Fake Don Juan


I'm stoned again. This American kid comes by here all the time, looking for help because he's sitting in the cockpit of a space ship he doesn't understand and he can't control, and he thinks I can show him how to fly it. I told him that, in pretty much those words, and I thought he'd go away and leave me alone, but he kept coming back. "Hello Don Juan," like I'm his Dutch Uncle. He seemed really nervous and so I rolled a joint, figuring maybe he was trying to find a source for some drugs, but he got paranoid and kind of obsessive. Not a good combination.

If somebody doesn't state his business plainly then I figure some of his business is really shy, which is a womanish quality and I like some of that but not too much, about the same as meat and potatoes, is how Geraro puts it. And then he waits a couple of beats, and goes on, "and greens and cornbread and jam and apple pie and ice cream." We get along because we are athletes who practice feats of balance, because we are the sorcerers of the Middle Way. He made the mistake of mentioning this to the kid and he's hovering around me for the rest of the night, like an obsequious waiter, asking questions.

"Describe this middle way," he says, like he thinks it's some kind of witchcraft or something. I was getting worried about giving him drugs, to tell you the truth. Some people are held together with chewing gum and bailing wire, and you have to be careful about doing anything to destabilize them. So we tried to explain to him how it's all a path of knowledge, but the chances of it leading to anything beyond the grave are so small as to be statistically insignificant. But people work on it anyway, or some people do. Others hire coyotes who brag up their connections on the other side of the border which allow them to guarantee a safe crossing.

I didn't know what to say so we just sat there quiet for a long time. There were a few clouds on the horizon, like brush strokes of blue and black with pink halos. Not wanting to waste my time, I worked out awhile, using the same technique of movement developed in the rock dancing, which I'll expand on later. I would set the pose on the other side of chaos, and intend the energy to shift. How it is done isn't my business.

Dreams are like the sea, Genaro says, and there's one thing the sea can be that's the same thing the land can be. Then he waits for somebody to ask him what that is, and he says, "Your grave." I think that was the day after we ate the mushrooms, and I told Genaro that I'm different from him, because a man and his death look to me like a bullfight, with the bull being the man's death. And then I'd expand the story, like, that you have to face this bull every day, and defeat him, and by morning he is magically reborn. He can lose as many times as he has to lose, but you can only lose one time.

And Genaro says, yea, that's like old age wearing away your strength, and leaving you walking around like a lamb at a wolf pack reunion. And that struck us as funny at the same time, the way it can happen, and we agreed that the hardest trial you have is old age, when you accept the part of you that's helpless. You never saw it because it was hidden behind power. This kid, he asked me for reference material on this idea. I handed him my pipe. Genaro thought that was hilarious and he rolled up and began bouncing around the room like a basketball.

You know sometimes you just have to be there.

"Once you realize you are sitting at the controls of something beyond your pay grade," I start to tell him, and he interrupts me again.

"How did a Yaqui Indian come to incorporate elements of corporate slang into his self presentation?" He waits a couple of minutes and I start to think to myself that he's looking into my eyes like he lost something there, and it feels spooky "It's like any other love," I say; "it's where you find the gold you buried and forgot you ever had."

"What is, Don Juan?" he asks, and pretty soon Genaro is rolling on the floor and he gets me going and I laugh until I cry.

But every time I'd try to tell him something he wouldn't understand it, so I'd have to move back a step and try to build a foundation. That's how I think of it, like a builder thinks. Genaro is different. He sees pictures which are packets of information. These are so much faster at processing information than the linear processors Carlos is using, that he can literally run circles around him.

Meanwhile Carlos is writing all this down. I tell him that he seems to have some idea that life is like following the rainbow until you get the pot of gold in the end. "You'll get it in the end all right," Genaro says, and the kid got offended I think. He's defensive about his masculinity, being part European and all. But Genaro sees the bigger picture; the part of him that uses the dream image processor is starting to have a place to self-reflect, and it's coming awake, coming right through the mirror.

But no matter how much I told him he didn't get it because he needed more foundation to give it context or relevance. I think UCLA is overrated, the anthropology department anyway. I told Carlos I knew he was going into Space because he was a light reader, and he thought I was saying he had some kind of special skill. I'm conflicted about whether I should have given him hallucinogens and then told him all those Toltec stories. I think he had some bad trips. He screams in the night like Fester Adams.

Sometimes drugs take you places you otherwise would not go, and that is not good or bad. It depends entirely on whether you want to do something you would not ordinarily do, because with the right drugs, you will. If you don't want change, do what you ordinarily do and it will pass you by like a fast moving train. Some change comes down for the better, and some change is too much. But you never know what's enough until you know what's too much.

I think Carlos loved his grandfather like a god, and he's projecting that image onto me. My mentor told me that you know when somebody is projecting on you because it makes you feel sort of crazy. And when this Carlos kid is around I feel crazy, because he's fixated on me as some kind of magical being. I won't tell you what Genaro said when I told him that, but we laughed until we cried. It was a funny picture he drew in my mind. Genaro is the master of funny pictures.

I've had some of the unmarried women around the village over when Carlos has been here, thinking he might connect with one of them, but he doesn't say much. Of course they all want to be American citizens and so they try to figure out what it is that he wants. Donna Florinda's daughter said it's not pussy. She said, "Papa Don, he's always so focused on me, like I'm a t.v. set. But he don't even pet the kitty." I guess he makes all of us a little bit crazy.

Today Genaro and I are going rock dancing. We jump from one rock to another rock. It's like a game of chess in a way, but performed on the fulcrum of a waterfall. In one direction there's a river flowing peacefully along. And in the other direction there's a river flowing peacefully along. But between those peacefull rivers, you have your waterfall. And so we figured that working out a series of movements that would take us across this part of the river would be creating a dream image interface that could do fast downloads. We're getting old and don't have time to waste on obsolete technology.

The hardest part of moving across the river is knowing that you can't do it, and if you depend on the part that can't do it you'll die. So you have to get out of the way to make room for what can do it. What jumps doesn't jump from cause to effect. It occupies both poses simultaneously and lets something else deal with the space in between.

We let this kid watch Genaro move across the face of the waterfall, thinking he would get it the way we get it. I think he had a good time but it's always hard to tell with that guy. He takes himself so seriously, like he's gonna cheat death. I made a story about what Genaro said, that the only thing you require, in the end, is your grave. That's the space you're reduced to, and so you might do well to learn to live in small spaces.

I noticed he's taking notes, like this is big news. He asks what that means, so I started making up this story about how a small space is completely relative, and if you move down into the micro world a cubic foot of space is a collection of universes, no different from this one we experience now. He just eats that shit up, and Genaro laughs his ass off because we're both seeing how he's trying to use this linear processor to understand a visual symbol processor.

It's not that we're not sympathetic to his situation. We've been there ourselves. And it was really, really funny because it was so close to being grave. The only thing we can do is counterbalance those things divided from each other, and bring them back to center, until they can unite again, completing the circle and securing the container. In other words, you have to make a boat that will float. Each sorcerer designs the boat to his or her specifications.

Joselito, he's a lover of beauty. You know how some men they love their mother so much you see her shining through? They say they are in service to god, but when they pray he says, "Go ask your mother." Joselito uses his heart center to process, where I tend to use a system of stories which counterweight to expose the unity of warring forces. War is the act of attempting to destroy in somebody else what you've destroyed in yourself. But like anything you try to destroy, it learns from your behavior and sets up defenses. The overpowering man will find the woman who knows the art of undetectable poisons.

"Then we have to face the forces of good and evil one more time," I told him, trying to let him understand that he needs to lighten up, and not be so self important. Old men see the young men who are like they were and reflect back to them what that looks like with age. In this manner it is possible to get a view of what makes the image processor so powerful. It sees the entire story outside of its linear unfolding process, as one thing, from seed to flower to seed again. The entire thing is visible from any place in the pattern.

What do you think he asks me next? "Do you believe in free will, Don Juan?" I told him that depends entirely on whether you draw it up yourself or have it done professionally.

"I think I understand," he says.

"And I understand," I said, "that you think you understand. But I was telling you something about a battle, and you cut me off."

"I was listening, Don Juan," he says. "You said it comes back to a battle between good and evil."

"I said no such thing. I said we have to face the forces of good and evil once more time, not that they have to face each other. They're the same army. We have moved our allegiance to the abstract."

And so it goes, his thinking it's all about understanding, when it's equally about boats on the water and a signal from the heavens.

He doesn't even remember that I was going to tell him something about being beyond his pay grade because he gets confused by his inner Indian's being his contemporary. I asked him if he thinks we're equals and the son-of-a-bitch actually said we are, and the way he said it I knew he thought he's better than an Indian. Some Mexicans are like that. He's pimping a degree from UCLA and thinks it means something to me outside the outhouse. I can shit sidewinder missiles and he thinks he's my equal.

He's avoiding the elephant in the living room, which is the reality of the sacrifice. He sees that shadow and his left shoulder blade itches. What confuses him most is when I tell him there's no hurry, and that he doesn't want to go until all of him is ready, and if all of him was ready he'd be gone already. What else can I tell him? Florinda teases him when he's around her. She sits in the grass and tugs on the sprouts, as if by pulling on them she will make them grow faster when its more likely she'll make them rootless. He's looking right at her but he doesn't see it. Then he doesn't know what it is that Geraro and I are laughing at.

Some things I don't tell him because they're hidden from him, still, and he'd hear something else. It's funny how you can't hear what you don't know, nor see it either.

Posted: Wed - January 9, 2008 at 12:49 PM