"There is a lie that has seemed to have gotten credence lately that males don't know how to love each other. I don't believe this is so.... If we are willing to look just a little below the surface, we can often find the wonderful opposite of what's being said to be true."

- James L. White, "October, 1979"

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by Edward Lacie

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Episode Twenty-Six

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Sex is the source of magic.

The incantation must be cast by a Gnome. A threat to life is indispensible.

Though Ed hesitates to look over that old journal, I've studied it cover-to-cover a few times and dismiss most of it as drivel. Not these pages.

(The book was owned, in fantasy, by Rimbaud during his period of The Philomath.)

More than a spell is needed; there's pain first and then a carefully pattern of sleep deprivation and fasting and drug-taking that precede the ministrations.

"Someone did our work for us," Coop says of the door being opened within Bare Cave. The Bare Cave is in New York City and was referenced in the Breslin letter from the Son of Sam.

Lara knocks and interrupts the rhythm, affecting my ability to channel the spell as I transcribe it, translate ("interp") it.

The final ingredient is music. In the case of this incantation, the music is an approximately twenty-minute long rock composition, Pink Floyd's (circa 1969) Atom Heart Mother, which employs such audio devices as motorcycles revving and tubas and full orchestra in the background, not to mention an angelic demon choir that chants nonsense syllables reminiscent of African languages.

This is also one of the only pages in the journal which has specific reference to the date it was written, December 13, 1979. The events described, however, took place the last week of October during the trip to Seattle which immediately preceded the breakdown that went in the direction of up. The opening verse also states that the chant itself was spoken on October 26, 1979.¹

Hard to remember all these years later, but I think that's the day Ed called the FBI and met with Sheriff Gardner the first time, before passing the letter under the toast (which, of course, happened October 31).

I'd forgotten about the two-day ritual of writing that was a crucial step to the attainment of the vision, but then the equation is different for each seer.

I interp:

___

October twenty sixth was.

December thirteenth is.

Karma between and all else or else the real radio, satanic stations if it is dialectic dharma.

The Trip is an experiemental prose work written after the poems of "Bouleversement" and this poem which follows The Trip.

This is the Longest Chapter of a Long Gay Story.

At first I thought, "No." Vi Et Nam took off his towel and hid his package, joining me in the whirlpool. He looked me over studiedly, obviously.

"Well?" I thought. "Naw. I don't know." He reached

over for my lap under white rushing water. I brushed him off with something like, "Let me relax a minute." That should put an end to it. It had only begun.

He moved from my left to right side, eyes fixed and unmoving from his look at my third eye as he did so, sad, cow-brown eyes, no: the scared eyes of a child.

Besides his genius, all Jesus the Christ has was his feet.

He was smaller than me but (obviously) older, perhaps almost thirty!

"What you' name?" I answered, dumb. I didn't understand his name which he told me once I'd told him mine. Noisy whirlpool. I've since called him Vie Et Nam.

Atom Heart Mother, the chorus screams a stately, "La! La! La! La!"

"How old you?"

"21."

"27."

He wasted no more time eliminating what little personal space each of us maintained, embracing me from behind. He was small enough to work his way into narrow spaces. A backrub began, expert backrub designed to break down resistence.

With a leg under each hand I began a massage mutual of his thighs. He seemed to be humming. Chanting?

The kissing began slowly and softly and silkily. I had splashed him earlier when I left and returned to the pool.

"Sorry. At first I thought you ...."

"Silence in the studio." (Atom Heart Mother "lyric")

"I have bed upstairs," he said among other things meant to get us to leave when the old man entered the pool.

I presumed he meant a private cubicle with a door but he led me to the orgy room, a bottom bunk in ninety percent darkness. The bed was the first (or last if you were passing the other direction through the room with an access from two sides) of five bunks beds placed alternately from the left and right walls, creating a winding path for those who were passing through.

No one else was in the room. It was about 6 p.m.

Excerpt from a letter from Dean that I received last week:

Dean had re-appeared in Seattle after his month-long runaway to San Francisco. Although Dean was back and accounted for, no word had been heard about Burhan in Iran. Also, the Iranian hostages were being held and would be until Ronald Dollar Reagan took office. 

'Flash! We just heard on the news that the bathhouse got raided last night. 125 arrested.'

and from a letter received today from Maggie:

'No luck for any of you,' she writes in the Christmas card.

I laid on my back expecting him to he got on the bed and turned me every began backrub when did the six others in towels return to the room to watch slow, sensual snips of skin between fast, skinny fingers flurry my back like this has happened before with the same people watching me every when did the return....

Atom Heart Mother starts again. I am playing it continuously.

Then he turned me around? to my side? the audience kept their distance. We were gracefulling and fun to watch, I'm sure. Still a little wet from the whirlpool, we wrestled slowly working ourselves into sweat wrestling for forty slow minutes.

Hands that tried to tenderly join us were brushed back but they would return and massage various of our appendages. The attendants who work the front desk have closed the door for a break and are on the far bed.

Lonely hearts club. A band from Atom Heart.²

An end and so tired I, he tried and another I reached to brush a he shouldn't touch me hand away from by back so I said in twice whispers 'I'm too' and he turned my over the backrub grew into body massage and I melted just a done he laid beside me the audience to kiss and miss and slobber as they peeling away and arounding him, both so wet glisten I turned him over to give him his massage detail my hands large eloquent "both masseurs" a near stranger asked exclaimed I was overwhelmed.



The problem with trying to remember more clearly myself what happened during that week: the needed pieces are connected to similarly forgotten longer periods of time both immediately before and after the week in question.

In order to be able to translate the poem of what happened during that week or so, I'd have to relearn a language that has disappeared. As ever, I'm waiting for a secret miracle (my next writing project is a screenplay).

Luckily the notes mention music or I'd have forgotten that element. Fasting is not referred to but is remembered clearly now. Sex. Dental pain. Writing.