Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Some clinical grade mescaline and a Leon Russell concert seemed like synchronous events
right on the heels of so many synchronous events. We'd all arrived within two days. My bicycle
got stolen. I got way bummed—I had a few thousand miles and many happy memories on that
bicycle, and eighty bucks wasn't chump change. But then Leon Russell rolled away the stone
on his way into town, and some high octane mescaline came down the pike as if by chance to
make me feel better, to help things let go of their material claim on each other, to loosen up
the firmament and let the universe proceed with expansion, beginning with our minds.
So we took some and went. Leon Russell looked like the old man on the mountain in a top
hat even then and was a rhythm 'n' blues god, and Mary McCreary, his eventual wife, had a
body that formed up right there on stage, direct from everyboy's dream. She sang and danced
in the front line, her Amazon-African physique a certain jaw dropper for the boys gaping up
from the front row at her perfect melons bouncing to the pulse of life while Leon fired of a
shoot out on the plantation. All the joy and light, the insight of Truth and Being filled us with
a warmth and camaraderie like never before till the show was over, and we were spent but still
tripping, or rather all tripped out with nowhere to go. Most people experience at some time
a silence of audible dimension, yet sitting in that room after the show was a level up, so to
speak, buzzing along to nowhere as the room went empty.
Into that lull Heavy Greg asked the thin air among us, with his distinct downward inclin-
ation, “God, man. I wonder what it's like to be dead. Man. It must be the trippiest fuckin' trip
in the world, man. It must be like . . . like. . . .”
Dead? What the fuck was he talking dead for? Well, maybe dead was cool. Nobody said
anything, because we were tripping and not nearly as seasoned as Greg or Jimmy, so we
couldn't talk—or at least not with any confidence, and besides, we had to scan the files for
dead and trippy, since anything could be cool. We liked the Grateful Dead, with the skulls and
everything. They were cool, and tripping was definitely not your usual life form, and tripping
was cool, but dead was not like tripping. No way. So we sat and stared, fairly stymied, until
Jimmy summarized the situation:
“It's not like anything, man. You're fuckin' dead.” The guy was full of surprises.
