Shit gets said all the time that I just don't
understand. For instance, this phrase, "The American dream."
I'm not really sure what it means. It's like those old
adages and maxims that Benjamin Franklin used to put in his
"Poor Richard's Almanac" that sound real nice but don't make
a hell of a lot of sense.
Old sayings like "waste not, want not" and "there's more
than one way to skin a cat."
I know that "the American dream" has something to do with
F. Scott Fitzgeral and "The Great Gatsby." We were supposed
to read that book in the 12th grade at my high school. But
I didn't read the book. I don't trust anyone who has ever
read any book all the way that they were assigned to read in
high school.
Myself, I read a few chapters of "Gatsby" and then lost my
copy somewhere. I think I lost it on the day in class when
we were watching a filmstrip on the book. Up on the screen
an illustration of Gatsby looked out over colored-pencil
water at a green light that was supposed to be a major
metaphor for something that gave away the ending of the
book, taking all of the fun out of reading it - making the
whole thing nothing more than academic exercise.
I remember screaming out in frustration and throwing the
book across the classroom. The entire room erupted into
laughter. I didn't get into trouble for that. I did a lot of
sketchy stuff in high school and generally had to pay the
piper for it. But somehow in that class I think I could have
gotten away with anything. It's probably because the teacher
found me amusing. He was a pretty good guy, and so my
in-class antics were never mean-spirited in any way. One
time we had an assignment to memorize something from Hamlet
and present it creatively in class. I must not have felt
like being very creative that week because I chose something
at random from my copy of Hamlet and memorized three verses
of it.
The room where we attended this lit class was on the second
floor of the fine arts building on the far edge of the prep
school's campus. The window two aisles over from my
front-row desk looked out over a pleasant and quiet
residential neighborhood and one of the last orange groves
in the San Fernando Valley. When it came time to do my
presentation for the class, I stood up in front of the
chalkboard and calmly recited the first two verses of the
piece I had chosen. Then, I paused, stepped over to the
window and opened it.
It was a nice, sunny day. I remember seeing senior citizens
walking their dogs, poor Hispanic fellows blowing leaves
around the street with their gasoline-powered blowers and
two women with babies in their arms, talking to each other
at the edge of the orange grove.
I looked out over this idyllic scene and cleared my
throat. Then I screamed the final verse of iambic pentameter
out the window at the top of my lungs. The middle-class whit
people all looked up at me, contempt and annoyance on their
faces. The gardeners were all wearing ear mufflers, and so
had no reaction. I smiled and shut the window and returned
to my seat. I'm sure there were calls to the principal that
day, but I came away from the scene with a B+.
Ahh, high school. The glory days. That time was like four
years in a gigantic padded cell. I could be a
completely-out-of-control fool and have absolutely no fear
of hurting myself. And I took every advantage too. I did
every obnoxious act and ridiculous thing that I could think
of.
Especially that final year. That was the year I read Hunter
S. Thompson's answer to Gatsby, "Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas." That was also the year I read "The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test," "On the Road", "No One Here Gets out Alive,"
Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Huston Smith's "The Religions of
Man," Robert Alton Wilson's "Illuminati!" trilogy, John
C. Lilly's "Center of the Cyclone" and Aldous Huxley's
"Doors of Perception." I read a lot of books that year. I
had a lot of questions that year. I still have most of those
questions today, but back then I also thought I had the
answer: Drugs.
Drugs were the entryway, it seemed, to a world of romance
and mythology that I desperately wanted to explore. Neal
Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison, Allen Ginsberg and
Hunter S. Thompson. They had all been injudicious users of a
wide variety of drugs, and they had all become
counterculture gods walking the face of the earth. I wanted
to be there, too.
I took plenty of drugs in high school. Pot, acid, coffee,
beer. But mostly, I took strange over-the-counter drugs. A
friend of mine discovered that if you spread Oragel on a
cigarette and dry it in the microwave, you can get a cool
rush from smoking it. I myself discovered that five ActiFeds
and a couple of cups of coffee could put you in a
delightfully weird head space for a couple of hours. Another
friend and I once split a box a Vivarin. We found ourselves
charged up for 45 minutes and then sick to our guts for the
rest of the day.
But mostly it was Robitussen DM. Dextromethorphan. That was
a popular drug during my senior year. Ironically, it was
brought into vogue by those bastards on the varsity football
team. I tried it anyhow and found myself irrevocably
hooked. I must have put away two gallons of cough syrup in
the succeeding months.
The last time I took Robitussin was at a small "get wasted"
party at my friend's apartment. (He was a Filipino national,
exiled from his home in Hawaii after smoking too much
methampetamine. His parents thought sending him to private
school on the mainland and putting him up in an apartment
with his alcoholic brother would keep him out of trouble.) I
sat down at the coffee table and sought to enter new
territory by swallowing eight ounces of Robitussen. Had I
read teh label, I would have noticed that the syrup
contained no dextromethorpahn. It was the wrong kind. An
hour later, my friend were flying and I was stone cold
sober. I talked them into going back to the grocery store
with me to get another four ounces so that I might at least
be able to catch a buzz that weekend. I started drinking the
new bottle of Robitussen in the car and finished it on the
couch back at the apartment. I never got high. My body
apparenlty disapproved of having to process 12 fluid ounces
of cough syrup in one evening. I ended up puking the entire
load out in a beautiful black waterfall over the side of the
apartment balcony. I haven't been able to smell Robitussin
since then without becoming ill.
Dextromethorphan and LSD were probably the weirdest drugs I
took in high school. Or even the weirdest drugs I ever took
at all. I've always been fascinated by truly bizarre drugs
like ketamine and jimson weed, but have never had the
courage or the connections to try them.
Interestingly, though, this week's Humboldt State University
Lumberjack has a lengthy story about kids in the city of
Eureka (a few miles south of the town where I live) picking
the seeds off jimson weed and eating them:
"Ben Moore, a 14-year-old Eureka resident, has eaten jimson
weed seeds. He said it makes a person extremely hyper for
several hours, then they will become unconscious for several
hours. When they wake up, they will hallucinate for three
days. Moore said he has never felt the full effect of the
seeds like many of his friends because he has only taken at
most four at a time, where his friends have eaten up to 14."
I can only imagine what kind of citizens these kids will
grow up to be. With any luck, one of them will run for
president one day. I think the situation in Eureka
illustrates a point that is very much important for everyone
to understand: Kids will do anything to get high.
The drive to dream is what has brought us as a species to
the place where we are on this planet. Every labor- and
time-saving device ever invented was imagined at first as a
way to give people a chance to loaf around and
fantasize. Every money-making venture in American history,
whether it led to vast fortunes for its organizer or was an
utter failure, was devised to get the scheme's instigator
ahead of the game, so that he or she might also be able to
loaf around and fantasize.
And every time a kid snaps a bowl or swallows a hit of acid,
she or he is making an attempt to get outside this ugly
world of nagging aches and constant irritations.
As Abraham Maslow showed us, we all need food, shelter,
water, love, acceptance and a whole slew of other things
before we can really start to feel comfortable in our skin
and be our true selves. But numb out all those superfluous
desires and we can become instantly self-actualized, achieve
the Holy Grail - knowledge of our "selfest self" - and
become gods walking on the face of the earth.
And maybe that's what the American dream is all
about. Thompson says it's dead. I say it never existed. Not
as anything real, anyhow. Mortgages, taxes, laws, rampant
consumerism, bad diet, bogus values and Calvanistic ethics
have us all frustrated in this country. Even the supposed
winners will tell you that they aren't satisfied.
Yesterday, at the doctor's office, I saw in Newsweek a
two-page color photo of a young, tough, hard-boned punk
rocker sitting on a patch of flat, dead earth, sticking a
needle of something into his massively tattooed left arm.
This picture touched a sore place in my mind. I think that
since I've seen the picture, it has become my definition of
the American drea. Isolate, synthesize and purify peace of
mind. Poke it in a vein and push it in the plunger. The kid
in the picture probably met furious hell of one kind or
another some time after the shutter snapped. Why not? We all
meet hell in our lives. And it's always in direct proportion
to the degree to which we steal our moments of happiness
from the corrupted world around us.
