Jungle Dreaming.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, again, I can't help returning, over and over, time as a circle, not an arrow, always called back here, as if I've spent many previous lives enmeshed in the Indian landscape. As a rationalist I find it hard to believe in "reincarnation" but who's to say, in a Universe 14 billion years old, 10 billion years ago souls didn't evolve to transmigrate, or clever scientists in some far-flung galaxy didn't discover the technique of transmigrating consciousness. There are many instances of people recognizing 'other' cultures intimately, I myself have had a fascination for all things Indian since early childhood. Anyway, it's a cool sci-fi idea and kind of consoling. 

(Though born again as a blind man or breaking rocks as a slave is not too appealing. I guess we all just long for something continuing after death, the miracle of being conscious of this stunning universe not easy to give up after a paltry 70 years.)

I went up into the mountains and sat in a cool mountain stream and pondered the exuberant foliage of the jungle hanging down to the water all about me; a silent jungle, somnolent, as if it's dreaming its existence, me plonked down in the middle of it as witness to the amazing wonder of life on this planet. Life that has Scientifically evolved, yeah, but with a mystique none the less.

That night, back in the city of Shangri-la, I sat in a cafe high above the Ganges River, a Shiva moon in the sky, glowering jungle mountains, shimmering temples, city lights reflected in the water rushing away from me, and I read on the Internet that my dear, beloved next door neighbor, Dolly, died in Sydney a week ago and I am bereft. I loved her very much, she was the one reassuring factor at the hellhole that is Northcott Housing Ghetto. When I was depressed she cheered me up, when sick she brought me hot soup, when lonely she let me know that someone cared. If there is such a thing as a 'saint' she was IT, never hurting anyone, suffering much abuse stoically, she brought up her kids, and her grand kids, in her tiny flat, was in fact the queen of Northcott, had cut the ribbon on the opening of what THEY thought was going to be a workers' Utopia back in 1960.

I was in Mumbai at the time of her death but didn't look at my Facebook page, and am glad of it as Shangri-la is a better place to receive such sad news, it's more bearable here, a site redolent of the sad beauty of life and death. It's a place of Moksha, the struggle for freedom from the wheel of rebirth, from desire, pain and loss. There's a mist shrouding the landscape that makes it all feel mysterious, like the veil of Samsara clouding one's view, that one is ever trying to see beyond, to a greater reality, where all is peace, love, compassion, harmony, oneness. She personified all this and now Northcott will ring with the shadow of her presence. 

(This sentiment is in contrast to the harsh reality of the world we struggle in, of greed, jealousy, celebrity, war, profit, competition etc. which I have, in fact, run away from, to this 'other' place. Of course, such ugly reality is writ large here in India, starving millions while a few elite hog all the resources, the corruption of the world exploding in one's face, but as a tourist I'm cut off from the horror here, and try to look past it, like a dreamer, a wanker.)

I nursed my old mentor Compassion here in Shangri-la back in 1974 when I was only twenty-four years old and we threw his body in the river for the sacred fish to eat. The people carry their dead down the streets here on the way to the cremation grounds, for all the world to see, not ashamed of death, death as a natural part of the cycle of life. A few months ago, in the nursing home, Dolly told me, at 93, she was tired of life and wanted to die that night. She asked me how long it would take her to die. I had to be honest and said that as she was a very strong woman it would take about three months, that her family loved her and wouldn't want to see her go so quickly, and I was right, almost to the day, my nursing experience able to suss her prognosis.

And now she's gone, like all the billions before her, back to the interstellar dust, to mingle with the atoms of her beloved husband, who had died 21 years previously and who she had missed terribly. And I carry on, old enough to lose many friends to Entropy by now, the sad beauty of staying alive in the Dreamtime of this world.

Beloved Dolly.

 P.S. A high mass was held for Dolly at the local Catholic Church, celestial organ and soprano singing, a hundred friends and deadbeats from Northcott filing in and out, wishing her well in her quest for Christian eternity, but loving and missing her terribly in this world, for that is the only place we've known her. And I missed the whole ritual, as usual, for I was off eating lotuses in India but I will always carry her in my heart, while I'm alive, and that's where my true self resides. Even India lies there. 

I'm reading Allen Ginsberg's "Indian Journals" which a friend has just given me for my birthday. He was in India in 1962, 10 years before I got there, and he writes a similar tale to mine, only he beat me to it; always I am beaten, the beat generation goes on. Even his mystical dreaming is similar to mine, the souls of us homo sapiens are one. What matters is the story is universal, and can be told over and over, each decade with a different slant or flavor but the same themes, and it's consoling to know that I am not alone in my loss and my search, not for immortality or an afterlife, but full realization of this life.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

45) At a Crossroads.

And so we come to the end of the first book of Arthur’s misadventures, "The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat", a howling psychodrama, yeah, but he had to squeeze some enjoyment from his misery-guts and write it as funny satire. (But there's only 6 lives in this epic tome, you might discover. Well, if he stays alive, he might get to write Book 2, "Public Enemy Number 7", in which he chases movie stardom and is in turn chased by the cops, and that will constitute the tale of his 7th life. If there are two more for the proverbial 9 cat's lives, only old age will tell.)

As an homosexual libertarian, pagan trickster and tripped-out wastrel, he found himself an anti-hero, and his tales picaresque, a loner and a drifter, who had no final destination and achieved no grand goal. While in future he would try to make himself a movie star, the tag of “great artist” eluded him, he was shoved to the back of the queue and reduced to cringe-worthy desperate acts, as many of his anecdotes attest, and that's how we'll leave him, hanging.

For he was not a model citizen, working nine to five, married with kids, who made the world go round, which is the subject of every movie, book and advertisement, Mr.Nice Guy wooing his princess, whose praises are sung from every nook and cranny, whose staid conformity made a freak like Arthur nauseous, with derision, envy and difference. He compulsively went against the grain and, worse, against "the collective", for "collectives" hate loners, everyone's got to belong to a "Family" or else they're 'OUT', destroyed. Religious maniacs out-number atheists, upper-class rulers over-power slave workers, socialist apparatchiks out-maneuver independent libertarians, private school boys out-compete state school drop outs, and Hets get favored over Homos, thus Arthur had all the dice loaded against him. In the face of his outrageous poofiness macho men could only grimace, and battle-axe feminists sneer.

In the distant future of the 21^st Century he had the briefest of windows to tell his side of the story, the Internet, and looking at the numbers on his Blog site, Artie could see that a few thousand around the world read him and were possibly, vaguely interested in his travails. Not just homos, there were thinkers looking beyond sexuality to a 21st century human existence. But censorship reared its ugly head as always, some STATES saw his work as homo propaganda and blocked him, or he insulted certain power-mongers and outclassed vacuous shit-heap climbers and THEY wiped him, it was always a game of dog eat cat, not easy to get heard above the caterwauling; in this historically hierarchical world there rarely was any true democratic freedom such as free speech, especially for those on the bottom of the heap. 

He was reminded of Isherwood's novel "Christopher and His Kind", the rise of Nazism in Berlin and the public burning of "decadent" books. Soon this text may disappear, read it while you can; while he hoped to make it over to Amazon/Kindle Books on demand, Artie wasn’t sure he could stay alive long enough to make it happen, or if he’d be allowed to. The Conservatives were taking over in Auz , homophobes who ruled the mass media could initiate medieval  pogroms at the press of a button, even after supposed "gay lib" times, there really do exist absolute enemies of homo happiness and gay marriage equality, relegating them back to the dark parks and toilets, where they belong as dirty night-crawlers.

He’d always been honest about himself, his vagaries, flaws, mistakes, failings; yeah he was a fuck up, and he was human. He first got his life story published in 1983 in an anthology titled “Edge City From Two Different Levels”: his tale “Welcome to the Men's”, included in this tome, described his youth of degradation and plead for gay marriage rights to lift his kind from the gutter of zipless sex. A historian from Sydney University, Gary Wutherspoon, noticed the story and asked him to reprise it for a bigger anthology in 1985, “Being Different”, which went on to several print runs, and for which he got a lousy fifty bucks. Artie made no bones about the human homosexual condition, he told all the ugly truths and was forever lambasted for it.

He was no prophet or mealy-mouthed “holy man” spouting bullshit about a non-existent god, getting the gullible to sit at his feet out front while out back he secretly sucked their cocks, as some closeted guru-types did. When he tripped on LSD he didn’t find “GOD”, he found a wondrous natural phenomena, the Universe, of which he was a conscious part. Neither was he a rabble-rousing revolutionary leader but he did protest the Vietnam War, all wars, and he struggled for Indigenous Rights, Women’s Equality, Gay Lib and Environmental Protection as if these issues were part of his soul’s salvation; to him, the political was personal.

At best he enjoyed creating art that eventually blew away in the wind, was inflammatory and satirical, heartfelt and vivid. From the age of seventeen in 1967 he told anybody who asked, “Yes, I’m homosexual, so what?” Being  a working-class Aussie was the clincher to his “boy most likely not to succeed” tag but he didn’t give a fuck, “boys just want to have fun” could’ve been his true by-line.

He eventually relinquished all role-playing, not only god-man, political leader and social worker, he even gave up the wank of being "the artist", all human activity was game-playing bullshit, money/power/sex ruled and he was heartily sick of it all = the mendacity and stupidity of humanity on the road to perdition. He especially eschewed the role of businessman: making money, stockpiling possessions, consuming endlessly whatever he could grab a hold of, devouring the planet, ripping off and exploiting everyone from a private jet. This kind of person he despised, he owned nothing valuable, recycled everything, lived on little, held contempt for designer-fashion, was brand-name averse, the corporate world would collapse if it depended on him.

He hated hypocrites, he had always been honest about who and what he was, a deadbeat, freaked out homosexual. The world is 90% heterosexual, run by and for them, and so it should be, kids have to be born, raised and carry the torch for future civilization. Yet some of those kids will be gay, they are born into Het families, not made by homos, in the main made by Hets, and they should be loved by such, they shouldn’t be tortured by a heterosexual supremecist world. All the freedoms hard won by the Gay community could be rescinded over night, in many places Gays are still imprisoned, murdered, tortured, alienated, excluded. His writing is an attempt at democratic free speech to plead for tolerance and support of his "kind", not propaganda, more like a defense.

Artie flashed that ‘straights’ are maybe growing sick of hearing homos whinging and whining about their sorry status, most just aren’t interested, and his book was pissing in the wind. He had rewritten it twenty-one times from his bunker while around him he felt civilization rocked on the brink of catastrophe; still he felt the weird compulsion to tell his story, regardless of the consequences, police states, fundamentalist religions, murderous thugs and indifferent trendoids be damned. 

Life for him wasn’t all doom and gloom: regardless of all the put-downs and rejections he got himself an exciting, euphoric life. There was music to bliss out to, crowds to dance with, movies to excite, books to blow his mind, sunny days on mountain tops to lift his being, friends with smiling eyes to redeem a blind humanity, and thrill rides to make life worth bothering with. He yet had much to give, and much to tell, but dark night was descending fast, he didn’t think anybody cared, he needed to move on, the drifter, the observer; where the wide world beckoned, he felt only to disappear, wailing that greatest cliché of them all, “Goodbye cruel world.”

After weeks, months, years of insomnia, he finally fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a lucid second life. The dream haze parted and an infinite road spread out to the horizon before him. He looked behind him at the cracked trail he’d already trudged along, full of potholes, occasional oasis and swampy bogs. He had been laboring down that road for what seemed like several lifetimes, experiencing some glorious sites along the way but suffering many painful events as well. Yet he trod gaily, determinedly, tortuously onwards for he felt he must be reaching his destination sometime soon.

He came to a crossroads at which an encampment had been set-up, like some welcoming caravansary, with several lost friends sitting by a fire radiating warmth and encouragement. And there glowing in their midst sat his long-dead mentor, dear old Compassion, benign smile and Nirvana bliss lighting up his face. Exhausted from his trek, instantly Arthur felt some peace, he sat and took time to catch his breath and steady his mind, then found the courage to put his burning question to his long looked for, wise, old friend. “I’ve come a long way. For all the joy, the pain has been intense. When will it be over. I’m so tired. Surely my destination is at hand? How much farther do I have to go?”

The ancient yogi, expanded eyes of the seer sparkling, gave his usual cryptic smile and lifted his crippled arm to point off down the never-ending road. And Arthur mystically heard his creaky voice lilting in his head, “I’ve been waiting for an eternity for you here at the cross-roads of your brilliant non-career. But you’ve only reached the halfway point, you’ve still got a long way to go, baby!”

Arthur stood up, blew him a kiss and moved wearily on. He could still hear the old fool laughing as he continued to trudge on down that infinite highway, angels flapping at his conscience and devils nipping at his heels, relentlessly. His own true-blue eyes searched the horizon that ever receded before him and, as the dream mists closed in on him, he figured, high or low, he’d surf his probability waves to wherever they took him.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

44) In the Belly of Queen Victoria.

By the mid 1980s Arthur had devolved into a true desperado,  hustling everybody he met for a break, virtually homeless in the squats and often starving. Nobody would give him a job, he couldn’t sell a painting or raise a budget for the grand movie in which he could make himself a star. He was too proud to scrabble for scraps off the floor at Paddy’s vegetable market, too paranoid to shoplift and too straight to be a drug dealer.

While he’d grown out of his psychedelic phase, the oncoming rush of the LSD trip too harsh for his paranoid sensitivities, for spiritual inspiration he did imbibe the occasional Goldtop mushroom whenever he went up to Nimbin Town, and thus he never did come back to earth. Add to this the oppression he had lived through due to his sexuality and it was easy to see why he was never going to settle down into steady, respectable employment and good citizenship. He was in a constant spin and smoked marijuana often, male leaf which he grew in pots on his squat roof, to quell the pain and relieve the depression his iniquitous life gave him.   

A side-effect of all this was intense insomnia, lying in his squalid bed thinking on and on about his mistakes, the beatings, the failures and the wrongs he’d suffered. One morning, restless and hungry, he went out into the city before dawn in a somnambulist fugue to wander the empty streets and peer in at the shop windows to contemplate luxury toys he could never have and expensive food he could not consume. It was outside McDonald’s restaurant at Town Hall Station that he went insane from the aromas wafting out at breakfast hour. He dreamed of heaped-up scrambled eggs, muffins and hash browns, to fill a bathtub with the crap and veritably bathe in it, but he didn’t have a cent in his pockets and could only drool in frustration.

He wandered on, forlorn, across the road to the Queen Victoria Building and cringed under Her imposing statue before the front entrance. He’d not noticed it before but behind the statue was a wishing well, full of glinting coins and he wished fervently for them. The coins were for charity and lay at the bottom of a pool protected by a grate. Arthur had a brainwave, and a quick try snaking his right arm in and out of the water confirmed that he could get his arm under the edge of the grate and scoop up the coins, for his own charity. It would be better, he reasoned, if he could get right in the basin, dive under the water so as to reach further and scoop up more coins. He would have to go around the corner to change out of his clothes, stash them and return with just his overcoat on over his undies. And on the spur of the moment, thinking of hot buttered muffins, he did it, snatching up a plastic bag on the way. 

He strode back to the wishing well, disrobed and jumped into the basin, taking a breath then diving under its freezing waters and squeezing his arm under the grate to shovel coins into the plastic bag. He had to come up for air often and dive again, merrily eyeballing his haul each time and determined to filch the whole cache. Just as he thought he had enough of the treasure, clutching the plastic bag, he peered up through the murky waters and hallucinated two wavering shadows looming over him. He rose up, the nightmarish vision gaining solidity as the waters parted, for when he broke the surface he found himself in the presence of two uniformed Security Guards standing over him, like Godzilla sea monsters.

Before they could grab him he emptied the bag of coins back into the well, then stood there dripping pathetically in his undies, sheepish and humiliated. The Security Guards hauled him out of the well and glared at him with scorn. What a sorry fellow he looked, semi-naked and wet, skinny and glum. Arthur dragged on his raggedy coat as they marched him through the front entrance and into the gloomy dark bowels of the Queen Victoria Building.

Leaving wet footprints on the nice black and white tiles, he was taken down to the basement to a Security cubicle and shoved onto a wooden chair facing a bank of video-monitors. The Guards guffawed and pointed at the screen showing the front entrance, Queen Victoria’s cursed statue and the dreaded wishing-well, artistically lit up like a theater piece. Damned video cameras, by the mid 1980’s they were ubiquitous, there would be no more sneaking around, for there were spying eyes in every nook and cranny, just like in the dystopian society of “1984”. 

They regaled Arthur with questions, “Why’d ya do it? It’s a shocking crime, stealing from a charity, Blind Children no less! What are ya, some kind of social freak? Getting around in ya undies, disgusting! What’s ya problem, are ya a mental case?” To which Arthur sullenly replied, “Why was I born at all?” They kept up the badgering, trying to solve the riddle of his pathetic existence. He was sick, “SICK, that’s it! Ya got AIDS! Aaagghhh, AIDS!” This was the era when AIDS had broken upon a fearful public and, to deadheads, gays were suspect and blameworthy.

“Have you got AIDS?” they kept asking him, Arthur keeping quiet, he had no interest in educating prejudiced yokels; to mean spirited people he was condemned which ever way he turned. He just gave a doleful, cryptic smirk, let the gronks think what they want, he had to worm his way out of this mess somehow.

Now they kept their distance, didn’t want to touch him, afraid he might bite them. They rang for the police and waited anxiously, squirming around the cubicle, they’d captured a plague-ridden zombie and wanted to be shat of him fast. Fuck, the police! Arthur had to come up with an award winning performance to escape this imbroglio. It came easy, he was a born actor, he shrunk in upon himself, hunched over dolefully, presenting as a leprous old Harold Steptoe-like figure under the gaze of displeasure from the Oink Oink brigade when they finally arrived. 

The Guards told the Pigs they had no case against Arthur because he had jettisoned the stolen coins back into the well and, as he was such a sorry-arsed AIDS-carrying fag, he should be gotten rid of post haste. Chilled to his soul, Arthur whined and muttered nihilist existentialism and anti-fascist diatribes, reinforcing their view of him as a nutcase, possibly rabid, and with much disgruntlement hustled him into the back of a Black Maria van, keeping him at arms length all the while. Arthur sniffled and cringed and wondered where in Hell they were taking him.

He could see himself in jail, then in Court, accused of robbing Charity. Uuuggghh! Such ignominy was hard to bear, still, what was one more burden on an already overladen donkey’s back, he was used to it, he’d overcome it, in fact he was a maestro at bearing up. The Pig van rumbled through the dawn streets of Sydney, Arthur apprehensive as to his destination, "Aumming" his mantra to center himself as he was tossed to and fro by the rough driving of the Oinkers. After an interminable tour of what seemed the underbelly of the city, up and down streets and around countless corners, him hanging on for dear life, wet and bedraggled, the van screeched to a halt in a back lane of Woolloomoolloo.

The back door of the van was ripped open and he was unceremoniously turned out onto the gutter’s edge, at some arcane Pig-shop, or so Arthur feared. But no, the Pigs shot off up the street without a word, abandoning him in the twilight silence of dawn.

The next thing he knew, he was being ushered into a building by a smug, staid social-worker type who tut-tutted about gay losers and the devil’s children. On seeing several crucifixes and a crew of ragged derelict men clamoring at a breakfast table, Arthur realized where he had been dumped. The Mathew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Men! Yeeha! He was saved. The cops had shown mercy after all. The good Christian worker blathered on and on about fallen humanity, trying to get Arthur dressed in their drab, institutional clothes, but he mumbled excuses about his own clothes being out in the alley and was permitted to go fetch them.

He rushed out into the clear, crisp morning air of freedom and off across the city of Sydney to retrieve his clothes from where he’d hidden them, for it was still early morning and there were few about to witness his antics. He then ran all the way back to his squat in Pyrmont, to tremble and rue his luck under the blankets of his rickety, lovely pauper’s bed. He thought of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", things were bad but not that bad. Then he fell asleep, hungry and safe.

www.amazon.com/author/tobyzoates

If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.