No. 8

Halloween, Hendrix and the hordes of hell

I spent nearly 4 years studying math and physics in college, ostensibly as a means of understanding Life, the Universe and Everything. A lofty goal, ridiculous in hindsight, but it was fun while it lasted, and I met some really interesting people. Math departments have a kind of rock’n roll flavor to them at times, a small cohort of folks engaged in weird and cryptic activities misunderstood but respected by outsiders. Our math crew would hang out in bars and talk shop, get drunk, stumble home, all the while thinking we had a leg up on understanding certain aspects of reality. At the time I hadn’t yet gotten the memo that the ‘tool’ I was using to wrap my head around number theory, linear transformations and eigenvalues, i.e. consciousness, was a complete and utter black box to me. My own motivations and psychic conditioning were absolutely hidden. In my experience, scientific practitioners tend to look at the world through a relatively cloudy prism most of the time, a prism largely chiseled by american protestant ideals over the last hundred and fifty years or so. Having drank the materialist Kool-Aid I had yet to wake up.

So, it was Halloween, 1999, I was supposed to be studying for an introductory quantum mechanics exam, my friends and roommate had split to parties or back alleys, and I was in the apartment, a dingy one-bedroom old Portland Section 8 joint with moldy carpet, in which I slept next to the back sliding door in the living room. In the dim light of our kitchen I hunched over a textbook, my mind wandering, sweat creeping out on my forehead. I went in the living room and lay down; I was beginning to feel ill, truly ill, my body felt weak and heavy. A gaggle of street ghosts had gathered beneath our 2nd floor balcony to get pissed and revel in all hallows eve, I could hear them binging and yelling.

As my fever worsened, I stumbled into the bathroom wrapped in a blanket, my face in the mirror pulsing with uncanny energies, translucent, losing solidity. Peering into my own eyes they seemed to flit, to grow hazy. I slid down onto the cool tiles, my head sunk, eyes closed, all the algorithms and equations of the past year flooded my head, creeping and slinking sideways. Suddenly there was banging at the front door. Startled, I quickly crawled army style out into the hallway and listened. Silence. Who’s there? the sun had gone down, and the apartment was dark, only the lamp in the kitchen shone feebly. I crawled to the front door, pressed my ear against it and listened. Nothing. Hello? I spoke. Again, several hard knocks on the door. Again, startled and feverish I scuttled into the living room wrapped in my blanket and grabbed a chair and quickly wedged it against the door. Go away, I said.

No doubt, a gang of grade school trick-or-treaters stood mystified at the door, waiting for candy, hoping for something as weighty as a Mr. Goodbar, in their masks, painted faces and fake fangs etc. A part of my brain must have registered that it was Halloween, but not the part I was operating on at the moment.

I drug the recliner from the living room and shoved it against the door, stacked the coffee table on top and sank to the carpet. I was burning up, so I went out on the back balcony, a grimy 2x6 plank with railing that overlooked 34th Street. The bums were living it up in the bushes below, a transistor radio blaring Jimi Hendrix, it all felt sinister, and my mind was transported back to another time when Hendrix had appeared at a moment when I was, if not at death’s door, then at least within spitting distance of it. Age 16, on Mount Bachelor, a semi-deceased volcano in eastern OR, I’d gone up with a small group of guys from church youth group, to ride mountain bikes. Our youth pastor, a southern Cal transplant who knew as much about the woods as a rusty roller-skate, had the brilliant idea of biking around the volcano. It was early summer, and the day was hot. We got ten miles into the ride and the trail petered out. Let’s keep going…

It’s funny, when the sun goes down in the high desert and the temp drops thirty degrees in two hours and you have no food and you’ve had to ditch your bike in order to traverse large swaths of razor-sharp lava rock and your youth pastor who’s supposed to be the adult is near tears, and your body temp is dropping and you’re a skinny 16 year old thinking he might die out here and as your about to attempt to bury yourself in dirt to stay warm and then you hear this eerie sound coming through the trees, you follow it…

Those mystical tones, the Stratocaster worn upside down. Hendrix leads you through the dark woods, your mind feverish, in shambles. Your buddy has gone ahead to see if there’s a trail anywhere or a road or anything. You run into him and he’s like, do you hear it? What is that? Sounds like the screaming of angels…Dreamlike, uncanny. And you stumble through the brush and trees towards a steadily growing light source which turns out to be a trio of backwoods revelers, drunk and swaggering around a campfire, listening to a tape deck and you lay on your stomach watching from beyond the fire light, trying to determine if these are the good kind of rednecks or the bad, and finally in frigid desperation you and your friends get up and teeter into their camp realizing that these old boys did not drive here but rowed here in rickety canoes that sit nearby on the shore of a mountain lake.

But so, as I lay on the balcony smelling the black mold and wet leaves, hearing Jimi through the fog of my fevered brain I once again heard from beyond the living room a heavy thud on the door, three thuds in fact. Which I knew from my listening of Coast to Coast with Art Bell was the exact number of knocks a demon will use on the other side of a wall in a spirit infested house to get your attention… oh shit. I jumped up and started stacking whatever furniture I could find in front of that door. The rest is a blur and I believe I passed out somewhere between the kitchen and the bathroom. Next morning the fever broke, I resolved to drop out of college, to begin playing music for real, to put those delusions of mathematical grandeur behind me.

The rednecks turned out to be drunk but kind and realizing we were on our last legs, fed us, tucked us into three canoes and commenced to row us across several miles of lake in the dead of night. Each man stood a plank at the back of his canoe and rowed with such drunken ferocity it felt like we were racing against some kind of clock, like the hordes of hell were at our backs, but our pilots only laughed and teetered and continued to row.