PSYCHEDELIC SUNRISE

By Ken Boyte

(c) Copyright 1996-2009.

All Rights Reserved.

Revision 3-11-09

Chapter 1: Bring On the Rebirth

Gulf War I, February 1991

THE DIONYSIAN ORGIES had been invading hallucinations ever since Professor Diligence started obsessing about the black-hooded priests. In the dreams that followed for Millbrook Tavistock, everybody was always dressed in red. And the battalions of jet fighters forever roared overhead, above Millbrook’s crossed, red eyes that could not see heaven, casting red laser tracers earthbound to mark the dead, and the dead, and the dead. Fire burning orange and red.

Everyone he knew from journalism school was talking about blood in those dark, Skull-and-Bones days of George BushGeorge Bush Sr. and Anton LaVey, the High Priest of Lucifer and the CIA, back when everybody was ritually consuming the consumption myths and sacrificing their kids to the economic world wars of capitalism, like they still are today, trying to forget their shame reading Sigmund FreudSigmund Freud subconsciously between the frames of pornographic corporations. To make it through to the sunrise, everybody was wired on something and trying to escape.

Like Millbrook Tavistock, a tall and skinny, half-blind survivor of Phenix City, Alabama. For him, raised on Church-of-Christ religion and Sunday football, which he hadn’t been allowed to play because of the accident, it was like the Apocalypse had already begun, when his dreams turned vampire red, and the orgies filled his battered head full of bullets rocketing toward Malcolm X, impacting his face and exiting the back of his skull, splattering the fragments of his rebellion against the Hall of Fame.

The dreams always ended when Millbrook heard the Devil sing.

▲▲▲

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.

– The Rolling Stones,

“Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Chapter 2: Blinded by Lies

Fall 1963

BACK THROUGH THE FABRIC of reality separating black holes from jazz notes, elves from human women, when the red lights of the ambulance stopped flashing, and the sirens blared no more above baby Millbrook’s bleeding head, he was crying and frightened by the geometric shapes of strangers in white holding shiny silver knives, staring down on him.

“Scalpel," said one of the neurosurgeons under the bright lights of the operating room to a nurse hiding behind dark-rimmed glasses and too much makeup. “Careful as we insert the metal plate,” the doctor grimaced, amidst blinking machinery, sterile gray gadgetry, and the static of a blue-and-white television.

Three seconds before the accident took his sight, white baby Millbrook fell from the edge of an old double bed and splattered the steel rod of the furniture frame below with blood from his head. Only for a moment, his unwed, 16-year-old mother had looked away on that gray November day, six months after his birth and death and first rebirth at the hands of military science and God, in 1963, along the Chattahoochee River across from the black smoke stacks of the cotton mills and the monotony of the metallic noise of the industrial looms that spun lies and fragmented time.

▲▲▲

Millbrook’s mother, unlike the tinsel advertisements, had been unknowingly named after the pagan goddess Isis, also known as Aphrodite and Venus. Cast in the dirt mold of a peasant, Diana Tavistock spilled the blood of her bastard son on a shattered altar of oppression, wishing for death and life in manic cycles of new and broken trinkets, forever in debt to the financiers and those who collected taxes.

Diana’s mother and father had survived the Great Depression and World War II, which, for her father, extended into a 20-year military career fighting and falling for bank deposit notes and foreign gold in Europe and Korea.

Like this, a brat of Manifest Destiny, Diana grew up traveling from one base town to another, among the nameless neighborhood flocks of new-refrigerator-buying Americans who believed that the Creator of Man would help their football teams win games of odds and chances in the parlors of Las Vegas. So blinded by the desperation of their sins, Mama and Daddy Tavistock cried out when the nightmares came past 3 a.m., and they blasphemed God begging for pain killers.

▲▲▲

Diana’s mother was Ashteroth, also unknowingly named after a pagan sinner, after Semiramis, Isis, and “the Queen of Heaven.” Millbrook’s grandmother, however, was only “Ash” to her friends, having been born into the shadows of 1914, into an earlier conflict that marked the return of Jesus Christ to the planet of Armageddon, or so the Jehovah Whistlers told them repeatedly on the front porch of their denial, leading up to the culling of the fields and the separation of the weeds of men.

As the only child to graduate from Red Devil High School, Ashteroth Tavistock was inbred, too, into deception, into the Roman lions’ den of market capitalism, to be the lone daughter in a family of five and blessed to survive two brothers who began working full-time in the factories of cotton before they were nine and on their ways to soldiers’ graves wrapped in red-white-and-blue flags. They never had a chance to fake death as children playing war because their childhoods were taken away by businessmen hoarding money.

Ash died with her brothers in front of cereal-box-sized dramas of corporate projections glamorizing perfect kitchens and beautiful people caught up in commercial predicaments and calculated solutions of psychology. She was as dead as anyone could be still breathing but doped up and believing in helplessness made escapable by little yellow pills – Valium Five: Take nine. Fall on your face. Sleep until suppertime.

Like this, Ash became an addict to pharmacists and big business tycoons patenting cures to problems that they also created. And on her knees, with a head full of green plastic curlers, she listened to the Hit Parade, being among the first generation of Americans taught by mass media advertising how to behave. But she never knew it. She never knew much about anything around her other than it all had been caused by a mysterious sliver behind the iron curtains of the shortcomings of men.

Nor did she know the immortal names of the corridors of power at Princeton University. She never even knew the significance of her own name, never cognizant of or asking questions about who or what or where or when or why she and her descendants had been born into a triple-six legacy of servitude, differentiated from the rich by bloodlines.

▲▲▲

Ash married Diana’s father, Norman, in 1933 when she was 19, in the countryside of Alabama. Meanwhile, across the sea in Germany, Adolph Hearst was casting black magic spells and hiding behind the changing names of the Devil.

Soon after their marriage, Norman was gunning for big businessmen on the front lines of Wall Street in Europe. After World War II ended, he returned to the red-clay farms of Alabama to sire a daughter and stockpile potpies in his new freezer, anticipating the Second Coming. Blinded by the yellow pestilence of hysterical newspaper fiction, like all the robots of the despots, when the enemies of the nation changed, he never questioned orders to kill communists and stomp out the youthful rebellion sparked by Elvis Presley--the King of pop culture madness and sadness and whores begging for their chances to suck off the cock of an idol.

▲▲▲

Maybe it was her rebellion against being raised without roots on the road to manifest slavery that made Diana Tavistock and her family crazy. Maybe it was Hollywood that spread her 16-year-old legs upon a hill for the soldier and made her wet and want to get even, to get f*****, to get up and out and made free by the words of a drop-your-pants-and-pull-your-underwear-to-one-side romantic liar. But no matter the cause or the source of her temptation, no matter her shame, before Diana knew what she had done to herself, she was trapped by biology and a black-night’s mistake, when she turned away from another televised political assassination in mystical, magical 1963 – back and to the left, back and to the left – to see the blood on the head of her baby boy falling: red, and into darkness.

▲▲▲

For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis are the stuff of literature. A work of literature, he believed, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, the literary work must be treated like a dream.

– Charles E. Bressler,

Literary Criticism (1999)

Chapter 3: The Butcher’s Knife

July 1973

A SERIES OF BATHROOM VISITS and trips to the water fountain helped pass another church service for Millbrook, who sat in the back pew of the small building with his grandparents drawing rock stars in his Bible. Later, after the tithing had been collected, the shaking of cold congregation hands sent the Tavistocks packing.

▲▲▲

That night, Diana, who no longer believed in God, tried to stab her father’s face again. “I’m gonna’ rip your balls out, you cocksucking m***********,” she screamed in the living room, holding the large knife.

From behind the locked door of his bedroom, the same room where he'd fallen as an infant, Millbrook tried to hide from the violence, and he tore a page from his Bible. Each and every night that followed, he continued to rip out the pages of scripture until the book was empty. “God doesn’t give a shit?” He questioned the words of his fallen mother.

▲▲▲

The stars fall, the earth catches fire;

all life withers and comes to death.

The end has no value as passage and promise;

it is the advent of a night

in which the world’s old reason is engulfed.

The world sinks into universal fury.

Victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s.

It belongs to madness.

–Michel Foucault,

Madness and Civilization (1961)

Chapter 4: The Mardi Gras Parade

February 1991

THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE had been Millbrook’s favorite way to block out the memories of childhood. Ranting against the government was another learned passion. “I’m telling you, man,” Millbrook would stammer in bouts of drunkenness. “They just create and use people like Hitler and Saddam Hussein to give everybody inside the U.S. something to hate.”

Having arrived in New Orleans the Saturday before Fat Tuesday, he found himself sitting on the ground in a small park in the French Quarter. Far from the long winter of Illinois, where snow continued to blanket his college town, Millbrook was tripping on acid: “They point to people like Saddam and say, ‘Hate this, man.’ And we do. And they use our hate to control us, twisting our emotions so we’ll agree to pay more taxes to fuel more hate for those we are educated to kill.”

“Wow. That’s heavy,” commented a young woman sitting on the grass beside him. The smile of Adonis glistened in her eyes beneath the festive starlight of February’s spring.

Millbrook removed another beer from his blue backpack and passed it to Kali Iacocca, a prodigal daughter of the establishment who proudly grew psilocybin in the bottom of her bedroom closet. The night before, she and Millbrook had met and f***** aboard Amtrak on the way down from Illinois. Regardless of the truth, when Millbrook looked into her blue eyes, starbursts exploded love American style inside his head, with a twist of Larry Flynt.

Millbrook’s lust had begun years earlier in elementary school, staring at naked pygmies on the pages of National Geographic, excitedly doing what the preacher said was a sin. Soon afterwards, in junior high, he started collecting centerfolds from the adult magazines kept on the open racks of the local pharmacies.

His confusion between love and lust grew gawking at lesbians wearing black fishnet stockings on the tits-and-ass pages of Hustler, Swank, OUI, Penthouse, and Gallery. And he found the best hiding places for his secrets, too, inside rock ‘n’ roll album covers. The inner sleeves of the triple-album Wings Over America, Elton John’s double-LP Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and the two-record set Alive! by KISS worked especially well for stashing porn.

▲▲▲

Back in the park in New Orleans, Millbrook began sticking a piece of black hash onto a straightened paper clip. He torched the drug with a lighter, which heated up the hash until it crumbled into a glass pipe and burned red. Millbrook inhaled the medicine before passing the pipe to Kali.

Spicy Creole sausages and blackened jambalaya shrimp sizzled in the kitchens of the bars nearby.

Millbrook breathed deeply, momentarily turning away from the conversation and squinting to see through the curly black hair dangling in front of his face. At first he thought he was hallucinating again when he saw the half-naked Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator holding a chain attached to the dog collar around the neck of a gay midget dressed exactly the same as his macho master. Both men wore silver-studded black leather jockstraps.

Lighting the hash, Millbrook once more raised his bushy black eyebrows when a white policeman on a Harley Davidson motorcycle stopped in the middle of the crowded street to tongue kiss a caped man dressed like Zorro. “Was that Rob Halford from Judas Priest, man?” Millbrook thought to himself. “I remember the night Elton John stuck his head in the oven and tried to die.”

But before Millbrook could think longer about songs inspired by tragedy, his mind drifted back to the middle-aged women of the Big Easy who were flashing their chests and dropping their pants for plastic beads.

“Show your cocks!” some of the women yelled back to the men wanting to see titties, who, likewise, obliged requests for voyeuristic sex on the balconies.

Millbrook was always looking up and gawking, stumbling through the crowded, curbed streets of schizophrenia and capitalism.

▲▲▲

The cramps within his stomach intensified an hour into that night’s psychedelic exploration of the darkness, the way the pain always came when the LSD digests through the intestines; however, the discomfort soon subsided and melted like Salvador Dali paintings into another red dream. But the Epiphany did not come, the way for Millbrook it never did. Instead, the rock music of his youth unraveled in the dirty streets, which opened up for him like a nasty yellow brick road full of midgets fucking Freddy Mercury, tempting all with the flute of Pan and Apollo to skip joyously without thinking into Wonderland, past the Mad Hatter and rabbits on a stick.

Millbrook continued to rush forward toward colorful broken mirrors reflecting the twisted, apocalyptic Christians carrying crosses and competing for attention among the paraded acts of Rex and Proteus, Elks, Zulu, Zeus, Bacchus, Argus, Alla, and Krewe Decadence. It was a pagan thing, dating back to the Roman full moon of Lupercalia.

Mississippi Queen.

And you know what I mean

I met a Cajun lady.

She taught me everything.

–Mountain

▲▲▲

It was a gnostic thing, the way Kali and Millbrook took the drugs and ate the words of the poets in a secret garden of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, into which they could escape like Alice, through a mirror of canvas and delight among the sweet thorns of taboo pleasure, which also brought back for them a boomerang of pain. It was a gnostic thing, something they read about in the library under a table.

Under the surface, under God in heaven, in middle school, when they first began to understand the tingling feelings between their legs that came when they touched themselves with their hands. This is how Millbrook and Kali's erotic experiences with art began in the brush strokes of a dead man’s vanishing lines, when they turned the pages and read about the Dutch Bosch and the Eleutherians, of which Bosch was a member in Holland at the end of the 15th century. This is how they came to know the carnal acts of portrayed beasts and feasts and jungle cannibal thieves of souls and flesh who did not wash away the blood from their faces.

And the more Millbrook and Kali gazed, the more they saw, the more it was repeated, the more they wanted to be like their habits, filling their minds with unclean cocks and twats opposed to organized God, who Kali hated more than her parents, like Millbrook, who was the son of the Devil, or may as well have been.

▲▲▲

On the outset of their first Mardi Gras night of heretical hallucinations, the two had heard the Swedish hippies whispering, and they stopped to score: “LSD, Vitamin A. Acid.” No matter that Jimi Hendrix dosed more elaborately, laying tabs on his eyeballs or placing hits under headbands to be absorbed through osmosis, Millbrook and Kali preferred the basic, put-it-in-your-mouth method of ingesting psychedelics. It was not showmanship, just effective.

A newscast blared from the open doorway of a bar: "An increased presence of U.S. Marines will be on hand this week, out of sight, to swiftly arrest violence at the annual Mardi Gras celebration, which dates back to pagan pre-history."

Not paying attention to the static, Kali turned her head to stare at a tall, curvaceous woman wearing only a red G-string and disappearing behind a red doorway. But Millbrook did not see the sexy devil babe in red, the pitchfork tail dangling from the crack of her ass, or the red horns pinned to her brown hair.

“Mardi Gras is always held 46 days before Easter,” Kali said, breaking the silence.

“And Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. My professor mentioned that, man,” Millbrook mumbled.

“A Roman circus called Lupercalia was held in mid-February,” Kali explained.

Removing the glass pipe from his pocket again, Millbrook held the flame of a lighter to another chunk of black hash. A song by the Clash played in the background:

The money feels good

Your life you like it well

But surely your time will come

As in heaven, as in hell

–The Clash

“In the end, man, we all have a choice to make,” Millbrook nodded. Stoned, however, he soon forgot what he was going to say next. Then his stomach roared. “Let’s find that place giving away free gator-on-a stick, man.”

Kali agreed, and on the way through the French Quarter looking for free food, they saw an old man wearing a capital-lettered sign around his neck, made of two pieces of poster board tied together with string and draped over his shoulders: “FALLEN, FALLEN, FALLEN IS BABYLON THE GREAT. SHE WHO HAS MADE ALL THE NATIONS DRINK OF THE WINE OF THE WRATH OF HER FORNICATION. COME OUT OF HER MY PEOPLE – SAYS THE LORD – THAT YOU MAY NOT PARTICIPATE IN HER SINS AND THAT YOU MAY NOT RECEIVE OF HER PLAGUES.”

“Repent!” the old man shouted.

But the young people did not listen and instead turned back to their hash pipe. The fire burned red, and Millbrook thought about his childhood, until his mind once more filled with confusion. “Such is the circular nature of the curse of free will, man,” he thought to himself, “to regretfully repeat mistakes forever, alone, either mad or surrounded by madmen.”

▲▲▲

The only weapon of power, it’s only strategy against…

detection, is to reinject realness and referentiality

everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of

the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finality

of production. For that purpose, it prefers the discourse

of crisis, but also – why not? – the discourse of desire.

‘ ‘Take your desires for reality!’ can be understood as the

ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world

even the confusion of the reality principle with the

desire principle is less dangerous than contagious

hyperreality…

–Jean Baudrillard

Chapter 5: Little Egypt

Fall 1987

ALL THE RADICAL KIDS of Southern Illinois University gathered on The Strip to shake their fists inside an old white, tin-roofed building called the Hangar 9. Located along a road lined by other bars, restaurants, and shops, black-stained wood covered the walls carved with graffiti (like “F*** You!” and “Anarchy!”) inside the Hangar 9.

A pool table at the entrance provided a focal point for competitive youth needing to be entertained. Across the bar, a pinball machine also gave kids wanting to cut class something else to do. Cigarette butts floated in ashtrays full of beer on the black cocktail tables between the bartenders and the stage. Torn red labels on empty bottles, tequila shot glasses, spilled white salt, and sucked-on limes also created atmosphere.

The Hangar 9 was especially popular with the depressed youth of Little Egypt who wore black T-shirts and checkered flannel. Slam dancing was part of the fashion statement, thrashing to fast beats and power chords inside the Hangar 9. Not a violent dance, but an expression of anger contained, not directed at anyone physically but harnessed and expressed with each step, with each movement, with hard, driving rage.

Most nights, student bands, and professional musicians passing through town, helped the kids escape thoughts of their mistakes for awhile before they aged, grew fat, and died – before the sweet smells of the punk rock girls went home with somebody else.

▲▲▲

One drunken night inside the Hangar 9, the lead singer of Goat Head was wearing a bloody mask like Pan and dancing wildly on stage under red and black theatrical lights. Molesting the room with his presence, the mad rocker humped the air eyeballing babes in a haze of dry ice. Then he thrust into the air a shrunken skull mounted on a gold-plated scepter, which was also his microphone and stand.

Out of danger from the slam dancers, who were running in a circle and diving off the stage, Millbrook bobbed his head to and fro, sitting at one of the black cocktail tables in front of the bar. He graciously accepted a joint from a classmate sitting beside him.

Meanwhile beside them, a black-haired girl with a blue eyeball tattooed into the back of her neck walked past shaking her ass. The gold loop through her nose dangled as she stuck out her tongue to show off a gold stud piercing. Oh, but for Millbrook, it was the black miniskirt and black fishnet stockings. She wagged her tongue again passing, and the stud reflected red lights from the stage.

Losing focus for a moment, however, Millbrook thought back to the long bus ride from Alabama that he’d recently taken to Southern Illinois. He’d only been in town a few days, and his first semester of graduate school had just begun.

“I’m gonna’ f*** you up!” repeated the lead singer of the band. The lyrics echoed and swung like a pendulum in front of Millbrook's crossed red eyes, back and forth, back and to the left, blurring into darkness.

“Ever read Sigmund Freud, Holmes?” asked Millbrook’s classmate, a tall and slender black man who, to Millbrook, looked like Jimi Hendrix.

Millbrook toked the joint again, causing the fire cherry to glow red. Then he answered, exhaling marijuana. “Sigmund F***, that psychology guy who dreamed about his mother, man?”

“The secular religion of the state, Holmes."

“Hey, man, what’s your name again?” Millbrook extended his hand, which the black man firmly gripped for a strong greeting, skin-on-skin.

“They call me Cletus, Holmes.”

In the background, Goat Head was loudly jamming something off-key by Metallica:

TO READ MORE, SEE PSYCHEDELICSUNRISEBOOK.BLOGPOT.COM