were practicing karate chops on each other and then started hugging and kissing and going down on each other in the green. A large, bearded cockroach dressed like an elegant European movie-star strolled by and advised everyone to take the 21 day, thermal cure at Vichy. A tiny yellow female creature in a bathing suit bounced by, chanting Om and masturbating with a credit card in the green . . . a flat flounder floated by with an enormous tray of far-out, gourmet food . . . and a duck and a cow read Japanese fairy-tales ... in the green, the green, the prisms of green. . . .

It must’ve taken several hours for us to come down . . . though it could’ve taken several years, the way our time-sense was blown. Our heads felt pretty spaced, and our eyes were hugely dilated. Everything still looked kind of greenish and our tongues and skin had that kind of fuzzy feeling like after too much rot-gut, dago-red wine . . . but you kind of expect that after a really mind-bending trip. We wandered back to the hut to explain to Brother Jo and the guide-daughter that we had done a little walk thing, and had gotten lost.

“You mind de snakes and de do-do-mon,” scolded the daughter, and we let her shepherd us back to our hut and a big dinner of Miz Rose’s iguana-tail soup (which tastes like chicken). We were pretty wasted and let Moonbeam curl up with some of Miz Rose’s grandchildren, at her place, while we zonked out in our little hut.

The next day was boat-day, and we lay around, feeling kind of strung-out, till after lunch when everyone went down to the little wooden pier to wait for the monthly boat from “de Big Town.”

Our packages, this month, had mostly chocolate bars, aspirin tabs and cigarettes, which everyone really dug. And the mail . . . some of my old man’s underground papers, a letter from my mother, and a formal looking letter from the welfare folks.

We ripped that one open right away, and it ripped us off right away, because it was a notice informing us that our social worker, Phil, had been busted (he must’ve gotten paranoid and the pigs could feel his vibes) and that our new social worker had “too heavy a case-load to be able to do the intricate paper work involved in out-of-county payments.” And, if we didn’t get our asses back to the City and County of San Francisco by next month, we’d be outa luck, welfare-wise. Shit... or as they say in the comics ... #$%=&’( II

I mean like, living here was cheap, but not free, for Christ sake, we still needed a few bucks for the rent, the boatman, and all that barter shit . . . and, like, to go back would be a total, mind-blowing downer . . . the clinics, and the pollution . . . the hostility of the pigs and the landlords and the freaks and the uptight straight world. And wow, to have to wait an hour on a cold night for a bus, and make three transfers, to get somewhere that would take ten minutes by car . . . and to have Moonbeam getting her head fucked with the Pledge of Allegiance, and marching to recess in lines, and having to raise her hand if she wanted to talk, or pee . . . wow, we couldn’t go back to all that “urban-poor” crap, we just couldn’t!

We went down into a really deep bummer that lasted all the rest of that day and night. Our auras were really dimmed-out, and our minds were low, man, really low.

The next morning we decided that the best thing to do would be to get super-stoned, and maybe that would put our heads in a better place, so we could figure out what to do. We decided to make it into the bush and score some more of those “poison” mushrooms that Brother Jo had turned us onto.

We told everyone we felt like a little stroll. “Mind de sun,” warned Miz Rose, when we laid Moonbeam on her. We got into the bush and did a little search trip, and found a little patch of the mushrooms under a huge, flowering bush.

“Like we want to get really loaded, this time, right?” asked my old man, and he reached down and grabbed a couple of great big mushrooms and popped them into his mouth. I did the same, and we crawled under the bush, digging the sticky heat and the jungly noises and smells. We had that waiting feeling, like before something starts to work, but like, there’s no doubt when this stuff hits you . . . phew. . ..

And like there we were, again in the magic land of green, with all those funny little comic-strip characters balling and doing their things . . . but this time we didn’t just stay there. . ..

This time our heads got into a new place ... a very clear place . . . the greens were still there, but like we could see all the jungle sights and smell all the jungle smells and hear all noises, like we were some kind of animal or something. And I looked at my old man and, well shit, you really get some weird hallucinations on this stuff, because he looked all furry, like, and his hands and feet looked kind of like a duck’s! I told him that, and he opened his eyes . . . they looked enormous and green, like pearly jade . . . and he giggled and said, “Wow, you look like that, too. Metamorphosis. . . .” But I wasn’t too sure it was funny, cause usually you can tell what’s a hallucination and what isn’t, but this time I couldn’t. It kind of freaked me, but I didn’t want to say anything that might put him on a bummer.

After a few hours, we got up and walked around. The air felt surprisingly nice and cool, and we were really tripping out on all the sounds and sights and smells which we never imagined existed before.

We ate some fruit, but mostly we felt really hungry for some more of those mushrooms, so we ate some, but they didn’t get us any higher, just kept us in the same place . . . well into the night, when we found that we were really into seeing in the dark.

Animals and snakes came near us and didn’t seem to be on any hostility or fear trips. We petted them and fed them some fruit and really grooved with their vibes. Finally we curled up under a bush and went to sleep, figuring we’d surely be down by tomorrow, and looking our usual selves.

But the next morning we were as high as ever and I was getting kind of scared . . . like how were we going to stay this way? With everything so high and clear and hallucinating that we were one of Brother Jo’s fairy tales?

We figured that we’d better fall by his hut so he could give us something to make us come down, so we found our way to the edge of the village and tiptoed quietly inside. Some of Miz Rose’s daughters were there, getting ointment rubbed on their backs, but when they saw us in the doorway they started to jabber and bellow and throw things at us like we were King Kong or something!

“De do-do-mon! Brother Jo, de do-do-mon come here! Hurry now, give us someting for de do-do-mon!” Brother Jo didn’t understand them at first, but finally he did, and got just as freaked out and started fumbling for some of that bark he gave everyone before the crab hunt. When they swallowed it, we began to smell the most horribly nauseating, corpse-sweet smell, that made us retch and feel dizzy and sick as all hell. We ran out of there, and they ran after us, throwing anything they could get their hands on . . . and their aim was too fucking good!

We ran back into the cool and friendly bush and crawled under some high grasses to. vomit and rub our bruises, until we felt more or less okay again, though kind of shaken up.

And like we still didn’t come down. We figured we’d better quit eating the mushrooms, even though we were craving them . . . and we waited a while but ... we still looked the same.

We still didn’t come down.

* * * *

Well, shit, our heads have gone through a lot of changes about it since then. It’s been over a month now, and for a while we were really bum-tripped about the whole thing... especially my old man.

“You can’t be a revolutionary when you’re looking like a goddamn platypus,” he kept saying. But after a while he stopped worrying too much about the revolution . . . like it really isn’t important out here in the bush.

Then we started thinking how it would be kind of funny if we tried to go back to San Francisco and collect our welfare checks. That would really blow their minds . . . they could use us as “perfect examples of drug abuse” . . . but we don’t much need our welfare checks here. We’ve got the mushrooms and fruit, bushes to sleep and ball under . . . and we can spend our time watching all the green . . . the endless shades of green....

Anyway, we couldn’t have stayed in the village with no bread for rent or chocolate bars ‘n’ shit . . . and it would’ve really killed us to go back to the dead-end, head-fucking scene in the States. And, ya know, after we’d been out here a while, we started to lose a lot of that artificial brain-trip stuff that had been programmed into us since we were kids. Reading, writing . . . like, when you don’t use it, it just goes away. Like we’re so much into the here and now that we don’t much miss it. We’re getting into a heavy telepathy trip with the animals, insects, even the plants . . . this furry stuff keeps us nice and cool, and the webbed feet makes swimming kind of a gas. I don’t much care about all that “abstract,” human shit anymore . . . like I really wasn’t making it too well in their world.

The one problem is that we’re kind of lonely here, just me and my old man. There are others out here like us, but they’re pretty hard to rap with . . . they just sit and stare and eat the mushrooms . . . really spaced out.

My old man says, “If we could remember how to write, we could write to our social worker, Phil, to come and join us . . . if there was any paper out here ... or stamps ... or mailboxes.”

We’ve tried to go back to the village a few times and rap with the brothers and sisters there ... let them know there’s nothing to be afraid of . . . but, wow, they won’t even listen! They just freak out, eat that goddamn, awful smelling bark and chase after us with machetes . . . and how much can we take of those bad vibes?

There is one thing that’ll make me feel better, and I intend to do something about it real soon. The next time there’s a dark night with no moon, I’m going to sneak into the village and get little Moonbeam. I’m sure Miz Rose has been treating her real fine, but I want her out here with me . . . her funny, giggling ways would make such fine company. I can feed her some of the mushrooms. (What was it Brother Jo said? The do-do-mon takes children who have lost their parents . . . and if they eat what the do-do-mon gives them, then he keeps them, but if they won’t eat it, then the do-do-mon has to let them go . . . right on, Brother Jo.) But I know I can get Moonbeam to eat some of the mushrooms . . . she’s such a trusting little chickie. Then she could groove right along with us. She’d really dig it . . . really trip out on all the green ... all the endless prisms of green. ...