Most friends leave you, eventually. They move on, grow out of whatever phase they’re in, develop, learn from their mistakes. Learning from one’s mistakes being the most important bit. My friend never made any mistakes and he therefore had nothing to learn from. And he hasn’t left me. I have to believe that, or I have nothing.
It was 1971 at the University of Boulder, and it was finals week. We were all excited for the summer, for long afternoons sprawled out on the sloping Chautauqua lawns, trips to Loveland, engagements and packed itineraries. It had been a packed year, one of headache and schedules, and those of us who weren’t enlisted and had no relatives fighting overseas were mainly occupied with keeping afloat in an increasingly complex world.
And my friend- he was introduced to me by this girl I knew. She was just an acquaintance, really. Hung around various offices with her hair tied up in a neat little bun, nobody knew exactly how she spent her spare time. One day, she hands me a card. I don’t remember what was on it, what the thing was referred to as, but I slipped it into my coat and went about my day.
Let me describe him. He was tall, about 6 and a half feet or so, really made his presence felt whenever he entered a room, as if his whole shadow was projected onto you. He always had this funny demeanor about him, I don’t mean that he had a particularly good sense of humor but rather that he was odd, seemed to prefer weird hobbies, hung around areas he shouldn’t have, mixed with the wrong sort of crowd. Often, you’d see some of the more popular students, the valedictorians, talk smack about him near the creek while they were puffing hash.
I had seen him a few times during my two-year stint at the university. Nobody asked where he came from- he showed up to every class and lecture promptly on time, and some people had circulated the idea that he was some kind of transient who wandered in from somewhere in New Mexico and was accepted purely on the basis of his work ethic. That was far fetched, but all the faculty seemed to like him well enough.
I approached him on one of the lawns alongside Broadway and called out to him. He jerked around, whole body turning in one swift movement. His reflexes were something else, too. Very unpredictable, every finger quivering, as if he was always just aching to get someplace fast.
“Hear you’re running a group tonight,” I said. “Up in Nederland?”
“Yeah,” he said, mopping his brow. “Yes, up in Nederland. Somebody tell you about it? It’s at 9 and I can drive you if you want.” His eyes were these beady, almost imperceptible little jewels that sparkled beneath the brim of his hat, this wide thick felt number that drooped over his ears. His hair was rancid, falling every which way in straight flecks, like Jackson Pollock spatter. There was something so repulsive about him, but his eyes, looking out from the cool shade, pulled me in his direction.
“That would be great,” I said, without really considering the ramifications.
So around that night, when I have everything packed away and all my research done, I go out on my front porch and he zooms around the corner in this cheap red Chevy Nova, right past the stop sign, and he honks three times before he notices that I’m already out the door, and he gives this dopey grin, as if embarrassed to the whole street. Nobody really notices. It’s quiet out, one of those nights where you feel night settle in around you and there isn’t too much commotion or din, even in the busier areas around Pearl Street.
He doesn’t say anything the whole way up, just keeps those beady little eyes glued to the road before us, you know how it is. Pine trees glint past at a rapid-fire pace, then recede into the dark. And This whole time, I’m feeling more nervous than during any of my exams, worse than anything I’ve endured, this gnawing trepidation. Something about him doesn’t feel right.
We make it out of the forest, Nederland is as always a glittering pool of jewels beneath the crescent of the Peak-To-Peak, moon and the pearly clouds covering it reflected off the glinting surface of Barker Reservoir. The tree-covered slopes frame this scene and I’m transfixed all the while on my friend, how he monitors the lights on the dashboard and stares straight ahead into the overpowered beams of his awful vehicle. The engine is making a noise as if some vital component were experiencing friction, but he doesn’t take notice of this.
Finally we descend into Ned’s main strip, from which he pulls off to the south and starts nearing a neat little juncture in the trees at the base of a particular foothill. He turns the engine off, pulls the key out, and opens the door. I follow suit, trying my best to act naturally in such unforeseen circumstances.
It’s one of those nights where the town is so quiet, its activity so subdued, that all I can make out is this overwhelming silence, punctuated by the sound his raggedy shoes make as they hit the gravel, and he strides forward, holding his arms out at either side.
I’ve brought my lighter with me, and the moon has since vanished in the atmospheric miasma, so I whip it out and try to illuminate our surroundings some- I know we’re on some kind of desolate stretch, far out from the center of the action, and I can’t make his face out- my flame only goes so far, maybe two feet, yet I follow his footprints in the gravel and listen for the pitter pat of him walking.
Soon enough, we arrive at a clearing where there’s this tree, an ancient, shriveled pine, looks almost dead, yet it has a mighty bough which swings across the ground, forming a sort of makeshift shelter. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
“Hi,” says the girl, leaning against the trunk. “Glad you were able to make it.” She’s puffing on some kind of compact water pipe, though clearly not really getting anywhere with it. Another guy- I don’t know him, although I think I’ve seen him around campus, think he lives way down on Table Mesa. His name eludes me.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Yeah, I guess I am, too.” I take up a seat about three feet from her, awestruck by the vastness of this arboreal cavern.
As I’m using what’s left of the fuel in my lighter to cast flickering orange trails on the bark and dripping sap, my friend pulls out a flashlight, clicks it on, and sets it in the center of the little circle we happen to have spontaneously created. She sets her hookah down as he raises his hands over his head. Rubs his temples.
There’s something even worse about how he looks with this flashlight, gives his pallid cheekbones an appearance of disease, he appears underfed, gaunt. He’s splayed out on the dirt, and he’s sweating more than ever, even though the night is cool and there’s no apparent source of heat. The corner of his tattered leather jacket blows ever so slightly in the breeze, he takes his hat off and crushes it beneath his arm.
“You know what we’re here for,” he says, scanning each member of the group, including me. “Here. Take.” He unzips his front pocket and pulls out a tiny satchel- made of cotton, maybe three inches square, little mass of twine on top. He weighs it in his hand like some sort of scale. Way out above us, somewhere, an owl sings.
He unties the thing and pours this substance out across his palm, then carefully grabs little pinches between his thumb and index finger, hands us each one solitary pinch. The girl, who I just noticed has her usual bun undone and rolling over her shoulders, eagerly gazes upon the stuff and, with one quick motion, raises it to her nose and inhales. I follow suit.
The first effect is immediate- a scent like a barbecue-
And then, I’m lying against the bark, using it entirely for support, and the friend has raised to his feet and is telling us something. Something extremely powerful, in this booming, resonant voice. I can’t make out what it is, exactly, save that it means something extremely pertinent, about the times we’re living in and where we’re headed if we don’t course-correct. Lines along that route. I try to move, but find that my movement is impeded, and every muscle’s signal from the brain is delayed by around five seconds.
All three of us are just lying here while he circles around us, a vulture to carrion, looking into our faces one by one. He’s blurry, the whole vision is blurry. At one point, he seems to grab my forehead by either side, twists me up such that I’m facing him, makes direct eye contact. Can’t tell what he’s saying, though. It’s like hearing someone speak underwater- the sound is held off, everything is just slightly impenetrable, maddeningly so.
I’m not sure when I come back around. Nodding, drooling, this ringing in my ears and a throbbing migraine, and my friend is sitting back down again in the dirt, the brim of his hat pulled low over his face such that there’s a shadow cast upon it, and we’re all quiet.
“What did you say?”
They all look at me as if I’ve broken some unspoken tenet.
“That doesn’t matter, man,” he says, gazing up at the stars. “Just accept it. Internalize it. You heard it, if you spend too much time combing over the details it’ll only lose itself further.”
I stagger out into the woods to vomit.
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I should have left our relationship there, stopped contacting him. But it was the peak of summer, and activity slowed down, and I was left to either wander the drowsy streets at night and risk getting picked up by the fuzz or going up and getting my kicks with this group of his, as loose as the ties between us may have been.
There was very little communication and we instead relied on unspoken understandings, little subtleties which we picked off one another. In poker, you would refer to them as tells. Gradually, language was phased out. Except for his language. His loud, strong, resonant language, a language of hope and an exit from this world. It cascaded across the Rockies with fervor, and every week there were more and more students beneath the branches of the old pine tree, until some of them were invisible to me, in repose up on the hill, shrouded in mystery. Only their twinkling eyes shone down from the lofty heights- like Hitchcock’s The Birds, all poised and ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Some of these new recruits were from Nederland, rather than Boulder, and were younger and more malleable to the effects of the drug- whatever it was. Whenever someone asked, my friend would dodge or dismiss the question outright. Answers did not come easy to him. When he wasn’t delivering his grand speeches, he was quiet and reserved and skulked around in the heady mists. That was just him, plain and simple.
I gradually grew tolerant to the substance, even began to enjoy its languid potency, and I could tell that it enhanced his words- these words which I understood more and more with each visit, they took on form and while I don’t think they were English, these are some of the closest base approximations I can offer.
“Now is dead,” he would shout to us all. “Now is a time of decay and rot, and I’ve seen it. I have seen the worst, and I’ve been forged anew from it, people. Let me tell you, I’ve been honed like a blade, in the fires of decadence and splendor, and now I see the true path.”
“Nothing is the answer, friends, nothing. We must remove ourselves from material want. We know better than they do, we’re so close to it, and they’re so far behind, we’re on the precipice, and it takes a leap of faith, Man, don’t you see that-? A leap of faith, and we’ll land on the other side. But we must remain conscious of that which is illusory, and of those who would deceive us. That’s our ticket out.”
The cuffs of his scuffed-up jeans would drag among the pine needles, and his beady little eyes would scan the crowd for any dissent- but there was none. We listened and complied. He was a wonderful speaker, an unparalleled sophist.
One night, after a particularly lengthy session, the girl offered to walk me down to the river. She said we could toss some stones in and contemplate what had just taken place before us, and so we made our way to the little creek that cuts through the middle of Nederland on its way to the reservoir.
“What did you hear?” I asked her.
“Revelations,” she sighed. “He’s so wonderful. Knows exactly what to say, and when.” She lobbed a hunk of granite into the burbling flow and it lodged itself amid the sediment.
“No, I mean, what did he say? What are we getting?”
“Wisdom.” She said this bit with an entirely straight face, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And I hated myself- I really did- but I had to agree in spite of myself, what we were receiving was some kind of unfathomable knowledge, which only our friend had access to.
What kind of information it was which was being relayed was another matter altogether.
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My friend and I were getting out of the car again, it was late and I was anticipating the effects of the substance, which he had begun metering out from week to week, stalling certain dosages and delivering faster on others. It was very methodical. My system had adapted well, no more migraines or points where I would wake up screaming in my sleep, after he dropped me back off at my pad in Boulder.
It was around a half an hour before our meeting was to take place, and so he was in a jovial sort of mood, a mood I’d never seen him in before. He kicked up some dirt and told me to lie down with both our heads up towards the sky, and we would watch the cosmos. The Milky Way was visible from here, he said, basically no light pollution.
He was right. There it was, shining through, a full band of stars, with us on the Orion Arm and every diamond up there sparkling brilliantly, a clock that never stopped ticking, vibrant and alive. It was dazzling. Life manifest.
“Now watch this,” he said huskily, and waved his arm out as if he were punching someone.
The stars were gone.
It was as if there had been a vial of ink in his hand and the sky had been paper. Where that wonderful panacea had been, there was now only darkness, this horrible void that threatened to consume us. I was vaguely aware of our terrestrial setting, that hadn’t changed, but without the universe above it seemed so meaningless- so empty. I staggered to a sitting position and panicked a little, drawing in sharp breaths and sweating like a stuck pig.
“Hey, man, it’s OK,” said my friend, putting his arm on my shoulder. “Just a magic trick, that’s all.” I shoved him aside and gasped, feeling like I was drowning, even if there was a steady flow of oxygen around me. It was a horrible sensation. I looked all around and could see nothing but the lights of Nederland- nothing above. All vacant.
Gradually, though I hardly noticed it, the stars faded back in, over the course of about three minutes or so, and my friend ran over to me and grabbed me, wrestling me to the dirt, trying to restrain and placate me. I could feel his scrawny limbs around my fingers, preventing me from hitting him, because he knew as well as I did that I wanted to, because what he had done was evil, and I didn’t even know why I felt that way, but I wanted to make him feel pain.
“Calm down, man,” he said.
I floundered onto the ground, entirely spent. I was almost dry heaving, I was so tired and exhausted. He did that, oftentimes, when you were in the trance state- he would hold his fingers out, probe you, wave them in front of your eyes, and you would feel this stream of thoughts leaving you. Memory going into him, remembrances sucked up into his person.
I couldn’t remember my own name anymore.
“Go away,” I said, thoroughly disillusioned. “Go on to the tree by yourself. I’m staying here. You can drive me back to Boulder when you’re through. I’ll wait.”
“Killjoy shit,” he responded. I heard his dirty leather shoes, vaguely, making little impressions on the road. He paused when he arrived at the car, leaned on it, contemplating something, hand on his hip, looking upward towards where the Milky Way had reappeared.
I whirled around and there he was, a man who no longer resembled anything human but looked more like an unlit scarecrow, one of those they hang up around the fields and then forget such that it rots over the course of many decades, its hat becomes waterlogged and moldy, its hair splayed wildly in every conceivable direction. Lifeless and motionless, posed for crows that will never arrive because the crops have all died and the farmer has moved. I sat there, holding the intake of my lungs, afraid that he’d jolt from his position and lunge toward me.
But no such thing happened. Instead, he lifted his hand two inches off the hood of the Chevy- and this blue jolt of lightning came from the center of his palm. It cracked like a malfunctioning breaker as he raised it, and the jolt increased in length. His face was dimly visible from this aquamarine cord, and I saw his beady eyes focused intently, as if manifesting this item took some real effort on his part. He looked like some kind of horrible insect.
“The fuck is that?” I whispered.
“Just a magic trick,” he responded, this calm chill overtaking him, which didn’t juxtapose comfortably with his intense physical strain. “Just an illusion. I have it, man. I have the storm, the storm that’s going to wash us all away. Flood’s gonna pour down and onto every street and sidewalk, carry us all off to who knows where. Lightning and thunder, all part of the grand equation.” He raised his hand two inches higher and the streams of electricity all braided around each other, commingled and separated.
I realized, as he said that, in the calm, detached tone, how meaningless it all was. Complete nonsense. I had been sitting there and listening to nothing short of the unhinged ramblings of a madman, for weeks on end, and this process was slowly killing me.
“Suit yourself.”
He gets this wild look, hoists a box from the back seat, a little locked compartment about 2 feet long. All while there are sparks flying around him, cold blue icy things which gather in his hair and all around the surface of his coat. He twitches and turns the key in the ignition. Flips on the radio to a Boulder station, which up here gets poor reception and is covered in layers of static. And yet I can make out, vaguely, a song thundering out of the Chevy’s cheap speakers.
It’s “West Of Tomorrow” by Sugarloaf, a big hit last summer. A song I can never listen to, haven’t listened to since, because it’ll always remind me of this exact moment, when I was holding my hands in front of my eyes and my friend was being consumed by electrons. And there, on that lone stretch, Jerry Corbetta sang out:
“After midnight... while the gray light... paints a new day...”
My friend said nothing, only turned around and trudged out into the gaping beyond with that strange metal box hung over his shoulder. I could make him out like an azure will o’ the wisp as he vanished behind the quivering aspens, and then even that was concealed.
From way out, I detect gunshots. Gunshots while the radio hammers these beautiful chords, ten, twenty explosions from way back in the forest. I cower and recede with every single one, as if I were being extinguished myself While the triumphant crescendo builds, I’m hiding behind the left rear tire, gritting my teeth and hoping my friend doesn’t come back, that he doesn’t find me here, in this state.
I must have laid there for a good while, my cheek pressed up against the cold earth, gripping it for solace, and the song neared its end and gave way to its organ solo and then that drifting flute, and I was waiting for my friend to return.
But he didn’t return.
The sirens came up gradually, such that I didn’t realize what I was hearing, but by the time they mounted it was too late for me to run- three police cars arrived from the base of the hill and gathered around the vehicle, drawing their pistols and flashlights, red and blue reflecting off every surface, drowning out the night in a sparkling popsicle array.
“Come on out of there, son,” said one of them, hoisting me up from my crouched position. “We got some reports about hearing shots. You know anything about that?” I was catatonic, incapable of forming a coherent thought, just looked at him dumbly, as his associates rifled through the back seat and two of them wandered off into the brush.
“Holy-!” came a cry from somewhere in the distance. The officer held me firmly against his patrol car to ensure I couldn’t escape, but looked up in shock as the lieutenant bounded down the trail, his eyes wide, his countenance ruptured. His skin was pale, it had been drained of blood completely by whatever it was he had seen up there, a vision so awful I can only envision it.
“Dead, Sarge. All of them. Dead.”
“What’s this?” another of them piped up. There it was, lying only five feet from where I had been- the box. The accursed box, its lock flipped wide open. He lifted the lid and pulled out an assault rifle. Spent shells scattered the recesses of the compartment, charred little detritus. And blood, of course. There was lots of blood on the weapon.
“Well, now,” the sergeant proclaimed, pulling out some handcuffs and fastening them to me so hard it cut off my circulation. I grimaced in pain. “You’ve got a lot to tell us. So why don’t we start at the beginning-”
And so I was hauled back to Boulder, placed in a cell, interrogated for weeks on end, unable to convey to them what I had seen or what my friend was capable of.
“Guy with the hat?” Leather jacket?”
“Yes.”
“Come with us.” And they took me down the long hallways, still handcuffed, to the morgue, where they pulled his body out of a drawer- his trenchcoat, his hat and all- still as intact as they ever had been. One gunshot, square in the forehead, beady eyes closed.
“You killed him. You killed all of them.”
I don’t know how he achieved that out in the clearing and simultaneously left the box next to me with the gun inside. It was, in his own words, I suppose, a magic trick. A magic trick to outdo them all, a grand illusion that, in one month or less, ruined the prospect of my future and resulted in my sentencing- life in prison for the cold, calculated murder of thirty people.
And that’s how it worked out, I was transferred to ADX Florence in 1994 and I’ve been here ever since. My little window is my only view of the outside world. I’ve been over it time and again, how he managed to achieve what he had, where the lightning came from and where the stars went. And there are no answers.
Every so often, though, when a low thunderhead rolls over Canon City and the sky becomes impenetrable- when the lights all flicker off and the corridors fall silent and I’m left alone in this concrete bunker to close my eyes and try to get a good night’s sleep, and the rain pours down out there- he’ll come to me, and whisper promises in my ear. Promises of what could have been if I had gone with him and the rest of them. How much fun we could have had. And I’ll cry, softly, because deep down I know he’s right.
My friend will stand there, outside the bars, just outside them, an inch or so, and his hair will stick out from the sides of that large-brimmed hat, and he’ll be entirely in silhouette and his two beady eyes will pierce through like lasers, and he’ll say to me that it’s only a magic trick, that it’s alright, that nothing matters and I shouldn’t concern myself with the world.
And I know he’s right.
Most friends grow as people, detach themselves from you over the years. They live individual lives separate from your own. But my friend doesn’t, he’s reliable and I can always count on him to make his presence known at 2 A.M. while outside the weather blots out the world and I hear distant cries of pain from across the compound. He’s always there, quietly listening, never moving, a scarecrow in the night. He’ll never leave me, and he’ll never stop reminding me of what happened.
Heck, what are friends for...?
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(Selected from the Prisoner Expression Project June 21, 2004)