Matrix Visit with the Maestro--Last Night's Strange Dream

A Rudimentary Eye-Tunnel.

I thought I woke up. I even made coffee. I didn't add milk and creamer. I headed for the garage, easing the loud door open so as not to wake anyone. I could see the scrapes in the paint where the edges of the door have scratched against the jamb. A spot of catarrh, and I sniffled it up. A little shaky, but why? I step out, it is cold, and I turn the light on. 

A man around my height is caressing the leaves of my bubblegum plant. He wears a fedora and a black suit. He must have heard me, for he turned, ever slightly--what hits me first is the eyes. They are silver and hold a skin-cutting cast upon my own weathered face. They flash blue. Brown and red, then black to blue again.

"Why are you growing weed in the cold?" he asks in his half-nod smack drawl. But he's from another time.

"Don't you mean pot?" I asked.

"No, I mean weed. We called it that before the kids began using the word pot. You miss that?"

It comes to me. Junky. "'Pot' for 'weed'", he'd written when discussing his verbal shift to the slang of the old era. Linguistic shift needed to score. Fuck me. I'm standing in the garage with William Seward Burroughs. Whose words I discovered perhaps one year after I discovered what turned out to be our great common denominator--heroin. His voice reading "The Priest, They Called Him" while Kurt Cobain raped a screaming guitar. Father Murphy in Drugstore Cowboy, the movie I watched on HBO before running out and buying three of his books. What the hell was he doing in the garage?

I didn't take this picture...cooler if I had.

"A spirit guide," he said. "Everyone's favorite thing these days. Is that what I am? Fuck, kid, calm down. Have a cigarette before you implode into homunculi."

I light up. This is a dream. But I can taste the smoke. "Why are you here?" I asked.

"Why not?" he asked. "Relax, Rob. You're not the only soul I've visited. I came here to tell you not to worry so damn much."

"I don't worry," I said. "I forcefully rebuke--"

"Yeah, and it don't work, eh?"

I stopped.

"Just listen." He approached me. "Remember what I said to you before? When you saw me with the pumpkin and thought, 'gee whiz, that'd be good enough for me.' And what you heard me say after?"

"I did it," I said. "Can you?"

"Exactly. Precisely. No maybe about it. I like your book, kid. And I asked you that for a reason. So, can you?"

"Well, I like to think--"

"No!" He poked me in the chest, and I felt it. A dot of almost pain on my sternum. "You're not breaking the lock all the way. You sledgehammer that bastard by doing. I want you to sit, lay, scream, grind your teeth and type all fucking day until you get it right. I want you to kick down the walls. I made ten pages a day, kid. That's twenty to you. What are you doing?"

Not that many. Instead of admitting my shortcoming, my ego took my mouth and said, "Well yes, but to be fair you were throwing away seven--"

"That pipe any good?" he asked. He picked up my water pipe.

I didn't answer. I knew he didn't want an answer. He wanted me to shut the fuck up and respect him. Sensation of taking a deep breath when I don't need to breathe. And yet there was the Pall Mall.

"You think you can't express yourself because you don't think safely," he said. "You figure no one will get you. You'll be glossed over. And all that pain, work, all the tears, all the--fucking LIFE--will go unknown. That's not going to happen."  

"How do you know that?" 

"I put hooks in my books," he said. "You bit one. I want to see if you can do it. That's what you get to know. "I," he said, poking. "Claim the record." He caressed my face. "And any Johnny-Come-Lately--that's you, kid, thinks he can...do what?"

"Out nausea the maestro," I said. I chuckled, feeling the tears that couldn't really be there any more than this great man could be there streaming down my face, a face which was certainly smashed into my pillow instead of catching cold garage drafts in lines down its cheeks. 

"Let him push his ass forward and do a temple dance with his piles," he finished. "That's a hook. And you bit it. Now, I gotcha. So you shake that firm ass forward. You shake that firm ass and show 'em your boils. Get that goddamn mugwump off your asshole before he suckles your soul and spits little yous into your ether. Finish your book and write that idea I gave you."

I open my mouth to ask what idea that was and see a mummy. Then I know. After the knowing everything flashes black of darkened no-matter and Thoth takes the reins of my face and pulls it into taffy, and there's the goddamn eye-tunnel again, eyes and eyes and eyes and spinning rolls and glimmering, chromatic things with feathers covered in eyes and eye snot and a ram's horn slides slow from my belly. I am stretching and someone is pouring my expelled blood over my body, head to toe, splashing crimson wash coagulating over my eyes, life's Jello, Pharoah is playing with my guts and I stretch and cry out from the feathers and my eyes fly open with the urge for a sudden morning constitutional. Gasping, I sit up and turn on the light. 

I take care of it. Do not say Shambo. I make a coffee. While it bubbles, I scribble in my notebook. And then I turn on this laptop and sit to keep the promise I will try to keep to the undisputed maestro of printed voodoo. I think I know what Bill meant, but I almost don't dare to believe it. I don't know if he ever believed in shit like spirit guides while he was alive, and I'm not sure if I believe in them myself--it's very difficult for me to JUST BELIEVE things--everything wants to be analyzed and noted and then connoted in ways that are picked to death, referenced and re-referenced, and furthermore, tried unto a conclusion before I believe in it.

But goddammit...I'll take it from Burroughs. Seems this is what it takes for my subconscious to get through to my jackass ego...my goal amalgamated, showing me one of the very few people I would heed if I had ever known him. Then again...he knew the occult very well. What if he figured out how to do shit like this before he died? Was this a Jungian brain dump? Or something more? 

We'll see. As with all things right now, we will see.