So, to lean on a cliché I will employ the voice of a wizened old soul. “So where should I begin this tale of triumph and tribulation? I guess the best place to start would be, well, at the start.” When you immerse yourself in the eddies and swirls of the road and street level life you meet many people with many stories; some arrive there on the run from persecutions real or imagined, the drop-outs, degenerates and dreamers of greener pastures; others come running toward adventure, wide eyed, naive and all to often, repulsively idealistic. I was, fortunately, unfortunate and detestably, one of the latter.
I suppose I should get the disclaimer out of the way at this point. I will be changing the names of people and places to protect their identities. Gods forbid I should actually gain some success with this recollective scrawl, but if I do, I don’t want anyone’s or any where’s way of life to be threatened. All I tell here will be as true as I can manage, memory is far from a perfect lens yet I will do my best to crystallise the facts and feelings honestly. Even with that though, my story will at times beggar belief. Often, even my own.
My call to the road came at the deluded age of nineteen. I was a long haired, Amish bearded psychonaught born out of the almost nihilistic, excessive hedonism of Northern Irish party culture and the brief time when fresh magic mushrooms where legal and buyable over the counter. A time and place in itself worthy of discourse and investigation. The hangover from the troubles still loomed and the inevitable defiant thrill seeking and drug dabbed middle finger was flipped in the direction of authority, conformity and any other establishment based buzz words that come to mind. I drift. Anyway, I’d climbed the mountain, swam in God, read the secrets. I had not yet learned that the psychedelic cable car to the summit had left my legs weak, that this unearned vista was doomed to collapse, that my spine had not developed the strength to support the weight of my swelling head. Ignorance is, after all, bliss and the ball slap of hindsight, a luxury of the living in latter times. Still, that inflated cranium was a key ingredient, all I needed was a random gust to whisk me away. That breeze came in the balmy Californian variety in the form of a scruffy, dreadlocked guy named (or not named) Arno.
The fates are fickle. That anyone from a place as grandly (if not aptly) named as The Golden State could follow a path that wound through the drizzle shrouded sectarian backwater I once called home is testimony to that fact. A town I often referred to as the pimple on the asshole of the world. A name, that is in retrospect, a bit on the grandiose side, assholes, after all, are quite important. I would be surprised if, to this day, Arno isn’t the only backpacker to have ever set foot in that place. But as it happened and luckily for me one of the more charitable local farmers had put an ad online with the aim of securing cheap, exploitable foreign labour. Bless his soul.
The time-line ran roughly like this: Arno had roosted on a derelict piece of rubble on the town limits for the term of his underpaid slavery and after an understandably short time had decided, unfairly, that Ireland was shit. Some mates of mine had bumped into him walking through town and taken him under their wing, or rather onto their couch, Ireland was looking a little better. I and a few other lovable delinquents bumped into them a few days later. A party was organised. The board was set. Ireland wasn’t so bad after all, once you got out of the slave circuit that is.
For anything to happen in this world an uncountable number of smaller events all align seemingly conspiratorial in nature. It wasn’t until years later that I pieced together one major moment that set all of this up years before. Please bare with me then as I insert a flashback into this flashback.
The night was like countless others. Bean’s house was banging and the drugs had kicked in, the cosmos slid between the textures of the breathing wooden floor. A brother appeared before me bleary eyed, swaying and smiling. Smiling as only a playful drunk with a plan that, at least in his mind, was fucking hilarious could smile. The hug was engaged. The marker pen showed it’s solvent head. The question was asked. “Can I draw on your face?”
“No,” said I.
“Why not?” He beamed.
The question and intent were so childishly innocent that I immediately felt a swell of guilt. With psilocybic honesty I realised I had just snuffed out some harmless fun, a decision that in a small but tangible way made the entire universe less for it’s utterance. Why not? The question demanded an answer. Because I didn’t want to look like a fool. I didn’t want to be laughed at, I was insecure. Could you trace this small cowardice back to bullying? To childhood pros laughed at for their innocent stumblings? Probably. Did it matter? No. I had been asked a question and in it’s answering I had found my character lacking.
“Go for it,” said I. His grin filled out, his eyes gleamed, his devilish joy palpable as he went about redecorating my face. My smile mirrored his.
And so it was a couple of years later, another party like countless others this time minus the shroomlings. Arno was the star of the show. He’d been traveling Europe for a year with nothing to make his bread other than his devil sticks. He and I got to talking. “You should come he said.”
“I don’t know,” said I.
“Why not?” He asked. There it was. The question that had become of paramount importance in my life ever since I’d become a Picasso. The question I’d promised myself I would take seriously every time it was asked of me. The first step is always the hardest and for me it was no different. I took myself to a room where I wouldn’t be disturbed. I drunkenly stared at the wall for a full twenty minutes. No job (not that that would matter), no girlfriend, no wish to go back to school. Why not?
Three days later I left the country to both the horror and support of my parents. My dad paid the ticket, my sax came in tow. I still remember how my heart broke as I walked away from my mothers house but turning back was simply not a thought in my head. This was it. The call to adventure.
Afterword: Firstly, I never advocate nor condemn the use of drugs and although these memories hold a romanticism for me the dire consequences for some of these themes will no doubt be the subject in later posts. What I hope to give is the sense that, via drug use or not, a lesson is still a lesson. Overcoming insecurity in the name of anything is a powerful tool when manifest in an individuals life and for me that one question at a time when I answered it honestly changed my trajectory in the profoundest sense. The smallest of questions but more importantly, its truthful answering provided a key to a door I couldn’t even imagine at the time. All it takes is the slightest nudge and your destination may change by the breadth of continents. And after all. Why not?
Freedom and Modern Musing 