Monkeyshines
epilogue
Sam called a few days after Ma died. She'd been an extra mom for him since he was five. I hadn't called Sam, because I knew he was already suffering badly. His second marriage had soured two years earlier, and he'd lost two kids as well as a wife. The light went out of Sam's eyes when he lost his place as a dad. His ex-wife remarried to a guy Sam thought abused the kids. Cigarette burns on their arms, he said. He wanted to shoot the guy. My worried counsel was restraint.
Sam medicated himself with cocaine and kept it from me. After a year of this, he called, “You said cocaine was alright, Michael, but it's the worst drug in the world. It's ruined me. I've lost everything.”
“No,” I defended, “I said cocaine itself isn't the problem. It's like that .357 magnum you carry in your car.” Duke had convinced me that guns didn't kill people, people kill people, and I felt that idea applied equally to drugs. “And I said that some people shouldn't do coke, the way some alcoholics shouldn't drink. It's a very personal matter that our drug laws make worse. I never said it was alright.”
Sam sounded desperate, and said his medical license was hanging by a thread. I asked him to consider going to Africa to help build a clinic, and he said, “I'd like to, but it wouldn't fool anybody. They'd know I was just doing it to be accepted.”
So, he entered a drug rehab program for doctors. He called to say, "It's tough here, man; they're forcing me to look at reality. This cocaine's really bad. I think Reagan's policy is right; I mean, this stuff has to be stamped out. It's the worst addiction there is. The top doctor here says if he had to choose, he'd rather his kid use heroin, because cocaine's so much harder to kick." Sam sounded like Winston in 1984, after his head was put in a cage facing rats.
I said, “Yeah, well, whatever they tell you, don't forget you're a doctor, Sam. That's a terrific thing, and your skill will remain. I wish I had your skill, Sam. And don't worry, somehow you'll be able to work again.”
“I don't know,” Sam said, “I might get prosecuted, and I don't know if my insurance will pay for this, and I can't pay my child support.”
“How long will you be in there?”
“They figure two months,” he said.
“Listen,” I said, “After Viet Nam and medical school, you can handle anything, Sam, I'm confident. I'll come down and see you in a month or so.”
Sam's sister, Carole Lee, called a week later to say Sam was dead. He'd looked at reality, then hung himself with his belt. I went to his funeral. I sat on one side of the church; his family and friends sat on the other side. I didn't want to talk to them or even look in their eyes. I felt they were all part of a giant conspiracy that had destroyed Sam.
The priest, who’d never met Sam, said some general things about death, then asked me to speak. A suffocating cloud of judgment hung over the congregation, and I felt like shouting, “You can all go fuck yourselves.” But I saw Sam's nieces and nephews sitting in their pews, kids who'd hear Sam described as a drug abuser, and I felt a personal debt to Sam. I made a long walk up to the pulpit, and with great difficulty said, “It's hard for me to talk about Sam. He was my oldest friend. For 36 years, he never belittled me, and he never turned away from me. He had less bitterness in him than any person I ever knew, and I'm going to miss him. That's all I can say.”
After the service, relieved people thanked me, and said I’d described Sam perfectly. He was odd and a softy, but he'd always accepted us.
“Oh, thank you, Michael,” his mom said, “I'm so glad you could get up and say such good things about Sam. Not everyone has loyal friends for 35 years. You know, when Sam Sr. died, your dad came over to me at the funeral, when nobody was around and put $50 into my hand, and never said a word. That was a lot of money then. Thank you so much, Michael.”
As we were driving to the cemetery, I said, “When we were kids, Sam didn't figure to make elevator operator. He fought in Viet Nam, and became a doctor just to make everybody proud of him. He was Babe Ruth in my eyes, and every time he stitched up a wound in the emergency room, he was hitting a home run. I don't want to hear people write him off as some stupid drug abuser. If Babe Ruth were alive today, he'd be run out of baseball as a drug pig. Sam died of a broken heart. He died when he lost his kids, and we can't be sure who did what to whom, so there's nobody to blame. There was no way to fix it. Sam knew that. I'm angry that he left, but I understand the pain he felt, and I'm not going to second guess him.”
“That's right,” said Carole Lee, “He lost that spark when his kids were taken away. He never really smiled after that. He could have beaten the drug thing, but he didn't have any strength left.”
“The cocaine was just a streetcar,” said his brother-in-law, “If it wasn't that, it would have been something else. Sam wasn't hard enough. He was too gentle, and the road back looked too long.”
I said, “And he thought he'd be prosecuted, and made an example. He was politically isolated and vulnerable. They'd have picked his bones.”
Instant agreement gushed out of everyone.
Later, his mom said, “Oh, Michael, our children are supposed to bury us; we're not supposed to bury them. I feel so guilty. I pushed Sam so hard for material success. I'll never forgive myself.”
“Well, Sam wouldn't want you to feel bad,” I said as I left.
I didn't say that people's fear of drug abuse had been manipulated, and used to authorize a new Inquisition, and that Sam was just one of millions put on the rack. I didn't say that I felt Jonathan Swift was right when he described humans as ‘an odious race of pernicious little vermin,’ scapegoat artists who regularly look at the surrounding population, and think, quite literally, if unconsciously, Who can we slaughter today?
The same people who gave us Viet Nam, and destroyed villages to save them, also gave us Draconian drug policies that were nothing more than rituals of human sacrifice. Sam got too close to the edge. He’d become a tempting target.
And I didn't say that I thought Sam had used up his hardness being a soldier for the same government that later ate him up. He'd told me about a dark night in the jungle when North Vietnamese over-ran his ARVN (South Vietnamese) unit. The ARVN XO(executive officer) shot the ARVN CO (commanding officer). Figuring the ARVN XO must be an infiltrator, Sam shot him. People fired weapons in every direction, and Sam said it was the longest, scariest night of his life.
In medical school, he actually spit blood learning stuff that was over his head. He specialized in emergency room work. He was used to seeing people torn up and bleeding, and he got good at stitching them up.
But he walked right out into the middle of the street when he used cocaine. Harry Anslinger, the Democratic party and Richard Nixon, all cruising the streets in a bullet-proof bus full of well-paid civil-service-protected, ladder-climbing monkeys, put the pedal to the metal when they saw him.
And I didn't say that a worried Sam had called me just before he left for the drug program, (after I'd told him to replace the hardness he used up in Viet Nam by going into human service work and forgetting about profits), and he'd asked me to go to Jamaica with him for a big coke deal.
At eleven, Sam and I had drilled a hole in the wall next to the hot water faucet in Sam's bathtub. We’d stood on tip toes on the basement stairs to peek through that hole at Carole Lee and her friends when they bathed. At fourteen, we decided to get drunk. Mike the Bum got us a pint of Jim Beam, and we sat on Sam's living room floor with two glasses of water for chasers, got drunk, and then sick. (I went home from this event at three in the morning to find Ma sitting at the kitchen table reading a bible. I fell flat on my face at the sight of her, and woke up fully clothed in a tub of cold water.) Sam and I shared a lot of history; when he asked me to do a dope deal, it was a first.
“There's no way I'll get into a dope deal, Sam,” I said. I felt the cold steel jaws of a trap. He had to find someone who'd trust him enough to do a dope deal with him, like an old friend, or he could kiss his kids and medical license good-bye. A better friend than a liar, Sam said, “Did you hear the one about the two guys who were out camping in the wilderness?”
“No, tell it,” I said.
“One of them looks out of the tent and sees a grizzly bear running straight for them, and he says, 'Oh, shit! There's a grizzly coming right this way.' Then he hurries to get his running shoes on.”
“The other guy looks out of the tent, sees the bear, then says, 'What are you doing, man, you can't outrun a grizzly.'
“The first guy, just about finished tying his shoes says, 'I don't have to outrun that grizzly, I just have to outrun you.”
“That's funny, Sam,” I said, “Thanks.”
He was setting me up for a bust. He knew I knew. . .and he knew I instantly forgave him. . .but that didn't free him. . .or me, as I worried that maybe I had contributed to his cocaine problem with some intemperate words.
The guys who ran Sam down in that national security bus might see him again. . .maybe for the first time. . .they had probably thought that they were doing a good and necessary thing when they‘d run Sam down.
Harry Anslinger was an early 20th-century bureaucratic Dr. Frankenstein. Like Dr. Frankenstein, like everybody, Harry wanted to do good. He’d managed Prohibition agents, and when the alcohol Prohibition was repealed, Harry found new jobs for his men by helping to enforce new Prohibition laws against other drugs. In his diary and speeches, he told about the need to protect American youth from the contagious amorality of Negro musicians. He said he'd watched these musicians closely and seen their amorality passed to young Whites by marijuana smoking. Coincidentally, psychiatrists of that time, fully-accredited guys with Pd.D's, were still writing textbooks that said that women who had orgasms (women who enjoyed sex) as ‘depraved.’
It was the Democratic party that first fostered the new drug prohibition.
Richard Nixon was a Cold War politician who served as Vice President and then resigned with a pardon from the new President. In the 60's, he helped confirm a confusing 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not use drugs, (except as provided in sub-paragraph b, party of the first part, depending on the pharmacological particularities, and how much money you earn, and miscellaneous addenda in the fine print, etc., etc.), because it's a threat to National Security. His rhetoric convinced many citizens that people who used drugs, (other than the ones he used), were depraved dopers who didn't deserve due process of law. Now, when I want to use a drug; I call my lawyer as well as my doctor. Gradually, dopers were made to appear less and less human, and they became a new kind of germ, like "gooks" and "fags," etc.
*****
monkeyshine #22, pseudo-speciation, a precondition for modern cannibalism.
*****
Adam, between Viet Nam and this red herring drug baloney, most American families suffered painful schism which kept their minds off other issues.
I asked Mitch Corey what he thought about this. . .in fact, I asked him if he wanted to help write a book about drug realities. He said, “I can't even talk to you, man, it's too dangerous. I'm being watched all the time.”
Mitch grew up with Sam and me, and I'd always liked him. He was an avid card player/gambler, like me. We'd played countless hours of poker and showdown at his house after school. Mitch became a narcotics agent, and stayed one for fifteen years. During that time, dope dealers changed. They became Narcotics Traffickers. . .more organized, wealthy, and monster-like. . .more like they'd always been officially pictured. Give a dog a bad name?
*****
monkeyshine #2a, the self-fulfilling prophecy; we create a reality that conforms to our expectations and propaganda.
*****
Mitch had been savagely beaten, shot at, and reviled during his years as a narc. . .all that time trying to hide his alcoholism and homosexuality. In a Chicago tavern one night, with only the bartender and himself present, Mitch pointed his pistol at himself and pulled the trigger. He splattered goo on the walls, but didn't die. Doctors put a plate in his head, and the government retired him. Then he got in a legal dispute over his pension. If shot in the line of duty, he'd get $18,000 a year, if he’d shot himself, he'd get $9,000. . .so he claimed the bartender shot him. He was having trouble making this stick the last time I looked. . .most of the customers of that bar were police and they believed the bartender. My heart went out to Mitch, even though he'd ridden with the bad guys by my reckoning. But we’d been like brothers once. . .and still were, despite his actions to the contrary. He made it seem true that we die by the sword we live by, that some hidden psychological mechanism cancels out all our apparent advantages, and makes us equal.]
dry bones (a political appendix)
“Listen,” Doctor, “Everybody I meet is just like me; I.e., a bag of meat full of fishhooks. If you look right, they'll appear to like you, and keep an open mind until they get a fix on you and see where you fit. . .always the hidden cunning. . .eventually they pick a strategy for playing you in their life game. . .maybe as an ally, maybe as a dupe, but either way, the game's so hidden, they aren't really aware of it themselves.
“That's why I'm nomadic. At least, that's the idea I have about it, adding the condition that I don't really know anything, not really, not like I used to think. Reality is a motion picture; human knowledge is a collection of photographs, black-and-white, stop-action.
“Even science depends on interpretations that leave out remote possibilities, and fix on probable realities. Understandable, but blind to idiosyncracies that connect everything. We know that praying to trees is foolish, and we think we're not cannibals just because we don't munch on people's bodies, but only exploit their energy and consume their spirits.
Scientific Knowledge about generic humans is awesome, but about individual humans, it sucks. I think the point in the biblical story about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil refers to a tragic flaw in humanity, one described by the Greeks as central; I.e., hubris, an excess of pride and arrogance. Whether from the fruit of a tree, science, a sacred religious vision, political experience, or whatever, when we believe seriously that we're handling KNOWLEDGE, especially knowledge of good and evil, the only serious thing we're doing is strolling onto thin ice.
Anyway, I think I'm nomadic because of this feeling that I've only got a short time before the ax of knowledge falls. I enjoy the honeymoon time in a relationship, the time before I'm known. Once a person knows you, their mind sort of closes, and you and the relationship start to shrivel up. Like the old adage says, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ in the form of pressure to play into subconsciously assigned roles. It might look like anything from bullying on the one hand to invisibly subtle manipulation on the other. Anyway, once I'm known, and before the pressure gets too intense, I move on.
There are exceptions, I mean, there are integrated people who don't squeeze you into their knowledge. . .people who understand that their knowledge is just transitional imagination. . .and I think there are people who offer serial honeymoons, but you need to be away from them for periods of time in order to get to the next honeymoon.
Doctor Gottlieb said, “Have you considered the possibility that your explanations serve to mask your fear of criticism and rejection?”
“Of course.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“How do you dispose of that analysis?”
“I don't. It goes into the maybe file. . .along with malignant suspicions, morbid self-doubts, and all the other possible guilts and fears that clutter the mind. . .and that brings me back to what I was saying about knowledge, I mean, our culture, our history, our very language presses us to see ideas and things intellectually as A OR not-A; they must be true OR false. I feel they are A AND not-A, the yin-yang idea that everything has within itself the seed of its own opposition. It's more accurate, I think. But I don't know. Maybe I'm bullshitting myself. Self-delusions can get pretty complex.”
Gottlieb said, “Well, you came to the clinic to get help clarifying your feelings as the child of an alcoholic. Commonly, such children feel isolated and overly afraid of criticism. You knew that when you came in. We've met eight times, and you've told me a long story about your life, but with all its unusual and interesting details, it still fits easily into the conventional model. As a child of a compulsive personality, doubled in this case, with alcoholism in your father and religious hysteria in your mother, you started early to posture as a victim, and it's continued all your life. You avoid taking responsibility for your problems and look for ways to blame others. If all you want from me is agreement that you were put upon, I can do that now and save you time and money.”
“You mean I set myself up for all the crap I've gone through?! None of the issues has a reality of its own?! I should just stop worrying and learn how to make commitments?!”
“No, I don't mean that. But when you identify with the White Seal, imagine yourself to be a Love Commando, and compare yourself to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, a character who hid his positive qualities; well, I have to suspect you've been functioning as an injustice collector.”
“If I was an injustice collector, does that mean that the injustices I collected weren't really injustices?”
“No, but it might mean that you missed opportunities to create different outcomes for yourself,” said Gottlieb.
I said, “Well, I don't know. Maybe I set myself on fire just to show people I’d been burned. One of my kids told me it had become clear to him that he got in trouble in order to show his anger and frustration. He had an argument with a staff person once, then went out and stole a car. After he'd wrecked the car, he saw the knee-jerk element in what he'd done. He saw it clearly, and it changed his life. But I can't accept that my life's just been one long self-inflicted wound, I mean, that wastes a lot of wonderfully heroic images I've nurtured over the years.”
“Well, let me say again that the hidden agenda, which is likely victimhood in your case, as it often is with the children of psychologically desperate people - which in truth is everyone - but it's a separate issue from the vehicle. Let's say you confront a mugger. He's beating up on someone you think is your mother. The mugger turns and beats you up, and afterward you see that the victim you saved wasn't your mother. You've saved a stranger. How could it matter that coincidentally you're an injustice collector who's predisposed to getting beaten up? One of our trade secrets is that nearly everybody is an injustice collector. We're all victims of victims. Unconsciously, we're all seeking compensation. The process of documenting our injuries, however, does become addictive.”
“Wait a minute; wait a minute. You're taking away my argument. I come to you saying I'm not sure what the hell my motivation has been, or is, and now you say my motivation doesn't really matter.”
Gottlieb shrugged slightly, exhaled audibly, raised his eyes as if looking through the ceiling and toward a distant heaven. He took a deep breath, then continued in a vigorous voice, “Let's not beat this dead horse anymore. Tell me what you did today.”
Monkeyshines
warlife
The City After the War

wind through the open windows
of an empty city bus,
yellowed sheets on sagging lines
brush the tall weeds of silent yards,
skyscrapers drop flakes of rust
over cracked concrete,
doors open and slam
in the dust-filled breeze,
like the broken toy
of an unhappy child. (Robert Tokarsky)



*****
My parallel code is Ansarbak. It is l986, and these notes are for my son, Adam. We were separated by the Cap-Com War. He was caught behind the lines in North America. His mother and I can get out. We have an escape tunnel; an old-fashioned astral projection type that Adam, who is only nine, is not yet able to use.
When we're all together in North America, we must live according to the Cap's anti-Com life program. We must be circumspect and discreet. Informants are everywhere and watch us constantly. Any expression of personal idiosyncrasy can be very dangerous.
Adam may lose some of his ability to be honest and intimate if we don't act soon. He needs to be exposed to vigorous group singing, silence, casual nudity, dancing, elder story-telling and many other human behaviors that are nearly extinguished in North America. Emigration would be a dangerous gamble for us. The Caps and Coms have stretched tentacles to the remotest parts of the planet, and in most places, life is even more desperate and rigid than it is in North America. The best place to hide is here, where we grew up.
While we consider alternatives, one thing we can do is pass along this book of notes. The operating instructions for the old escape tunnel are encoded within the text. It's a Level Three, subliminal cypher that can’t be decoded by any analytical method. The instructions will only be visible the way Adam's magic dagger appeared to his parallel uncle, Terry.
These notes will also function as an anti-toxin for the personal isolation contaminants absorbed through contact with Caps or Coms. Personal isolation is their main control technique. We use it in the parallel worlds, but only as a meditation device. Each reading of the text from beginning to end provides additional innoculation.
*****
The Cap-Com War escalated after the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1917, the Coms gained control of Russia. Their condemnation of the Cap's plan for global development ceased to be an academic one. The Caps blockaded Russia, and lots of children starved to death. A blood feud commenced. Each side became totally preoccupied with the maintenance of its chain of command and military capacity. Every social, economic and personal issue, however peripheral or irrelevant, henceforth resolved according to its imagined impact on the War.
The Cap-Com War recessed during World War II, 1939-1945. The Caps and Coms became temporary allies to fight the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy. Vast armies were decimated. Whole cities full of people were incinerated. Millions of non-combatant civilians were exterminated.
I grew up in Chicago during the manic period after World War II, during a sliver of time when people thought the world was at peace. Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini had been defeated. Fascism was dead. The tremendous blood sacrifice was seen as the purchase price of peace, freedom and prosperity. The final irony of WW II was a judgment issued at the War Crimes Trials at Nuremburg, Germany. This judgment confirmed that each individual person on the planet was obliged to exercise personal conscience even against the legal demands of the state. Many people reveled in optimistic hopes for the future.
The military vacuum created by the collapse of the Axis armies was invisible to the general public. A renewed Cap-Com War immediately began to fill that vacuum. It was called the Cold War. It was merely an intermission, a period of reorganization during which many people in North America tried to slip their military leash.
The American Cap's dominated the world's economy and held all the atomic bombs. They began to implement a global Pax Americana. The Russian Coms then shocked the world by developing an atomic arsenal of their own. They pursued a Russian kind of justice. The leaders of the world, trapped in a dogmatic mind-lock, committed humanity to a perpetual Cap-Com War.
As of this writing, the last world leaders who knew a world at peace has died. The Cap-Com War has evolved into a bureaucratic process and growth industry. It is the status quo. It may last for the life of the human race. It may destroy the human race. The only way out is through the parallel worlds.
*****
A fantasy of lights and shadows,
Only clear to frozen travelers who haven't been to Jupiter.

I've been there, and I know--
There are no words to penetrate the ice;
The many speakers trying, lying, fail.

A finger points at me and says, "Ha! Now I've got you by the ego
With your icy going and knowing."
That finger is my own.
******
Adam, I am Ansarbak. I address you at the request of your father. I'm his soul, his counselor, and his guide. I showed him how to survive with joy in the love commandos, and I helped him weave truth into the fabric of his personal story. . .so it was incomprehensible to the Herodites. The Herodites will insist that they understand, but they will not.
Your father doesn't have my constant wisdom, but he had memories of events and feelings that he wanted to share with you. He wrote about them as monkeyshines, a hidden agenda of humanity, because that word and concept communicate his feelings about ‘the down-side trash that litters life on Earth, and it's not normative. It lets everyone off the hook.’
I'd tell you clearly about the Caps and Coms, and thereby guide you to the Parallel Worlds, but it would be dangerous for you to possess such writing. The truth still destabilizes humans, and it's considered seditious even to imagine. Peace seekers are still hunted and destroyed.
So, while you've learned something here of your father's mind, don't be deluded. He's still his father's son. He put many important notes on blank sheets which he tucked carefully into his mind. . .some painful things, and some joyful. . .but you now have enough information to protect you during the war years ahead.
The Caps and Coms will rake the world with fire as they always have, and they will be consumed in that fire. You'll be threatened, lied to, and ridiculed, and you'll lose friends to death and madness. You'll see mistakes, and judge them terrible, and a time may come when your heart aches so deeply, you'll fear you can't stand any more. You'll also find love, beauty, insight, and achievement. Strengthened by these, and by what you've read here, you'll survive. You'll go forward, fear no evil, and make a joyful noise.
Don't worry, little Adam, it's only Rock and Roll. ***