USABLE FUDGE - a glampunk story
Chapter Four: Beanbag Voidal
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CHAPTER FOUR: Beanbag Voidal
Jackson's Hole, Wyoming
April 20 1974
A saffron-robed acolyte named Bert or Bill moved across the room, sweeping the hardwood floor and bending over with a damp cloth to scrub away any stains. The floors of the ashram were always kept spotless.
The Bhagwan sat on a raised dais in a round plump armchair lined with soft gray fur. "You know, Mr Rask, John Lennon once sat where you sit now, and he confessed to me his feelings of deep inadequacy. He spoke in complete confidence, and I undertook to never tell anyone, which I never have." The soft lilting Indian accent was a comfort and a torment to Rask. It spoke of great serenity and wisdom but it also reminded him of Indira. He said nothing.
"Well Mr Rask, sir, I see you prefer not to comment. This is well. In time you will feel that you can confide and - what is it the Americans say? - open up to me. Loosen out. But maybe you would prefer to talk to one of those head doctors, an analyst with a comfy couch where you can lie down and spout your horizontal anxieties away like a great white whale?"
The Bhagwan sniggered. "I'm sorry my young friend, but when you become older you see that there is nothing more funny, and more sinister, than a hurt that is held so close to you."
Still Rask squatted on a beanbag across from the master. He looked at him with calm indifference and a void of disinterest.
The master leaned toward Rask’s beanbag from his raised seat: "Are you using cocaine, Rask? Heroin? Some combination thereof—the downer to bring down the upper, and the upper to chase away the blues of the downer?”
He leaned back again in his armchair throne and grinned benignly: “You can tell me frankly, my friend. I don’t judge. We don't search your lodge, you know. My disciples on this retreat enjoy a certain… sacrosanct discretion. I said nothing when Mr Rod Stewart sat where you sit now and confessed to considerable sexual misdemeanors. I held my peace and merely offered spiritual consolation. In absolute confidence."
Rask squinted and shifted in his seat. His skin itched and his eyes burned from the sunlight pouring through the high windows of the ashram’s great hall.
The Bhagwan closed his eyes and began to sway. Was this a prayer or hypnotism?
"Indulgence in one’s self-nurtured loss. Can lead one on collision course. To even greater deeper grief. To speak then is to seek relief."
A nursery rhyme, a happy horseshit jingle. I’d like to teach the world to sing. Snap, crackle, pop. Put a tiger in your tank. Rask stood up unsteadily, bowed in order to preserve some minimal decorum at least from the failure of the morning’s session, and stepped away backwards from the dais, bowing three times as he’d been taught.
The master looked on from above and smiled indulgently. Frailty was his sustenance.
April 1974
Rask and the Ruffians #18 on the Billboard singles chart with "Reverse Ragout"
Hexei Monstrance #12 on the Billboard album chart with debut album "Housefire"
Retreat. Never was a word better suited to a place. As Rask walked back to his lodge—a log cabin set in a leafy grove next to a rippling brook in a highland meadow teeming with wildflowers and scurrying jackrabbits—he considered the multiple uses of the word retreat.
Retreat from consequence. After the incident back in St Louis that fatal February, a man appeared. As if summoned by events. He introduced himself as a special doctor, a government doctor, and said he had straightened things out many times before for those who enjoyed special favor. He'd been sent to straighten things out for Rask. Why? Don't ask, buster.
Had he even been real? Was that some afterflash of a shockstruck dream?
Rask passed the central plaza in front of the ashram hall, where the Rolls Royces and Buicks were parked, the Bhagwan’s personal fleet. Acolytes were busy washing the cars, buffing up a killer gleam in the spring morning sunlight. The fleet was kept immaculate. A simple bird dropping on the bodywork could provoke the wrath of the Bhagwan, so a designated initiate patrolled constantly, holding both a damp cloth and a dry cloth to keep the cars free of all earthly stain.
Retreat from responsibility. That unreal doctor fixed things so Rask could leave St Louis that very day, the day of the death. He flew to New York, where awkward questions were being asked by reporters though not by police. Indira's parents were flying in from India. Rumors of private eyes, vengeful investigations into what really happened that Valentine’s Night.
He flew out here to Wyoming. Took flight. A flight risk. Rask was at risk of flight. Rask decided nothing—band manager Johnny Five-Fingers pulled the strings. He felt like a speck of dirt drifting in a glass of pure water, subject to the stochastic bouncing of brownian motion. Private plane to a private airstrip, pushed and coddled around by bodyguys and holy devotees.
The ashram was located in a most delightful Rocky Mountain vale. On a spring morning like today, there could be no more idyllic place on earth. Songbirds sang in the clusters of aspens just off the footpath. Rask was from London and knew only sparrows and pigeons, the scruffy preterite of birds, and to him these birds were so much more enchanting than anything real.
Retreat from the future. There were no phones at the ashram ranch. Nobody could bother Rask with questions about where to go after the breakup of the Ruffians. Nobody could challenge him with questions about a new direction, where to go now that glam was dead, now that disco was in, and Indira was crushed on the patio, and what now what now what now?
Telegrams were received at the Western Union office in the Hole, and were sent over to accumulate unread on the little table just inside his borrowed lodge. That little cottage where John Lennon had wept, thinking himself inadequate and aimless, and this long before Rask ever arrived.
One telegram lay uppermost on the doorside table, and as he walked inside it met his eye:
NEED TO SEE YOU TALK ABOUT THINGS STOP WILL VISIT YOU SATURDAY TWENTIETH STOP LOVE HEX STOP
Something squished beneath my boots–the malleable earth itself. My leather duster skirted the tall grass or the tall grass teased the duster, one or both. Burlap sack over my shoulder like a proper hobo. The landscape was rolling, it rolled on and on into obscurity. The big oppressive sky hoarding all the blue in the world. I could see through the gaps in sister mountains all the way to Montana, I thought. This brought no comfort.
I looked back at the idling car for reassurance. Only a cruel glare behind the window urged me on.
I stomped down crude paths past silent, indifferent aspens. The air was abrasively fresh. Where was all the stink? Did everyone here piss in toilets like trained dogs? I couldn’t imagine how he was surviving.
I found his cabin with the aid of some polite, if unsettling, acolytes in cheap linen robes. The rustic structure looked… quaint.
I entered without knocking. He was sitting cross-legged on a floor pillow in the center of the room. The arrangement of his legs was unnatural. Those sturdy, thrusting limbs were meant to hold him up, not to anchor him to the floor.
“You got my telegram,” I said, dropping my bag by the door. I know he did, because I was looking at it.
“I got your telegram,” he replied. There was something sedate about his demeanor. A resignation, an abandonment.
“Well, I’m…” Making myself awkward as a scarecrow. “I’m, uh, here now.”
Rask sighed and rose on half-paralysed legs, poured us both glasses of water from a tap that ran slow as molasses. We sat at the tiny table and he gestured for me to begin. Formal somehow, like a consultation with an embalmer.
I hadn’t seen him since the day the Indira’s life was disassembled in the SoHo gallery, well over a year before. We hadn’t spoken on the phone, despite my many attempts to contact him since then. Every time I’d crawled across a stage in that year, I imagined myself crawling toward him, and the look he would give me as I bowed at his feet. The thought somehow never occurred to me that perhaps he would have no wish to speak with me.
What I’d planned to say was out the window, and instead I blurted “You should see what they’re saying about me in the papers, Rask. That I broke up the Ruffians. That what happened to… That I’m the reason you’ve disappeared.”
Rask blinked. He was either on something or all the way off everything. I didn’t know which would be worse.
“The Monsters won’t talk to me,” I continued. “Jilk fucked off somewhere–told me I was all sold out, no soul. Everywhere I go, they just ask me about…what happened.”
He blinked. “What happened,” he repeated. Gaze from nowhere.
I cleared my throat. “It’s like, I’m finally making my fucking music. And people want it! You should see the sales, man, they fucking dig me! And the shit I’m making is good, it’s great. But there’s all this…things keep getting in the way. I had an interview yesterday and we fucking told them what shit was off limits, and they still brought it up. Asking if she was having an affair. If I was having an affair with her.”
Rask’s eyes narrowed, only slightly. I wondered, could he say her name either.
I forced a smile. “You know what I told them? I took this long drag on my cigarette, blew the smoke right in the reporter’s face and said, ‘man, I’m just a faggot.’ The reporter must have been a big poof himself, you should have seen the ugly look on his fairy face. That should give them something else to talk about. If they can even find the balls to print it.”
Rask was quiet for a moment. Everything was quieter out here–the absence of noise made my teeth rattle. Then, he leaned forward, took my face in his hands and said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Hex?”
I stumbled. “My… music.”
He shook his head like a disappointed parent. “You’re talking about people talking about your music. Very different from the music itself.” Making of himself a mini-guru, a faux wise asshole.
“It’s…” I grasped for gangly strands of words—what he might want to hear. I needed a hit of something. “Isn’t that the point? To make stuff that people talk about? I’m trying to change the world here, Rask.”
He leaned back. My cheeks tingled where his palms had held me. “What are you doing here?”
I righted myself. This part I had rehearsed, at least. “I think it’s time for you to come back. To music, at the very least. Jellicoe and I believe that any more time away from the public eye... it just doesn’t look good. And if we just get back to making music, we let the music speak for itself, yeah? But the important part is to come back. When they can’t see you, that’s when they start making shit up–”
Rask stood suddenly, took his glass to the sink and placed it in the shallow basin, then returned to his floor pillow and sat down criss-crossed once more. “You think about the image too much, Hex. Stop seeing yourself through their eyes.” He looked up at me. “Or through mine.” His eyes closed of their own volition. “My wife is dead whether people see me or not. Her death remains.”
Without being told, I knew I was dismissed and still I took my time leaving and still I paused at the door to return his own question back to him: “What are you doing here?”
Rask chewed his words. “I’m trying to figure out what happened.” His eyes never opened.
I slung my bag over a bony shoulder and closed the door behind me while Rask sank and sank. Defeated was the feeling. I thought about my momma for the first time in…well, a damn long time. The sky of her eyes. The cerulean scarf I left at Jilk’s before he broke up the band. The color of my hair.
Then I imagined everything waiting for me back in the city–my stuff, my guitar, the endless supply of people, the easy-as-breathing drugs–and I shot the loneliness out into a vacuum void before I could even call it loneliness.
There was a tour in my sights, the world begging for a taste of my boot. Rask had given me access to that world, but he’d abandoned it–he abandoned me. Leave the old man be. Let him stew in his twenty-seven-year-old irrelevance.
I had what I needed. I had a dismal future behind me and a glorious past ahead.
Video Seven “Amateur Kerouac - Midwest Postcard” by A.P. Murphy
Music by Neil Young from the Dead Man soundtrack
