The studio bigwigs are also concerned about the deficit in law enforcement, which partially explains the proliferation of the even more extensive and putridly stale genres of “Copaganda,” in which I also made a cameo appearance as a “scumbag,” and “Trialhypnosis,” where I had starred as the controversial defendant.

It always comes down to the Verdict: a uniformed authority figure pronouncing a fate over which you are helpless. The message is powerlessness, and the show might as well fade to black after that, the rest is all padding to fill the hour. It’s over for the hapless extra, he’ll never be seen again when the Verdict is delivered, whether it’s a cop chanting, “You have the right to remain silent,” a judge reading, “Guilty on all counts,” or an allopath gloatingly declaring, “Your type of malignancy has a survival rate of about five percent at a year.” Same late prime-time slot; different night.

There’s even a subtle aesthetic to it, a balance. Cosmic justice, wholly distinct from cultural justice, which is at least theoretically based on fairness. The Universe fosters no such delusions. All the stars demand is that both sides of an equation be equal. My winning streak was bound to turn.

Defeat/Triumph
Pleasure/Pain
Life/Death
and so on.

I get up and leave without a word or gesture. To what point continuing to stare at his smug mug, enduring the glaring light and sickly alcohol miasma of his Death Chamber? Shall I appeal to reason, come up with a logical argument to convince the doctor of his error? Will I pry some neglected nugget of hope from his overcluttered mind, my one chance in a million he forgot to mention? I have nothing further to discuss with medicine.

Courtesy is for the living. Time to start losing those habits.

On the bright side, I can finally give the IRS a big fat bird.

No need to give up smoking or cocaine. In fact, I believe the time is ripe for a good old-fashioned heroin habit. I always wanted one of those.

I can trade in my exercise equipment, which mostly goes unused anyway, for some skydiving gear and maybe a dragracing motorbike.

My diet from this point on may as well consist of pure cholesterol. I can live exclusively on pastries without a twinge of guilt.

I can fuck strangers without a condom.

I can tell off all the people I was afraid I might need someday, my agent and publisher and lawyer and probation officer and everyone else that no longer matters.

Fuck ‘em.

I never again have to pretend I’m seriously considering matrimony so as not to lose a good, steady lay.

I will drive the Porsche into the ground and never spend another minute in a mechanic’s shop.

I will tell Llewellyn Reece I have a crush on her.

Can I write a novel in three months?

Absolutely. Thousand words a day. Cake.

Two in six months?

I don’t see why not.

Will I be able to write when I can no longer walk?

Marcel Proust wrote seven million words in the sickbed, by hand, no less.

Sure, but god, what a dull seven million words! He wrote about ghosts. An exercise in stasis. Seventy pages on one instance of tea-and- biscuits and the associations conjured. How can you create dynamic fiction, if you’re not really alive?

Will I waste away to a corpse, still madly scrawling my impressions from a life cashiered, clutching my memories to the end?

I know in that moment that there will be no sickbed. I ain’t goin’ down like that.

-Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, “All I Need,” Spirit of Music, c. 1999, Bob Marley Music

“Well, I’ll be frank,” the doctor intones gravely, tightening the knot of his tie. “The prognosis is…not good.” Could be paranoia, but it’s as if he’s biting his tongue to keep from popping a grin, or even a chuckle. That too- serious look. The bastard, I do believe he’s enjoying this!

Delivering the news, after all-that’s the signature scene on every one of the dramaporn clones that have been hastily plotted by failed playwrights since television began. The shows where dumpy looking, balding guys with glasses get to be unconscionable philanderers and still earn the love of grandmotherly near-widows who bake brownies all day for you after heroically snatch ninety-four year old Sylvester from the jaws of death by performing some unconventional radical surgery that you invent on the spot, mostly to impress the new nurse.

You know that sort of show. In fact, I believe that the ubiquity of this tired setting has less to do with it’s popularity among viewers (it’s a fact that most Americans will watch any crap put in front of them) or even
unwillingness to invent new and original premises (which in addition to being expensive and risky, requires exactly the type of minds that avoid commercial television) than with the patriotic zeal of network executives, who, in their unobtrusive way, are trying desperately to address the nation’s shortage of physicians.

I can just about see a teenage version of this geek, pocket protectors and calculators, Advanced Placement Biology text at the ready the minute he stops jacking off to ER. Standing in front of a mirror in blue thriftshop surgical scrubs and a white Miami Vice coat, practicing his lines. “There appears to be an abnormality,” and “I’m going to be frank, the prognosis is not good,” and “Nurse, please, I can’t. I’m a married man, and my mistress works on this wing.”

If I were writing the script, the next line would be, “However, there is an experimental therapy that just became available for your condition, and the early indications are promising…”

Instead, the Writer, who I sometimes think is boring and unnecessarily cruel, decided to insert a lecture into the monologue. “If you’d come to me earlier, when we first called you, it’s possible that we’d have had some options. Surgery might have been feasible. But it’s been over three months, and your x-rays are extremely discouraging. Chemo and radiation are contraindicated by the extent of the growths.”

He pauses, savoring his moment. “I’m afraid that the best I can recommend is a course of painkillers, and I will, of course, associate the research centers with your case. Breakthroughs happen every day, and one might be relevant to you.”

He hesitates again, and it’s obvious he’s waiting for the Question. It’s my big line, one of the last I will get to utter, since I am a guest on this show, just one among the legion of goners that portray the heartbreaking tragedy the Star must confront each day in his daily struggle to be true to his Oath.

There’s no escaping it; I need the information, if only for tax purposes, and he’ll never tell me without being explicitly asked. Would you? I surrender, nearly choking on the words. “How long, doc?”

“Well-it’s just that,” I stumble, trying to distill my impressions into inadequate verbal code. “Okay, it’s like this-if you’d ever asked me who I felt to be the greatest English-language novelist during the first half of the last century, I’d have told you, without hesitation, Joyce. He represents the quantum leap in form and structure in fiction, every bit as much as Einstein forever changed the way physicists think about their work. Yet I’ve always profoundly disagreed with him about his theory of literary art.”

Llewellyn is wearing her therapist’s mask. “You know, I read Portrait of the Artist probably ten years ago, as an undergrad. I can’t really say I remember his ideas on the subject clearly, if I ever did really understand. Perhaps you could describe the conflict.”

I inhale. Lecture time. “For one thing, I’ve always objected to his veneration of Aristotle and Aquinas. Heavyweight minds, certainly; but wrongheaded. In a philosophy-paper kind of way, they could just about equally share the blame for Western civilization’s ongoing rape-and-pillage approach to other cultures. And some of their thinking was quite absurd. Aristotle ‘proved’ the impossibility of the atom, showing quite clearly that there could never, logically, be a point beyond which matter could not be divided and retain it’s basic character. He also provided an excellent case for slavery and the subjugation of women. Aquinas ‘deduced’ the existence of a Christian god from the widespread success of Christianity; for how could it have taken over the ‘whole world’ otherwise?” I shake my head. “Nitwits.”

“Furthermore, I’ve never really understood what Joyce meant by his contention that Art should be ‘static, not kinetic’. As I’ve been made to understand this vacuity, the duty of the writer is to abstract his judgments from his work. To be a landscape painter with words. To reflect through the mosaic life itself. Not settle personal scores.”

“Well, when I read this, I was enraged! It immediately sounded all wrong, narrow. Were Huxley, Orwell, mere propagandists? The whole point of literature, I’d always felt, was to move you. If I had a novel political or religious view, I owed it to both myself and the reader to make the idea available. Not through rhetoric but technique. If I were clever enough, you’d never know you’d been changed, but there’s no finer and more delicate art than counter-propaganda. It’s why I write. Yet to James Joyce, I am a desecration.”

Llewellyn nods sympathetically. “This must be confusing for you.”

I find to my surprise she’s mistaken. “No, actually, things are clearer now. I’ve always felt a bit of terror in opposing the notions of a much greater writer. What did I fancy I knew that he didn’t? Now I just know Joyce-or, rather, I in the incarnation of James Joyce-was wrong. Victim of Jesuit propaganda. There can be no such thing as static literature, because selection of subject matter represents a kinetic decision in the production of art! By choosing what you write about, at the minimum, you are manipulating your audience! He was as guilty as anyone. How could you read Portrait and not be moved against the Catholic Church?”

“That’s a fairly common phenomenon,” Llewellyn says, nodding. “People who discover that they’d been famous figures find frequent points of similarity-underlying personality traits and life-struggle themes-but as often harbor a strong distaste for the previous incarnation’s major premises.” She smiles. “It’s a symptom of growth. I happen to know the reincarnation of Karl Marx, as it happens, and she feels the same way. Now she’s working on a spiritually-based social philosophy called ‘Tribal Collectivism’. A hippie chick. Used to go out with Crazy Bear, in fact, and he’s the earliest recorded reference we have. Sonofabitch is in the Bible. Numbers. Look it up.”

“Crazy Bear? In the Bible? Who was he, Moses?”

Llewellyn laughs. “No, and it’s a good thing he didn’t hear you say that. No, on the contrary, our friend was a little-known insurrectionist named Korah. Led an uprising against Moses and Aaron in the desert, said they were incompetent, any moron could have moved the Hebrews past the Sinai peninsula in a few weeks. According to the Bible, he and all his supporters, their families and livestock, were swallowed alive by the earth, which opened at God’s word to obliterate them. Of course, that’s not how C.B. tells it.”

I’m curious. “What’s his side?”

She shrugs. “It was a straight political execution. God had nothing to do with it. Moses had studied Atlantean magic as a prince in Egypt, which is the same place he got the idea for monotheism. The peasants honored as many gods as the market would bear, but the Pharaohs and their offspring worshipped the Sun, just like their ancestors from the Island. Moses had an Atlantean power rod, a crystal-tipped copper tube device for channeling TK. He used it to bury them alive. That’s also, of course, how he split the Red Sea.”

“How about you?” I ask, realizing she’s never peeped a word about her own transmigration. “Who have you been?”

“No one important, I’m afraid. Midwife and witch. Shaman. In every life I’ve recovered, I’ve been some kind of healer.”

“That seems very important.”

“It doesn’t get you into the history books, that’s for sure. Except occasionally as a statistic. I’m fairly sure I was burned at least once, during the Inquisition. It’s a recurring nightmare.”

Something’s been nagging at me. “You said ‘we.’ ‘He’s the earliest recorded reference we have.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

She hesitates. “A group. We compare notes on reincarnation.” She doesn’t elaborate and I decide not to pursue it. Why force her to lie to me?

“Thank you,” I swear I hear her say, though her lips don’t move. Then, most definitely aloud, “Why don’t we get you back into a trance, see what else we can come up with? You seem especially tuned in today.” She raises the volume on the music a notch. I close my eyes and ride the wave of time away from the shore.

* * * * * *

She looks thoughtful. “James Joyce. I can see it. Desert Trance is very stream of consciousness. Maybe like Joyce on acid.”

Not only that, I realize. “The books are structured alike, too. Eighteen tracks, eighteen episodes. A triad of protagonists made up of two of the author’s alter egos and his faithless love. Christ, I even had a Molly! Why didn’t I see it before?”

I did see it, though. I wasn’t the only one. “A Joycean masterpiece,” one reviewer had commented, noting the parallel. And I had had a fanciful conversation with Molly-my Molly, the model for the character in Desert Trance, where I had gone so far as to teasingly suggest that she was the reincarnation of Nora Barnacle, comparing her promiscuous ways and writer-groupie status with those of Joyce’s albatross-love.

She had, naturally, done me the same as Leopold Bloom-the very same day I closed the novel I had written her as a love-offering, breaking my heart and leaving me to muse on the peculiar ways life imitates art imitates life imitates art…

I never talked about the real Molly in interviews, and as far as I could tell, no one realized she was drawn from reality, without very much alteration at all. I passed the character’s name off as a symbol for Ecstasy,
the drug-molly is a slang term for pure MDMA, also called “molecule” to distinguish it from the adulterated pressed pills.

Everybody wants Molly.

She was, after all, the hottest thing that had ever happened to literature.

Twice.

Desert Trance now seems to be a somewhat inferior epic.

I can hardly regard it as my greatest work, with the lofty company of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Somehow my rave novel seems trivial by comparison.

On the other hand, thanks mostly to the interceding invention of the aforementioned personal computer, I had kicked it out it in a three-month orgy of psychedelic frenzy, instead of seven-to-seventeen year schedule my predecessor had kept. What this incarnation had apparently lost in quality and scope could be compensated by prolificity and comprehensibility.

I am, after all, a young man. I can fill a shelf in the time I have left.

Of course, I understand that I am not precisely “James Joyce,” just as a wrinkled octogenarian is not identical to the toddler of eight decades prior. Our gulf is even greater, having not one, but two interstices of amnesia between us. Rigorous Jesuit indoctrination has given way to secular Jewish indifference. Modernist literature has come and gone. Psychedelic drugs have become widely available. Somewhere along the way the bottle had been replaced by the bong.

Yet apparently some things stick, such as an ironic interest in reincarnation, a mania for innovative prose, a taste for untamable fireballs named-

I sit crosslegged with my back to the couch and throw myself into a mild trance, savoring each inflation and reduction of my chest, slowing time, until I reach that place between breaths. Emptying my mind, balancing
precariously on the crack of the Yin-Yang, the pinnacle of not-doing where striving momentarily ceases, and the body and soul are free from the interminable struggle to either engage the rich nourishment of air, the most fundamental good, or to extirpate the poisonous waste, the anti-air that embodies our most basic conception of evil.

Both are fiction; good is that which benefits us and evil that which is to our detriment. Plants have the opposite perspective on gases, water creatures still a different one. And hardly any ever consider the symmetrical duality of this seminal interaction with nature: ingesting life, expelling death.

In,

-Eternity-

Out.

Somewhere an angel is softly chanting mantras. “ ‘…either on the Bus or off the Bus…’” Llewellyn, reading key phrases from her notes.

No good. If I can consciously hear her, I’m not deeply enough under. The suggestions are intended for the subconscious. I’m thinking too much, and the problem will only compound as my lysergic-charged internal
monologue obsessively echoes every tangent. Meditation on acid is a superior achievement. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I open my eyes.

Llewellyn stops reading. “Here, let’s try something else. Lay down.” I hear the rustling of her clothes as she rises and walks to the stereo, replacing the quiet ocean sounds I’d been barely hearing with something
like ambient trance.

“Focus on the music,” she advises. “It’s special.”

I know what she means-it’s spiked with subliminals-but try not to be aware of them, lest my attention undermine the suggestions. Relax.

Innnnn

–

ooooout.

darkness. the world is soft, wet, and free of discomfort. Life enters and death departs though the connection at the Center.

Between breaths.

alone in the universe but I don’t mind. It has always been thus.

there is only One.

the firmament quakes, and I am thrust into a new dimension: cold, and glaring. Pain; something assaulting my backside. I wail. What nightmare is this?

Rough surfaces abrade my untouched flesh. This new world, along with its other evils, is a desert.

I spit and gibber the fluid from my mouth. A new ether flows in.

With that first hit I am hooked.

Then, a disruption at the Center of things. The happy stuff is no longer flowing in. Omigod, they cut the Cord!

They-the Others. The inhabitants of this mad realm, who as part of some sinister design have forced me from paradise into what I can already see is a pretty shitty place.

Slappers of asses, clippers of cords. What other tortures do these beasts have in store?

I take my first step on all the lands of the Earth.

I utter my first word in all the languages of man.

I am educated in the fashion of every culture.

I lose my virginity to the entire world.

My hand is quivering, my eyesight poor. A hazy page before me.

Destiny. Best goddamned sentence I’ve written my whole life. I squint, to lovingly stare again at my handiwork.

The inelocutable modality of the visible…

“Holy shit!” I exclaim. “That explains a lot.”

We had determined, by cross-referencing my recovered memories, that my most recent life had be that of Norman Hartweg, a no-name playwright from California, who was best known as Tom Wolfe’s snitch for
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This act of questionable loyalty turned out to be a massive break in my past-life recollection efforts, as it documented an otherwise mediocre, unmemorable turn at the Wheel. I like to think my soul knew it would be so.

“Norman” is the only of the six files marked by a proper name; the others are labeled, “Asian Field Officer (Mongol?) c. 800-1200”, “Eskimo Fisherman (undated)”, “Flutist, (Middle East?)”, “Rabbi, c.14?? (Europe,
poss. Spain), “Anasazi Corn Grinder (Female) c. 100-1300,” and “Miscellaneous”, which naturally contains random scattered impressions that could not be otherwise cataloged.

The problem is that, at least using Llewellyn’s technique, memories emerge much like stray recollections from a distant past during the current life-sudden moods, flashing images, fragments of conversation. Unlike recall within the present incarnation, however, there is no context. It’s a bit like trying to place a familiar stranger-but without the knowledge of which hangouts you’d frequented, jobs held, or schools attended.

Perhaps a computer analogy is in order. After all, man has created the machines in his own image. Every so often, it becomes necessary to completely replace the hardware. Naturally, you want keep all the information from your old hard drive, but to accumulate files from several generations of upgrades will quickly monopolize the memory availability on the new computer.

So a compromise is reached: compressed archiving, which preserves the essence of the data while making it inaccessible without a special application. You never use most of that stuff, anyway.

Unfortunately, the file names were converted to an unintelligible dialect of Sumerian by a malicious virus. The only way to see what’s there is to randomly decompress and hope for the best.

Somewhere between the signing and cashing of the check, I dimly recall.

She answers the door wearing a low-slung pink chemise and no bra, judging from her smooth, tanned cleavage and prominent nipple bumps. Two rows of perfect white teeth shine between her inviting, ruby lips. Her brown, curly hair is down, fluffy, a tendril resting on each of the breasts I am involuntarily ogling. A part of me wants to take her right there in the doorway, but my calmer head prevails.

“Victor…come in, have a seat. Let me grab a drink and we’ll get started.” I watch her ass as she struts across the room. Miniskirt. My blood is boiling.

“So, did you find out about the biopsy?” she asks innocently, which has the effect of ten gallons of icewater on my lust. Why is everybody suddenly so goddamned concerned about my health?

Especially psychics?

“No…listen, today I want to try to put some things together from my last life. I’ve had some odd dreams lately.”

She nods her beautiful head, and goes over to the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. “Your life as a Merry Prankster, right? Let me get my notes on that one.” She chooses a folder marked “Norman,” extracts it and sits down, setting her drink, which turns out to be coffee, on the appropriate table beside her. “Do you, uh, want anything, before we begin?”

Most past-life regression professionals stringently discourage the use of chemical agents for experiencing their services, and recommend avoiding even the most innocent of drugs prior to a session.

Llewellyn Reece is not among them. In her care, I have consumed psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, LSD, and Ketamine, and a host of strange herbal brews from the dark jungles of the hot wet ancestral lands, all of
which evoke a different phase of memories. Her policy is to match the subject’s psychedelic state by ingesting the same prescription-to be on the same “wavelength”-but it in no way hampers her effectiveness as a therapist. Llewellyn has a fantastic capacity for any amount of any drug, from either a biological quirk, specific tolerance to each, or supreme discipline over her body and mind.

“Acid,” she explained, “is for ‘birth’ experiences. E can bring you back to when you met a soulmate. K summons the sensation of dying, and mushrooms can take you to the interstice between lives.” Her justification was that these drugs were actually analogous to chemicals produced at these momentous times in the brain itself.

My first impulse is to demure; then I think better of it. “Dose me,” I say. “I should be frying for this. After all, I practically tripped my way through that entire incarnation.”

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just projecting my gloominess. That happens.” He looks uncomfortably around the cafe. “Look, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s good to see you. Be sure to let me see your drafts. I have to run. I think I’ll go home and take a nice, long, decadent bath.” He offers his hand.

“Yeah, I have to be getting to my appointment. She can be vicious when you’re late.” We simultaneously rise and part.

My step is more leaden as I resume my trek down Religion Row, as if I somehow contracted Crazy Bear’s depression. Maybe it’s that place, I theorize. What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway, Ennui? And such a dump, really, considering those prices. No wonder it’s always nearly deserted.

No, that’s not it. It’s that creepy death prophesy. I shudder. He’s in a bad mood, I temporize, and he just wanted to bring me down. Despondency craves fraternity.

Why, then, did he rush so to change the subject and take leave of me before I could return to it? So I’d be that much more shaken and uncertain. But it doesn’t ring true. His flaw, if anything, is an excess of honesty; I can’t imagine Crazy Bear being cruel enough to inflict that sort of dishonest prank on a whim. I’ve always known him to be obsessively ethical within his unusual framework, even to a fault.

He was being philosophical, cryptic, declaring a generalization; only my superstitious mind took it for a prediction. Which brings me back, loopishly, to, why didn’t he just say so, when I was so obviously freaked? The only interpretation which seems to explain his action is

I’m going to die.

Well, everyone is. Maybe he saw something fifteen, twenty years down the line, and thought I was too jelly to take even such long-term news. Maybe I am. I still haven’t called about the lab results.

I’m never going to write that book.

It had never seemed important, before. The plans I mentioned to Crazy Bear were concocted on the spot, in fact; the matter of a follow-up to Desert Trance had listed somewhere between skinny dipping in my Jaccuzi with models, and bringing the Porsche in for an overpriced tune-up on my to-do schedule.

Now, with the reaper’s shadow killing my buzz, writing just one more seems to be the most urgent necessity of my existence. “Goddess,” I mumble. “I know I’m an ungrateful wretch.” This is how I usually begin after long periods of unpious silence. “I’ve turned my back on you, and I don’t blame you for not talking to me anymore. I’m greedy, I’m arrogant. I flush with pride over the words you whispered in my ear. I’ve neglected my rituals. But, oh, Goddess, if ever you loved me, if I pleased you only a bit in serving as your word processor, let me live long enough to deliver another volume of your love to the world. In the name of the Moon, Earth and Sun, I pray. Bless my work, if not my life.”

Which brings me to Llewellyn’s. I put the morbidity on a back burner, and check my hair in the obsidian reflection near the elevator. Maybe I am in love with her. Ridiculous.

“I went into a nice restaurant, and had a decent, vegetarian meal, and thought about all the ring dings and baloney sandwiches on starchy whitebread I’d been poisoning myself with, and started thinking I could open just one account, and eat like this every day, and stay each night in a hodie, and I knew it was over. I was still living a lie. Worse, I was stealing from the real homeless, taking donations that rightfully were earmarked for them. So I called the bank, unfroze some funds, and took a bus back here to contemplate what an irredeemable piece of shit I am.” He folds his arms, his tale told. “I’m losing my faith in anarchy.”

“My, you are selfish,” I remark. He looks hurt. “I asked you ten minutes ago how you were and you still haven’t asked me how I am. Let’s talk about me.”

“You’re right,” he says sullenly. “I’m a narcissistic pig. Okay, how are you, Victor?”

“I am fabulous. I’m on my way to see Llewellyn Reece. Thank you for giving me her number, by the way. She has amazing…abilities.”

This gets him to smile wanly. “She’s very insightful.”

“When I’m with her, I’m so comfortable. I feel I can tell her anything. She always knows just what to do.” I grin like a schoolboy.

“Just don’t fall in love with her. She’s a witch, you know.”

I’m not at all sure what he means by this; he’s the last person I would expect to express religious prejudice, particularly against witches. “Well, ah, it’s strictly professional…”

“Watch your heart, is all. She’s a player. Don’t ever think you can cage that bird. A confirmed free agent. It’s all about power for her. She gets off on what she brings out in you.”

I shake my head. “It’s not like that. It’s…therapy.”

“Have it your way. Then why are you so damned cheerful, if you’re not gone roses-are-red on Llewellyn?”

“Because the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I drive a Porsche, and, unlike you, I know how to appreciate being affluent. It’s not a tragedy, you know. People work very hard, all their lives, to get the thousandth part of what you have, and most of them fail. If you have anything to feel guilty about, in my opinion, it’s thumbing your nose at the advantages which fill the dreams of the world’s great unwashed. How ungrateful! It’s a crime not to be enjoying every minute of it.” I call the waitress and order an eight-
dollar specialty drink and a bagel with cream cheese. She is moderately attractive, straight blond hair and bright hazel eyes, ten pounds on the chunky side, which can be soft, so I flirt with her, mostly to prove to Crazy Bear that I am most definitely not in love with Llewellyn Reece.

“Anyway, I’m glad that’s working out. How’s the writing coming?”

Wrong question. “Well, I’m toying with several ideas, nothing at the paper stage yet, of course. I think maybe I’d like to do some science-fiction, or more like ‘psi’-ence fiction,” I coin, tapping my forehead to clarify the homophone. “Something about auras, or TK, or secret societies, or maybe even reincarnation. I certainly have the material. I feel this tremendous pressure, though, to be original. I think that’s holding me back, The next novel answers a question I’ve been torturing myself with: was success a fluke, or do I really have ability? So, naturally, I’m taking my time.”

“Well,” he says ominously, “be careful about that, too. You may have less than you think.”

He takes a sip of vanilla triple latte. “That woke me up. I realized I wasn’t truly helping those kids; all I was doing was perpetuating their dependency. I had become a welfare state. Worse, I had probably kept kids staying on the street, where otherwise need might have evoked reality and forced them to take more responsibility for their lives.” He toys with a deck of cards on the table, building a makeshift structure which quickly tumbles apart.

“So I thought of all different ways to use my money to constructively solve the problem of homelessness. I opened a free hotel, with a hundred thirty rooms and showers and laundry and daily meals. It was a disaster. I insisted on no rules, because my intent was to free, not to enslave; but within a week all the volunteers quit on me, and I had to hire temps to staff the place, and those quit, too. The police were there every night, serving arrest warrants, finding runaways, responding to violence complaints, shutting down parties. After only a month, it burned nearly to the ground, which is good, in a way, because my insurance company was threatening to cancel my coverage. I could see their point.” He lights a handrolled cigarette.

That night, I had a revelation. The homeless were that way, generally, because they were not housebroken. Rebelling against the institutions of man, they had reverted to a wilder state, finding, like other urban animals, rest in whatever unoccupied perch they could locate, feeding on the refuse of their prosperous and wasteful neighbors. Better to set up a hotel for pigeons and squirrels.” He produces a wooden toothpick and proceeds to pick.

“So I acquired two hundred acres of prime virgin forest, a river running through it and all that. I brought them out there by the truckload, gutterpunks and street heads and humbums and every smelly, destitute lost soul that wanted to go. I named it Freedomland. I gave them each a tent, gave lumber, agricultural supplies and basic foodstuffs to the groups that wanted to start free kitchens, and drove off to my palatial mansion, satisfied that I had finally found a way to help the orphans of the street.” He munches a biscotti.

“But it didn’t work out like that. The kitchen leaders quickly gave up, watching their supplies voraciously consumed by those that had no part in producing or preparing them. I had to send weekly food trucks. Disease was rampant, though the most responsible citizens of Freedomland attempted to enforce sanitation ‘suggestions’. The river had been polluted by shit, so there was a giardia plague on, as well as a lice epidemic. Finally, the driver of a food truck was assaulted and taken hostage in a beer riot. The instigators demanded one keg per capita per week, from a microbrew, no less, they let me know no shitty Old Style would do, as well as a bottle of hard liquor of choice. The water, they claimed, was no longer potable.”

“I concluded that these failures were a result of my inability to truly understand the viewpoint of the homeless. I had partied with them, and patronized them, but never for a moment really considered what made them tick. I had thought the craving for alcohol would disappear under the trees and the birds. I thought it was part of the disease of social alienation, of fitting stereotypes unconsciously imposed on them by the judgmental robots who were secretly jealous of the liberty of the average street bum. Now, I saw, some people just like being plastered all the time.”

He takes a drink. “I called my bank and business manager and froze all my accounts, went to the thrift store, spent all the cash I had left on these ratty clothes, and took a cup out on the Row. Everyone knew who I was, of course, and I saw right away that I could never learn what I needed to here in town. So I hitchhiked to somewhere-that’s what it’s called, Somewhere, New Mexico-and drank Mad Dog and spanged with the locals. I slept on a church lawn, on rooftops, on fire escapes, in tunnels. I begged all day for change, bought the cheapest food I could find, and if I had anything left at midnight, I’d give it to another bum. Broke by midnight, that was my motto. It felt good. I was purified. I was even more popular than I had been down here, because they didn’t know I was rich. They respected me for giving, because they thought I was just like them.”

“And I started to see how someone might choose the streets; it’s like Janice said, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ The struggle to accumulate, the web of obligations natural in the indoor world, the constant deference to authority-none of these had any relevance. And I saw gems of humanity from a vantage only a beggar can have. One time I woke up in a ditch staring a state trooper in the eye, and after he ran me for warrants, he actually gave me a five-dollar bill. That was one of the most mind-blowing events of my life. Why I always say, cops are people, too.”

~ )))0((( ~