—A Kind of Wake—

IT’S THE WEIRDEST THING. You are not the kind of guy who would be hanging out in a place like this.

The stretch limo with tinted windows screamed to a dust-peppered halt at the edge of the desert highway. Except, suddenly, you weren’t in a desert any more; you were at the periphery of a wheat field, flourishing in hazy sunlight.

The door opened somehow and the guy sitting next to you — the one wearing the operating-theatre mask beneath frowning, hopeless eyes — shoved you, straight-arm, into the roadside. You fell on your side, jarring your shoulder and grating your elbow; coughing up the red dust as the limo roared off.

And now you are standing in the field and the wheat sounds as though it is hushing you, while the early morning heat soothes your aching bones. You are reminded of the pain numbing the rest of your body and tugging with the weight of an anvil at your rib cage when it bites again.

In your Inside Head, you hear the first few notes of Stravinsky’s ‘Rites Of Spring’ — Dances Of The Adolescents or something, you remember it being called. But there is unpleasantness tainting your memory; like the stale after-taste of strong coffee. You look down. The plastic tag around your wrist reads, ‘D.O.A.’. A pretty damn serious administrative hiccup, you’re thinking, but notions of complaining (to whom?) are clouded by a twinge in your chest that develops into full-on torment.

“Oh man, that hurts like a bitch,” you say to yourself, rubbing your chest and looking around. There is an early morning mist, the vapours of which seem to be clouding the view through your glasses; at any rate, the world has retreated into soft focus.

Far beyond the boundaries of the field is a range of hills that looks, absurdly, as though it has been stretched with billiard-table baize. At a point where the cloth has been brushed against its nap, couched in a misty hollow, is a large house — a mansion; white walls fringed with ivy, crowned by crenellated turrets and grey tiled roofs.

Falconcrest on drugs, you think. A good one that — considering what has happened to you.

While you are doing your best to breathe regularly, as you vaguely remember a nurse imploring you to do before things got weird, you hear rustling in the wheat and turn to catch a bedraggled figure parting the stalks. He is dressed in a long black coat, has a tangle of dark hair shocked with grey, curling around his long face. A drooping moustache and a neat oblong of beard under his lip appear to be suspended on the air, rather than his face. It is the symbol for something — or someone — you recognise. You cannot quite put the pieces into place.

He sings in a deep, mock-black, cynical voice, “‘Ah-welcome to de ‘Otel Californee!’” before hollering: “Captain Trips, I presume! How the devil are you?”

Now you recognise him. “Frank!” you exclaim. “Where am I? What the hell are you doing here?”

“We are in close proximity of Serenity Knolls, the Detox Mansion of your wildest dreams, oh portly, guitar-wielding One. And we are but two of its honoured and illustrious guests.”

“It’s great to see you again, man,” you say, attempting to clap him on the shoulder, before the pain peaks again and you think better of it. “You know,” you grunt between gritted teeth, “I thought you were...”

“The ‘black water’ and the nicotine caught up with me in the end,” says Frank mysteriously, with a nod. A pair of butterflies performs figures-of-eight like tiny seraphim around his impressive nose. “But that kind of damage is repairable here.”

“What the hell happened to me?” you ask him. “I got this pain right here behind the ribs, then everything went real dark and heavy...”

“That will pass,” he says with a smirk and then he taps, ritually, at his pockets. “Er, you wouldn’t happen to have a pack of Winstons secreted about your ample personage would you, Jerry?”

“Sorry, no. Er, wherever I was before this, I seem to have left it in kind of a hurry.” You pull nervously at the plastic wrist tag, staring deeply into Frank’s dark, inscrutable eyes with an uncanny sense of alienation.

“Never mind. Come on, let’s get you checked in,” he says, leading you off by the elbow through the field in the direction of the mansion.

Birds are singing joyously in the wheat. You seem to walk for an hour without getting anywhere and the view remains unchanged on all sides: the golden glow of the wheat; cloudless blue sky; rich, loamy earth. Quite suddenly, you reach the field’s boundaries — or at least, the wheat seems to part, drawing back like a theatre cast retreating behind a closing curtain. Directly in front of you, a little way off, is a hedge, a driveway and a large painted sign: Welcome to the Serenity Knolls Detoxification Clinic.

“Maybe they’ll be able to help me here. This sure is one mother of a heartburn,” you mumble to Frank as he leads you, smirking, through the gate and into the grounds.

Three scruffy, long-haired individuals in 1970s-style, silk Lynyrd Skynyrd Freebird bomber jackets are sweeping up dead leaves from the lawn, cleaning the yard. They smile and wave in your direction as you pass. You glance around, fearing a case of mistaken identity.

“How far did you get?” Frank asks you cryptically, as you make your way towards the front door.

“What do you mean?” you say, not understanding.

Frank ignores this, seems to put another question instead. “How old are you, Jerry?”

“Fifty-three.”

“Mmm. Not bad. Congratulations! Only made it to fifty-two myself. Missed my fifty-third birthday by sixteen days. So what happened? You look terrible. I thought you were in the process of cleaning up your act, taking things easy on account of your family.”

You are surprised that Frank seems to have the inside story on you, considering he has been away for so long. “I had good intentions. I just messed up. You know what they say about old habits. I guess I’m lucky I have an iron constitution, or I wouldn’t have gotten this far. But you get older and your body doesn’t regenerate itself like it used to. To be frank, I just didn’t have the heart for it all any more.”

“Please, Jerry — let me be Frank,” he says as you reach the portico and the mansion’s double doors. “It’s what I’m here for.”

There’s a queue at the check-in desk and the harassed nurse, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mama Cass Elliot, is dealing with a dispute about a confiscated a bag of white powder with an overweight, wild-eyed and unshaven man — a dead ringer for John Belushi. He’s becoming very loud and unruly when two men in white utility outfits lead him away shouting and cursing.

“So, name your poison, Captain Trips,” says Frank, filling out one of the yellow admission-forms for you.

“Well, at my worst, it was pretty much everything. Heroin, cocaine, acid...You know, it’s tough to be somebody. It’s hard just to keep from falling apart.”

“So they sent you here to Rehab Mountain — you gotta detox before you can move on up to the next place. Sign here...”

“The next place? Listen, I think I’m having a heart attack! I feel like I swallowed an E-Bow! I’m not going to be headed any place unless I get to see a doctor pretty soon. Like, now! What are you fucking talking about, the next place?”

“Jaco has been known to refer to it as Urantia.”

“Who? What?” you yell, frustrated by these diversionary tactics to the point of physical violence.

“Oh, you’ll get to meet Jaco real soon,” says Frank. “I’m sure he’ll still be familiar to you from the seventies — you do remember the seventies don’t you, Jerry?” You clutch at your chest as the pain kicks in again. “It’s no wonder you get chest pains, y’know. You’ve got a bad attitude. You’re full of poison. Your token gesture to physical fitness was kitting out the Lithuanian basketball team in tie-dye T-shirts. Psychedelia’s no way to deal with problem-solving. You need to let the bad stuff go whistling on by you, dodge out of the way. Like one of those little tai-chi dudes.”

“Give me a break, Frank,” you say, supporting yourself on the counter as a grinning Mama Cass hands you a key on a brass fob engraved with angels’ wings. “Don’t start going all cosmic on me, for Christ’s sake — not you, of all people.”

“The Real Stuff never gets called by the right names. Strange things happen — like kundalini yoga, it’s all attitude,” Frank taps his temple with his index finger and grins at you mischievously before heading off towards the impressive staircase. It is wide enough for ornamental plinths, busts of famous composers, and the lush dangling of house-plants. Seeing an elevator around the corner, you pull him by the shoulder of his coat in its direction.

On the way up, you start to get the shakes again and Frank appears to sneer at you in that condescending manner of his; like he has a bad smell under his nose. You grab the hand-rail and pull yourself out of another downer. “So, how does this squeaky-clean anti-drug philosophy of yours tally with Winstons and black coffee?” you say.

“The way I saw it, cigarettes and coffee weren’t drugs,” says Frank. “They were food. I was living on that stuff while I was working, y’know. At the desk all night, sleeping during the day. That’s the way I was living.”

“At least that helps to explain your studio tan,” you say, grimacing at Frank’s pallor. He still looks like death warmed up.

“That’s all changed now, though. No need for stimulants in here,” says Frank, sniffing; ironically more in the manner of a coke fiend than of someone with a runny nose.

“Shit. You’re cleaner than the goddamn Pope. Didn’t you ever feel the need to relax, chill out? You’re way too uptight, man...”

“Don’t tell me, I need to go to Big Sur and take acid with someone who believes in God. Or how about, I buy some beads and then perhaps a leather band to go around my head, some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore. I’ll ask the Chamber of Commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope.”

“You always were a cynical bastard,” you say. “I’m grateful to the Deadheads, whatever you think of them. Thanks to them, my kids got to go to college. Didn’t end up working at the check-out in a Seven-Eleven. I did pretty well for myself — for a beatnik bum.”

The elevator jerks to a halt and the door opens. Frank grins, grabs your wrist, leads you out and sticks that key you’ve been clutching into a lock in an unnumbered door identical to several others on the same landing.

“Welcome home, Captain,” he says. “Make yourself comfortable, whatever. Hey, there’s no mini-bar and the close-circuit cameras will detect any hidden pharmaceuticals. I’ll come and pick you up at three for tea and biscuits.”

“For what?” you ask as you slump into the engulfing softness of the king-size bed. Better than most deluxe hotel suites in here, you think to yourself. A breeze billows the net curtains and beyond the french windows leading to the balcony you can hear birdsong.

“A quaint custom, recently introduced by Sir Henry..." Frank’s voice is faint and echoey with a neat little delay on it, and you’re fading out into sleep. You can just hear the clatter of the key in the lock as you drift back into the sibilance of the swaying wheat.

Locked in...

*

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