Flashback Trail |
Issue 19
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You write an achronological autobiography in the second person. The unifying idea is the trails you wandered and on which you set out. These become wider paths, roads, and LSD trails. You, slippery You, and I along for the catharsis.
excerpted from Trails: Autobiography of You Flashback Trail Flashback Trail This trail begins at the door marked 10E and ends at the nondescript end of the hall leading from that door. And this trail begins at the nondescript end of the hall and ends at the door marked 10E on the 10th floor of the hospital. It can take all day to walk it or be over as soon as each patient, leaving the room in which he or she sleeps, arrives at the day room where meals are served and where otherwise the TV talks to itself all day to partly filled chairs. Landmarks include:
More permanent presences include:
BTW: That isolation room is an alternate trek for anyone on this trail in ward 10E. The trailhead here begins with what is called an “episode.” One lies on a bare mattress on the floor and wide awake dreams gelid transparent butterflies are floating about, before the medicine kicks in and numbs the dreamer. One might have LSD flashbacks here or merely the associated “trails.” The way out of the room and out of the hospital in general is to go along with what the trail guides (i.e., doctors, nurses, and the fat-armed cook) insist is real. -- One would think schizophrenia would appear in red robes but when you answered the door it was a barefoot and shirtless blonde angel in overalls tied at one shoulder with a thick hempen rope. You could barely hold the door closed as he began, “I am the messenger…” and the heavy hallway door pushed in and in and in at you, and you knew you were not in the hallway after all but on the mattress in the far room, and to waken yourself began jumping on your knees in your dream and that was you jumping on your knees now awake. … Next, but who knows next, you were up in the Catskills at the inn run by Latvian WWII veterans. In the woods nearby was your friend’s father’s trailer, on one wall of which hung the portrait of him in his SS uninform. Maybe that was on your mind when it happened. Your hippie friends and you were grooving around the campfire in the evening, playing guitars and talking, when one raccoon showed up and then several more aggressively begging for the fried chicken. You chased them off and then: A presence, the most evil and frightening you had ever encountered, towering blackness, taller than a six-story building, but without form really; gripping your soul in an absolute fear grip. It was the shadow you met on your bad LSD trip months before in your Brooklyn apartment. No one else seemed aware of it though they reflected back your terror, which was so great, so sudden, you felt you were falling backward into an abyss. As quickly as it came it was over, but only in terms of presence. Its impact has lodged within you since. Fear as shadow that you now address as You. … This trail is a trip. First, the terrain: A top-floor walk-up apartment in the only brick building on a street of brownstones in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, a so-called railroad apartment, with one room leading into another – a short narrow hall (with bathroom off to the side) as you enter, jig-jag into the tiny kitchen, then into the main room (with a Hollywood-style walk-in closet off to the left, larger than the kitchen), and finally the doorless open bedroom that looks out onto the cross street. It’s a trip in time as well as space. You are in the kitchen at the tiny table with Ainis telling him your ideas about the paddle-wheel of consciousness. Both of you are peaking and he increasingly is weirded out by what you are saying and is the first and maybe only one to leave. Have you taken one tab at this point or have you merely prefaced the dose with marijuana, hash, and mescaline? Back on the mattress with the rest of your friends it seems you are ingesting one, two, three orange barrels of Sunshine… or more. On your back you are part of a network of undersea Paleozoic brachiopods and drenched in white light. Maybe it is too soon in this life for white light. You get up to watch the yellow paint under the red ceiling light crawl along the walls. Lights out, you see rainbows that live only in darkness and light years away. Mattress on the floor, bamboo blinds on the windows, red bulb on the ceiling, faces changing: Charly's into a wolf, Daina's into a witch, Gvido's into a boar. Gvido becomes Adam, then Buddha, then a Bible salesman. You are entering a place you have been before with people you have known before. They are not these people. You may have peed on the mattress, but someone says, “Look there, someone spilled the wine.” Now the music from the stereo is sucking you down... Santana Abraxas, Working Class Hero, Mother Earth… down the vortices. You are now in the main room entering the vortices. Gvido is saying, “Let Go!” You are in the bottom of the hourglass, then through the funnel, into the top of the hourglass, back and forth, telescoping in and out of realities at an accelerating rate. You believe everything and anything and their opposite. You globe in and out with the Big Bang and the Big Crunch for many eternal returns. An opening in the darkness to the Garden. There is Eve at the gate. Voluptuous. But you are back in the bedroom staring into the corner at your shadow, the Campbellian one, your Enemy. You are panicking and the light from your fingertips, once benevolent, has become lethal. You swing your hands around trying not to disintegrate your Latvian-American hippy friends. You are trying to stop 5,000 years of war that is on the rim of the toilet bowl... Gvido – you didn’t even notice he was gone – returns with Thorazine to bring you down from the trip. (There were no trails.) Where did he get Thorazine at night in this neighborhood? Did he go home all the way across Brooklyn to get it? You sleep, but next day, you are embarrassed to look the neighborhood grocer in the eyes. You think, “Everyone knows.” And in a way, that’s how it is from then on. … Four months on the road with your girlfriend, having toured almost all the central and western states, night is falling and the entry to the camp site is barely wide enough for your VW camper bus. The lane dips suddenly and… solidity is no more. No gravity, no matter, the world is turning into mist, nothing to stop your atoms from falling through to who knows where, knowing only it holds once again the shape of your fear. And you find your parking place and it’s almost as if that momentary existential faint never happened. Other are camped there. Brethren of the road and of the time of the road. You join a group of them in their van for a smoke. And a certain social pattern repeats: one person is the lead, the cool in-the-know main person, who is not mocking you but the meanings behind his words are. Meanings flaking off the words. They all have a secret knowledge you do not. Even your girlfriend may have it though she remains quiet about it. -- In Santa Barbara, the song is “I guess he’d rather be in Colorado.” (John Denver) You just came in to work and now the day is over and you leave. Your life is now divided in two, the before and the after. You go back to your room in the residential hotel across from the beach. You have failed at… something. Just now, you were painting the ceramic figures the crafts factory sells to gift shops all over California. You waited for an outer space presence that waited for you to answer. There was a coming-closer and you asked, “What have I done wrong?” Then you thought to stop thinking as a kind of technique. “Tingle-tangle” went your mind, the Latvian word for an amusement ride. Whatever it was, the presence was not amused. “He blew it,” you heard a co-worker say. Then the song. People had been tapping into your mind for weeks. Television talk show hosts hinting about your situation. Historical figures in art books at the library moving about and giving you looks. A conversation had been going on between your thoughts and what people said to each other in the streets. Gestures by diners in restaurants, words on signs, numbers on license plates, meaningful objects and motions – it was all pointing at you. Panic sets in. You must, you simply must deliver your girlfriend safely back to her parents in Brooklyn. To her dismay, you throw everything in a dumpster that won’t fit in the camper. You set out from Santa Barbara, first stopping for gas, telling the attendant you want the oil in the car – a misunderstanding – he puts it in the engine instead of handing it to you. In Arizona the seal breaks, begins leaking a quart of oil every ten miles. You buy a case. You make it as far as Albuquerque, where you sell the camper and everything in it at a pawn shop for $100, enough to buy two train tickets back to New York. You get to Brooklyn, apologize to your girlfriend’s father for having lived with her without marrying, take the subway to your parents’ apartment in the Bronx. There, with great concern and few questions, they feed you and put you to bed. You awaken and there is a presence in the chair by the table. A roar of fear comes out of you like a locomotive, like a whale roaring. The lights switch on. It’s your mother. She’s there to cannibalize you! On and on the scream roars out of you. Here comes your brother to cut you up for the roasting. And your father too. Your brother is holding your arms and shaking you. You don’t believe it’s not true what you imagined even when they leave you after you’ve quieted down. It is the beginning of the fearful months that will lead you to ward 10E at Jacobi Hospital. -- Almost 50 years later, you look up “I guess he’d rather be in Colorado” on YouTube. The video of John Denver singing is accompanied below by the lyrics for “Away in a Manager.” That surprises you not a whit. |
IVARS BALKITS, a dual citizen of Latvia and the USA, resides in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published online by Slag Glass City, Coalitionworks, Antae, Feed the Holy, The Ekphrastic Review, The Woolf, DMQ Review, The Palisades Review, and Vernacular Journal.
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