Full Discrepancy

The Wheel of Flesh

By the late '90s I was knee-deep in what some would laughably call a "career," chasing down and solving other people's problems, for The Man—- no, not just The Man; THE Man, the ultimate capo, where the buck came to die. By then I wasn't moving solely in this dimension anymore. I'd cracked a faster kind of transport, folding the hidden spaces between ours like paper cranes. Not the first guy to do this, I'm sure, but my timing was spectacularly bad. The Millennium was bearing down like death itself, inevitable, inexorable. Everyone felt it, something deep shifting under our feet. Something approaching in the tunnel dark.

Afterwards we all laughed, said we were just worried about numbers— stupid numbers blinking on stupid computer screens. Y2K, a punchline. A few keystrokes later, problem solved, we told ourselves. But that wasn't the real trouble. Not even close. We felt it then, just a cold shadow on a part of ourselves we didn't know we owned. But those of us who traveled between the zones saw it clear. A dark thing turning, a wave bigger and filthier than shadows, washing through the hidden spaces, staining dimensions we didn’t even have names for. Impossible to pin down. Impossible for tiny brains like mine to comprehend, to see its shape or trajectory. Everything got sharper after that—more desperate. Every trip a little more harrowing. Less sure I was coming back.

So that's why, when the creator of that new music device sent out a call—- by programming two tracks to follow each other at an interval calculated to milliseconds, to open a psychic portal—I answered. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" chased by Elvis Presley's "Burning Love," a combination like a Mayan spiritwalk. I stepped through quick, traversing the Between. Colors soup-deep, joy and pain all tangled up, just a scenic route on my way to business. But stepping out the other side? Son of a bitch. It's Steve Jobs. Smiling. Pleased with himself, like he's been waiting his whole life to see me step through that damn portal.

Shook me up. Usually my spiritwalk help came through more traditional channels. Take 1993: it occurred to me then there had to be a way—artificially, exogenously—to initiate a dimensional opening. Not just luck into it with badly timed mundane bullshit. I'd met this shaman at a party in the Hollywood Hills, some guy spouting mighty claims that I believed about as much as you'd believe a Scientologist's car-sales pitch. Spent most of that night looking over his head for someone, anyone, more credible. More interesting. Yet weeks later, I realized I was still thinking about that guy, especially when it came to portals. On an off chance, I opened the LA Weekly classifieds—there he was. Or someone just like him. Christ, these guys are everywhere. Shamans advertising all kinds of services. The internet was just opening up then, and assuming you knew exactly where to find it, you could meet some genuinely interesting souls doing wild things out there. Of course, you had to be careful, real careful. Two months chatting up a statistical analyst, a political organizer, even a sports fan—and then one day, bang, you download a file and see the heinous thing he'd been holding back, just hoping you'd have the same tastes.

I got a lot of practice moving between zones back then. Imagine the sheer terror of a guy like me suddenly appearing in your bedroom— bedroom you hadn't left all day, bedroom you knew, positively, nobody had stepped into. Eventually, though, I hurt the wrong character— an asset of my bosses— and was politely advised to stop. But that's another story. This one is about the day I found Shamanbear on that primitive internet. Not much of a story, really. He offered a variety of service-portals, and after long, careful consideration I picked an assortment I was dead sure was bullshit— but holy cow if true. And let me tell you: it was all holy cow. You poor kids. You have no idea how good we had it on the internet before Google.

Eighty-six bucks later and a very short wait for a mundane, regular postman, I ripped open a first-class envelope. Before Amazon, just receiving a package was a thrill—even when you already knew exactly what was in it. Fifteen minutes later, three quick grassy puffs, and everything started to change.

I was saving a movie for just this occasion. A friend had introduced me to the cult favorite and brilliant "My Dinner With Andre", and 45 minutes in it was obvious something special was going on, aside from award winning performances. I knew that he wasn't- Andre, that is- that I hadn't seen him turn and look at me; but that strange nagging feeling overwhelmed me, creeped me out to be honest. ***A creeping unease bloomed beneath the surface. Andre turned his head, looked directly at me—except he hadn't, of course. My quiet brain knew it, felt the gaze boring into me from inside the screen. My logical brain snorted, waved dismissively, saying nothing had happened, just a trick of the light.*** I knew that he was looking at me but only my quiet brain could see it. My logical brain was snorting and completely denying anything had happened.

But the walls in my head that keep me tethered here started to shift, to slide—that telltale sign that a portal was opening nearby, that I should be ready to step through dimensions. Only there was no portal. Just confusion. Something else was at play. My body was responding the way it always did when preparing for dimensional shifts— stomach clenching, throat swelling, saliva flooding the mouth, the same reflex as holding in vomit too long or fighting an overdue bowel movement, when every muscle starts letting go, opening, unwinding, relaxing, readying for release and I know holy cow here it comes, get ready, it's coming— but no portal opened.

The next thing I knew I was drifting off into that half meditative, half asleep zone where I would live full-time if I only could. Andre was no longer a movie character but a barking mass of sound, syllables without shape, hardly even a voice anymore; maybe those were words but I had no chance of understanding them. Stopped caring. Frozen. Diffuse. Nothing mattered. Everything let go. I wasn't, anymore.

Then I came back, fully awake, completely refreshed and ready for action. "That's some hell of a movie," I felt compelled to remark, to absolutely no one.

That sucker stayed in the back of my mind until I got that first class envelope from the Shamanbear. As I took three strong huffs off the hot metal pipe and the narrator had finished his whining about his life and Andre was warming up and getting into his groove and starting to unravel the mystery of the director Grotowski... and that's all it took. I can still see it vividly, that moment: I’ve slipped through. Only… there's no portal yet - I should have seen it coming, but this time it’s not a portal awaiting me, it’s Andre himself- he is the focal point here. Andre is still a crashing wall of sound but now I can understand - it's some ancient language I don't know even remotely but I get what he's saying. He has to know who I am and what I've done before we proceed.

I exhale, bracing myself for whatever is coming, and as I exhale my torso flutters - I'm a book. I'm literally a book, the son of a bitch has turned me into a book and he is reaching through the screen and flipping through... me. I exhale again. Flutter. I start to laugh. He doesn't care. That's nice. I was worried he'd be pissed about laughter. I always worry higher beings might take offense. They never do. Shockingly forgiving, even patient with our lower-life laughter. They never, ever acknowledge humor or that anything like humor has passed. Now, I know a couple of guys who could maybe do it, but, seriously, good luck making a higher level being laugh. Still… they're remarkably gracious, at least with me.

Andre has been speaking this whole time, incantations, recitations, but now when he speaks it is at me, directly at me, saying my name and looking in my eyes. "Woodrose. I have written all you need. Go." Did he just write on me? I didn't notice. Do I care? Apparently not.

And then, there it was, at last. A portal.

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