ANDY MORLOCK'S DEAD (NO, NO, HE'S OUTSIDE, LOOKING IN) By W.C. Leadbeater and Timothy Leary A GREAT DARKNESS AND A HUNGER ...was my total schiz-krieg amidst the clean, white walls of the hospital room where Andy Morlock's body was being prepped for cryonic surgery. The greatest Pop Artist of the 20th Century was slowly losing his life; like some vital spirit being drained from an alchemist's flask the color went from his face and the world went technicolor: I had just finished smoking my last joint for the night--marijuana is the only thing that has ever controlled my killer glaucoma, so-called because my great-grand- father's eyes hemorrhaged and he bled to death--I was smoking even though my best friend, Timmy J. Lurie, advised me to go to Narcotics Anonymous for my drug problem, saying, You cling to worn-out ideas like the wonders of conscious exploration when all the great explorers of the mind have had to face day-to-day reality. But this was an emergency situation. My sight, like Morlock's life, now hung in the balance--if you have glaucoma it's a trade-off; you either smoke U-boat and go crazy or Say No to Drugs and go blind. I may be crazy, but I'm not blind yet--though I'm halfway there and almost gone. Goddamn the pusher man. I'd never touched anything that kills the Spirit. But I was too close to blindness to follow any other path: When the killer glaucoma had been diagnosed my pressure had been sixty--enough to put me into constant, ex- cruciating pain. Fifteen is normal. Twenty is okay. Six- ty--how shall I put this? When my ophthalmologist measured the pressure he shouted Holy shit!! and fell off his stool. THE POPE OF POPSICLES Andy Morlock's meat-vehicle lay on the slab, awaiting the cryonic freezing of his brain. Andy, most well known for his paintings of Heinz baked beans, became interested in cryonics when he learned that Walt Disney's bodanon had been scienti- fically hibernated until technology like Eric Drexler's nano-technology (atom-stacking) could reanimate him. Drexler was using archons, sub-quark entification regulators for upper-levels of organization, to reverse the effects of entropy. All complexification, that is, entification, is controlled at the sub-quark level so massive irradiation by archons could cause the ontology of a system to recapitulate its phylogeny; in the case of the brain-dead, reformation of neural nets: Resurrection. Reincarnation. And I was doing what I could to popularize, humanize, Disney-ize cryonic technology as a New Wave science fiction writer. I had a mohawk and every record Roxy Music ever made (not to mention Psychedelic Furs and Elvis Costello); an oddity in cowboy country but the skinheads out in Montana had their own bars to dance at while beds were burning. How can we sleep while the world is turning? At 3:59 AM our man, Dr Mellon Hitchcock, announced Andy legally dead, bringing me out of my flashback to Cranky Wear. The coy blandness and teasing of the Virgin, pervasive in its appeal to the media, was gone! The albino pallor was gone! Andy Morlock was dead! The switching of beds was performed swiftly--if one of the nurses were outside, looking in, and came in unexpectedly the ruse would be found out; dead is dead and doornails forget. Reach out for me, hold me tight--let your soft machine talk to me. The Unknown Soldier who had traded beds with Andy slept with his TV children-fed as we immediately started cardio- pulmonary support using a heart-lung resuscitator that looked as though it had been stolen from Marcus Welby. Andy looked better, in fact, than he had since 1968, the year he was shot by a mad lumpen-feminist name of Kynasta McShine....I myself have suffered from paranoid delusions that mad feminists are out to kill me. I thought of the hatred of the Virgin for the Serpent: I wrote the Virgin a letter about how I wanted to vorkle because I was Virgin myself; I would allow her consuming excellence to devour me. Strike, dear Mistress, and cure my heart. Virginia had stopped speaking to me. I rued the day I had ever written the suicide note--I was dead to realms of light, born to the Void of Colors. Different colors made of sorrow. But Sophie heard the voice of Atlantis calling.... I'M GOING TO GIVE THE PROBLEM TO YOU Once the bodanon was outside everything moved swiftly. We loaded Andy's dead body into the back of our ambulance and screamed out of the parking lot like the Ghostbusters in pursuit of the Slime-thing. His spine is entitative in its own right, a mind independent of the brain; I thought as I drank my Orange Crush. Never drink Mr. Fruity while you are resurrecting Andy Morlock from the dead. We arrived at our mortuary on West 91st St and began administration of transport medication at 4:40 AM. By 5:45 Andy was positioned on the Mobile Advance Life-Support System and surgery was underway to raise his femoral artery and vein, even though the dizzy spin I was in kept me from noticing anything other than that I existed before the All; was the All. I am Invisible within the thought of the Invisible One. I am intangible, dwelling in the intangible. I move in every creature. I descended to the underworld and shone down upon the Darkness. It is I who poured forth the Water; I exist within radiant waters. I am the gradual Dawn of the All.... I could turn you inside out.... How had I ever come to this strange Gnostic philosophy, after having grown up as a Catholic boy, redeemed through pain and not through joy? It had been a long process of evolution, initiated by my first psychosis. Eighty percent of institutionalized schizo- phrenics invent their own religion; I had invented mine--and when I found it reflected in the long dead philosophies of Marcion, Mani, Valentinus, I had become obsessed with the curious, alien religion--which if demythologized would make an excellent modern philosophy of science: A Cosmos without a Creator does not disprove the existence of God.... I think I know how Andy feels in this instant: Like me, he often felt the 3 stigmata of the insane science fiction artist: alienation, blurred reality, and despair, the Reality the Gnostic sees in a world made by the Demiurge, Saklas....Andy often pestered me to write a script about the world a xillion years in the future, instead I write about how it feels to be insane because few of the insane can communicate their experiences. Even four hits of high-powered blotto acid can't equal the realities of schizoaffection. And here he is on the insane hibernation table, no longer looking the figure of the fast dandy. I thought it would come to this: suspended animation, state of bliss. GENESIS NOW! Just before I had arrived here in Phoenix I was trapped in a mental hospital he never made! out in the mountains of Montana--a place no one could escape from because it was so isolated: Warm Springs State Psychiatric Hospital, where hot pools stained with rust were held captive by mountain peaks rising all around, like the womb threatening mental abortions. Like Big Nurse threatening with mental medications. Haldol was the death of me while schizophrenic Rootboys danced to Rasta music: L.B. was playing reggae on his acoustic guitar. Dem legalize marijuana, right here in Montana: Only cure for glaucoma here.... This was the second time I'd been in a mental institution: Slime-thing had gone gonzo in the Invisible High. To my classmates in the Western town of Invisible, a New Wave science fiction author was strange; an insane science fiction author was even stranger: The cowboys liked beating up skateboard punks. One gerp stole my Walkman and destroyed my precious Cult tape under the dreaded influence of VADIS. A GOOD SWAMP MONSTER NEVER GOES ANYWHERE WITHOUT HIS WALKMAN VADIS (the Vast Active Destructive Intelligence System) was author of a thousand conspiracies, the Mafia, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, all trying to obliterate the Savage Id--shotgun, everybody's got one; just as God was the Divine Author--I was his typewriter. Typewriter torment, a dreadful disease which I had caught the first time I touched the machine, had forced me--mind controlled by the psionic satellite VADIS--to write a series of bizarre letters to a lumpen-feminist name of Valerie Cooper, a North Dakotan with a love of reversing roles. She refused to do anything that made her feminine; she refused to learn how to cook because it was a woman's job and she wanted to be a vorkling quarterback. They just don't build rednecks the way they used to. Is this Love that I'm feeling? I like to dream, on a clouded sun at midnight. Vadis had fallen in love with me when we were both in William Farmer's class at the University of Montana. Farmer said, The two chief characteristics of the Gothic are epistemology and sex: His essays on epistemology, the philosophy of Knowledge, had won him the first Guggenheim Fellowship to the Soviet Union. Glaznost. Perstroika. Now you can get a Big Mac in Gorky Park.... Val had sat beside me copying my notes, feeling up my legs, livelying up herself with day-glo eyeshadow and green mascara for the atypical male, myself not knowing what I could find--but then when she had me alone and came as close as a woman could to raping a man the desolation of party-time wasting kicked in: I froze. Beyond the Pope of Popsicles. Too much confusion, and no solution. Impotence. Fear of flying. I smoked a lot of grass and popped a lot of pills; saw a lot of people with tombstone-minds. Goddamn the pusher! I wanted to love her and treat her right, share the shelter of the sky and my bed, but the probing hand and the questing tongue brought only the violence that comes from acid dawn. A new, clear day.... Burning light which seared every neuron in my brain. As the burning of the brain continued I became a lizard slithering down Broadway. There is a Broadway in every town, even the Invisible City. Street life, leave me alone; why are you calling on my telephone? A dirty Avenue full of traffic jams, tan girls with green shirts and violet eyes, and this slick-hip, Afro-jungle-fox with white sneakers, so pimp-smug walking along some neon-pool-hall pockmarked Avenue, coked out fool planning to sell crack to my grandchildren. Yours, too. Stoned on some love-potion he found in some ungodly bathroom. Did you say you think he's blind? The pusher is a monster, he ain't a natural man. Flying low; dying slow...If I was the President of this land I'd declare total War on Drugs: crucify the filth who sold me this rape called mind-fire. Got to search for something new. Confessing to the endless sin, the endless whining sound, I found a Church. Some blasphemy of demons lived upon the altar, then died in a blaze of star-fire: The World became the Afterlife. IT IS A STRANGE THING TO CALL YOUR GOD AN ABYSS I saw churches, mosques, synagogues, all shadows cast up in the center of the Void of Forms, the True God who is called Abyss. I became Sophie, Mother of the All, gave birth to the Cosmos; became Androgyne: I was Jesus's twin, a Savior in need of salvation. Obsessed with Gnostic mysticism, I sought out a priest. When he cursed me for a heretic I was overwhelmed with despair; that was the first time I jumped out a church window. I raced through shattered crystal until the Thorazine Police carried me to a place safe from the psionic beams the Vast Active Destructive Intelligence System was shooting into my brain from satellite. A psychiatrist in lumberjack shirt and cowboy boots with long hair to his shoulders diagnosed me in the emergency room. They just don't make psychiatrists the way they used to. And it's a hard rain's a gonna fall, but that kool (sic) night had threatened snow. Winter comes early when you live in Invisible City. But if I was paranoid, why was the Day-Father demanding a sacrifice of my heart? Didn't He know that human sacrifice went out with Stoicism? Take my Soul if I'm in doubt. I spent three months in that place. When I'd first arrived I'd been terrified; I thought of psychokillers with eldritch cleavers chasing sadomasochistic nurses; I thought of drooling idiots, life-long prisoners of hell-holes where ECT's were used to discipline those who tried to escape.... So the first thing I see is a drooling idiot. Later, I found out he'd been a victim of a bicycle accident, hit and run, was brain-damaged. At that point I began to adjust to life in a long-term mental institution. I'd started making friends, started to actually enjoy the routine: My best friend was George Two Ways, a peyote burn-out. He dressed like the immaculate conception in a zoot suit, white jacket with side vents five inches long, wore a bandana and leather boots. # DEAR UNCLE TIM: I have just been released from the Bobo Boat. You probably remember George Two Ways; I wrote you letters about him when I was trapped in a mental hospital He never made! I met him in Gandolph's, chugalugging Mountain Fresh beer; he offered me the magic mushroom for a bargain price--then thoughts of acid day rose like the fingers of dawn and clutched my brain: No matter who's the winner, we can't pay the cost. I walked out of that place without even a beer. Did I do the right thing? LEAD # DEAR W.C.LEADBEATER: In my opinion, the last thing you need right now is a hit of acid. TIMMY J. LURIE # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.