Parable of the Stoner

Follow the thread, mind as fingers feel along a near-Gordian mass of headphone wires:

I speak of that which is not new nor old, but enduring...eternal return...the two fundamental movements: Cyclicality and sexuality, each of which powers the other, such that the collective pound town turns the earth around...To endure in time, any structure must present predictable recurrences...The view from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy...Their way of thinking is basically different from ours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality...The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous...Buried up to the waist then to the chest until finally only a mouth, taken over by a gadget...They can remain in this invisible state for years, only materializing in order to breathe…*

Yes, the old in-out, stretch wires, turn over, rescramble: I speak of cyclicality and sexuality, the predictable recurrences: To endure in time, dead flashes of serene timeless joy, each of which powers the basically different time and sequence and causality: It has been established that atemporal and anonymous, taken over by a gadget in invisible state, only materializing in order to breathe, yes, the old in-out, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality, the old in-out, enduring eternal return not oriented toward sequence from the Land of the Causality, basically different from dead, buried until finally in this atemporal and anonymous invisible state, each of which powers the other, such that the view from the flashes of plagiarism of one author turns the earth around:

I do not claim to be William S. Burroughs any more than Burroughs himself did. “I am HIS and HIS is me...For HIS is the ultimate threat to their parasitic position...HIS position is desperate...Shadows are falling on the Mountain…‘Hurry up, please. It’s time.’”

***

Groom, Texas. March 2018. Semiarid, the midpoint between eastern forests, central plains, and western deserts, an old waypoint for Canadian River wagon caravans, now a particularly desolate stop on the old Route 66. Population 574 by the last census, but I wouldn’t trust it. Our party of four, packed into my Beetle, is the quintessential horror movie group: Two men, two women, and the other guy, Joey, actually had the telescoping coffee cup-bong from Cabin in the Woods. We were doomed from the start.

Groom’s layout does not, at first glance, exhibit any kind of complexity. A grain mill along 66 with its row of silos and indecipherable labyrinth of iron bars and PVC. On the other side of the road a gas station, behind which the 574 alleged inhabitants live in sagging vinyl-sided stilt-houses. In the near distance, next to Interstate 40, a two-hundred-foot white cross towers menacing over the town, the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross arranged around it in detailed sculpture. On the monstrous white crossbar, the town’s motto:

O vos ómnes qui transítis per víam, atténdite et vidéte:

Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.

There is no Christ on the cross, not yet. In the beginning is the Word, and the Word is God.

We stopped at the gas station for water. The clerk was running around the store with a baseball bat, swinging it wildly around his head. He whipped around when we opened the door and fixed us with shocked, bloodshot eyes. “There’s a goddamn pigeon got in here.”

Water in hand, we stood around the car. Ruby blinked sleep from her eyes and chomped the head off a sour gummy octopus, offering the legs to Mack. “Slobber sisters?” Seeing no one around, Joey packed his telescoping bong.

Just as he prepared to light up, a pure-rust flatbed truck skidded around the side of the station and pulled alongside the Bug. A pair of German shepherds with matted fur ran in circles on the bed, and three men, each as rusted-out as the truck, eyed us from the front seat. The driver slurred through his three visible teeth, “Y’all ain’t from around here, are you?”

We didn’t need to answer. His laughter intensified until it became a hacking cough. “Well, if I’s you, I’d get out ‘fore sundown.” He and his silent cohort cackle-hacked away through the vinyl-sides as the dogs slid and crouched, struggling not to fall off into the road. The clerk must have busted out a back window: A crash, then a lone pigeon soared in a great arc and perched above the word “símilis.” I hadn’t noticed it before, but all the station’s front windows were boarded. My eyes had grown so tired by the passage of the road stripes they could scarcely hold more; I struggled to see the distant gaps between window-boards and silently repeated the word “rehabilitation.”

A passing cloud of weed smoke jarred me from my reverie. Attribute to me whatever virtues you will, but I am a paranoiac beneath it all. I turned as a handicapped panopticon, checking and rechecking each road until Ruby caught my shoulder. “It’s fine. This is a ghost town.” She kissed my cheek, a faint whiff of sour octopus, a sleepy grin over her downy cheeks. Behind her, Mack stared with unfocused eyes at the pigeon, biting off octopus legs and tapping her feet with the same metronomic rhythm. She does that when she’s thinking. We’ve seen her spit hexametric epics at the speed of casual speech after a good tapping sesh.

Joey cackled, rocking back and forth on the roof of the car and spitting smoke down onto our heads. “Y’all look crazy. Call me responsible, but I think we should stay here for a bit.”

Only half the sun was visible above the nearby overpass: Ruby, Mack, and I traded anxious looks. “You heard those--”

Precisely on cue the flatbed skidded back around the gas station. This time it didn’t stop but zoomed by us and back into the vinyl-sides, the three guys cackling as their dogs prayed for thumbs.

Joey thumbed toward the truck. “They’re just fucking with us. They know this looks like the opening to a horror movie. This is probably all they can do to pass the time.” Their laughter echoed across the empty landscape. At least I think it did.

I wanted to leave, but Ruby and I hadn’t been together long enough that I felt comfortable looking scared, but nevertheless she would trust my judgement either way. Mack had resumed her metronomic munch, but we all knew she’d follow Joey into the blazing Gomorrah if he giggled first. “What do you suggest we do, then?”

The words ebbed and flowed in grey-teal smoke: “Let’s go check out that cross.”

***

Traditionally, the Stations of the Cross comprise a series of fourteen cross-sections of Jesus’ path to crucifixion:

1. Jesus is condemned
2. Jesus takes up his cross
3. Jesus’ first fall
4. Jesus meets his mother, Mary
5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross
6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face
7. Jesus’ second fall
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem
9. Jesus’ third fall
10. Jesus is disrobed
11. Jesus is nailed
12. Jesus dies
13. Jesus is taken down
14. Jesus is placed in the tomb

We learn from Friar William Saunders that “because of the intrinsic relationship between the passion and death of our Lord with His resurrection, several of the devotional booklets now include a 15th station, which commemorates the Resurrection.” Groom’s set follows this relatively recent development, with an empty stone tomb set at the end of the circular route.

Groom, Texas’ Via Crucis is a circular dirt road with one-way signs stabbed liberally into its side so that all cars that happen upon the road must proceed before the fourteen sculptures and the tomb and must either continue around the circle forever in contemplation or else commit a crime to leave. I have since learned that a local law written in 1954 only demands $7.50 for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, to be paid--I couldn’t make this shit up--in quarters.

By the time we’d bumbled through the maze of shacks to Via Crucis the sun had sunk to crimson-purple mood light, so Joey read to us by his phone’s flashlight from the tourist guide he’d picked up at the gas station. “‘Local legend holds that some citizens with great respect for the law have remained inside the circle forever and eventually were granted by God the privilege of becoming the figures in the fourteen Stations. This is clearly fantasy, but Groomers will maintain that there is no other explanation for the strangely modern clothing on the statues.’ And then, on the next page, holy shit: ‘Law enforcement records show that, since the Cross’ erection, 133,316,666 citations have been written for those who have violated the one-way signs to leave the Via Crucis. Somehow, this number has not changed since 9/11. Groom’s beloved gas station clerk, Tantalus, has informed us that this number is the same as the earliest estimate of Hell’s population.’ This is so tone-deaf. Seriously, ‘the Cross’ erection’?”

No other cars on the road, we meandered slowly from station to station, stopping and getting out of the car from time to time to admire the detail in the sculptures. Dark bronze, they bore a level of intricacy I’d never encountered, every pore and anachronistic fiber distinct. Simon the Cyrene had clumsily trimmed nasal hair. Veronica had torn her skirt on the left side, and tendrils of cotton leaned back away from the hole as though pulled in a westward breeze. Each Jesus bore a markedly different face, and each expressed a qualitatively distinct agony. Joey offered the third fallen Christ his coffee-bong. “Most High, right?” He winked.

By the time we reached the nailing, the sun had sunk below the horizon, and the clouds fizzed out their last violet dregs before fading into the night’s grayscale. These statues were clearly held against their will: Tears streamed down the sob-marred faces of the flanneled centurions, their snapback helmets pulled tight over sweaty bronze curls. Semijokingly I muttered, “I wonder what bet these guys lost.” I distantly imagine that Mack heard me and gave some witty response, but I had fallen elsewhere:

It is an underdiscussed fact that the hypnohighwayed mind is capable of retrieving and synthesizing information at a level of sophistication or egolessness that often seems random and diseased to a normal mind, even that of the same person at a different time. Through my mental haze I recalled a line I had read, that anybody who doesn’t get a hardon at the thought of nailing Jesus is nothing but a disappointed slave. It’s anyone’s guess who wrote it. Raging antitheist or heteroskeptic? Wherefore that “or”? In any case, a sadist, glee at the messenger pigeon’s hazy dólor or its dolorous haze. The question is only of sequence. The dentist’s office situated just outside the entrance to the Via Crucis circle, “Nash Dental,” with its yard full of tastefully groomed willows; another line from deep in memory: “...the past follows from the present and the present from the future”; no one knows the day or the hour, say the prophets, yet Mack is our metronome, leg by leg, the heads spat onto the ground, someday to reach the bellies of whales, but Nineveh was destroyed in 2017, and so they swim in circuits, waiting, waiting, slowly filling with heads, debris…

My eyes bolted to a movement somewhere close; I realized with a stomach twinge of foreboding that I had been holding a centurion’s hammer hand and that I had a half-chub. Joey put his hand on my shoulder. In the clouded darkness I couldn’t make out his face immediately, but his bud announced his presence loud and clear. “All good, man?”

He didn’t wait for me to respond. “We got some new friends.”

Ruby and Mack leaned against the car, chewing octopi with a couple of women in long skirts. One of them laughed a twang like a bucket-bass, and Mack’s foot tapped to an invisible rhythm.

I don’t remember what we talked about. The words turned around the Beetle of their own accord, a relay, laughs and comfortable lazy agreements. I’m sure I slipped into my old Texas accent. Ruby probably mocked it. Joey probably shifted into German more and more as he ripped the bong. That’s what he always does. I couldn’t make this shit up. And Mack probably tapped her foot and said nothing and laughed, and we probably set our conversation unconsciously to her rhythm. The crowd around the car grew as the night wore on. Not much else to do in Groom: Folks hear voices, it’s moths to porch lights.

Here’s where my memory kicks back into earnest gear: We had a good-sized crowd, probably a couple dozen, long-skirted women and flannel-clad good ol’ boys spit tobacco into grimed jars, and Joey regaled them all with some apocrypha about Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king. At some point he had gotten so baked that he switched from German to Swedish, but he doesn’t speak Swedish, so he spoke English at a bounce. Midway through an impressive recitation of the Truce of Altmark in the original Latin, Joey’s performance was interrupted by a loud horn, skid of tires, frantic barking. A viscous call pelted the assembled with its gravel: “Let the games begin.”

The Groomers ran from the car in pandemonium, falling over themselves and scrapping, and eventually formed a military-style line, shoulder to shoulder, at the side of the road nearest the sculptures or, rather--I saw with an idiot shock of re-recognition--nearest the empty concrete circles where the sculptures had stood before nightfall. In front of the line, his hands swinging mechanized flat at his sides, strutted a burly man in tattered jeans who I immediately recognized as the ominous driver at the gas station. His now-bare back bore a cascade of scars, reminiscent of the ancient flagellant sects. He barked to the silent rank, “I ‘preciate y’all waiting, but you know the drill.”

I quickly discerned, as the rank split and formed a series of thirteen files, one in front of each empty circle except that which, earlier, had staged the nailing scene, that the local legend was true: These were the faithful, and they were competing for positions. At the first station a gaggle of men growled sentences at a central figure, who held his meshback hat in front of his crotch in both hands, his head bowed, a thorny crown thrust bloodily onto his balding scalp. At the fourth, a group of women cradled another man, his face caked in dried blood, and each tried to sob more piercingly than the others. One woman’s voice cracked, and the others kicked and shoved her out onto the road. Her skirt torn at the left hip, she rubbed the grit from her bruised arms and stumbled on to station six, pulling a filthy washcloth from her bra.

Two men, each competing for the role of Simon, fought viciously in the thin strip of grass between the street and the pedestal, tearing at each other’s faces with blood-crusted fingernails. One landed a hard, crunching kick to the other’s balls, and with an inhuman squeal he passed out as the victor slung him by the legs into the dirt road. Joey ran to the downed man’s side and slapped him awake, quickly loading a bowl. “Here, man, take this, it’ll help.”

The dolorous took a long pull and slurred through a concussed haze, “My Savior…” Joey laughed, his long beard twitching mirthfully, but on hearing the downed man’s endorsement, a cohort of three rushed in and took Joey under the arms, dragging him to the first circle, where they ripped the crown from their balding Christ and dug it violently into Joey’s brown curls. Ruby, hearing his surprised yelp, ran with her idiosyncratic bouncing stride up the dirt road, broke through the competing judges, and wiped the bright blood from his face with her sweater. The shirtless sergeant sprinted up the road, yelling, “Too early, but I like your spunk, Veronica!” He tossed her over his shoulder and ran her to station six before turning to run back to me.

“I didn’t take y’all for the type, but I’m glad you didn’t take my warning. I’ve never seen folks take over the competition so fast. You better light a fire under your ass, though, if you don’t wanna be leftovers.” He stressed the last word so heavily as to leave no question that “leftovers” was a term loaded by dread and long habit. Before I could open my mouth to question him, he nodded and pointed with a gnarled hand to the formerly empty nailing scene.

Though my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could hardly see the chaos for its miasma of dust. In bits and concealed pieces I glimpsed each of those I had seen ousted from the other stations, whirling in mayhem of punches, kicks, and bites. The driver explained, “First one to fall three times has to be crucified, but if one of them manages to stay upright, he gets to skip to the fifteenth station and walk out of the empty tomb. That’s what these guys train for every night: That’s the Second Coming.” The guy Joey had replaced skidded out into the road and barely caught himself on an outstretched hand with a sickening crack as one of his fingers snapped. “There’s the key to this cryptogram, if you’re curious,” the driver slurred on, his tongue protruding through the yawning abysses between his teeth. “It’s been my plan since I built this place. I’m grooming these folks for the apocalypse.” I gaped. “Don’t hate me ‘cause I love puns. Anyway, your buds’re doing great. Cutie’s already starting to bronze.”

At the sixth station Ruby vacillated wildly between struggling to move her hardening legs and tenderly wiping the face of the redneck Son of God. She caught my eye with a look of turbulent panic.

I ran to her side, the driver at my heels, and with a grating heave pulled her up onto my back and took off toward Joey as a chorus of voices barked after us, “Trust me, y’all don’t want to leave. Out there it’s Hell for you now, it’s weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In the distance I caught sight of the dentist’s office and its thicket of willows and groaned.

Both my hands occupied, the driver gaining ground quick, I shoved Joey from his pedestal with my shoulder and tossed Ruby out across the grass as the driver fell on me with a blind flurry of punches. “Squeal like a pig, demon!” I caught one across the forehead and felt a warm gush over my right eye, vision fade to middle-gray as I felt his weight lifted off me.

I was sure I had gone unconscious and would awaken nailed to a cross, but as the scene fizzled back into focus I saw Ruby’s outstretched hand. On the ground next to me the driver lay with Joey’s bong stem in his temple, gushing clear fluid like a hellish fountain cherub’s penis. “I’ll pick up another one in New Mexico. Come on, man.”

As they helped me up, a pigeon landed on the driver’s shoulder and, after drinking from his gushing ear, cried into the wound, which healed almost instantly, spitting Joey’s stem out onto the grass. The driver, somehow revived, with barely a scar, shouted, “Again!” and didn’t pursue us but, rather, plunged the stem back into his head and crumpled forward onto the grass with a crackling thud. We heard several iterations of this as we hobbled away.

My arm over Ruby’s shoulder, we arrived at the Beetle to see Mack in the same spot as before, her feet, for the first time, still. Joey jumped in the driver’s seat, high as a kite but confident, and Ruby pulled me into the back seat, patting my forehead with her sweater.

Nothing changed as Joey contradicted the one-way and zipped through Hell back toward I-40. After some time on the road Mack clarified to us, “Poor dumb dummies. They weren’t fucking with us. God is fucking with them.”

My usual cocking eyebrow out of commission, Ruby took over and cocked her eyebrow quizzically at Mack, who expanded, “The apocalypse already happened. Dummies say they’re waiting for the Second Coming, but Jesus was born, then he resurrected: One, two. The prophecy says that ‘no one knows the day or the hour’ when he’ll come again because they can’t know it; they can only remember it. A centrifuge of nostalgia just spun us out into its Hell, the present. Only thing I can’t tap out is why God goes along with it: Why bronze ‘em every night? Oh, and why the puns?”

None of us could think of an answer. Somehow Joey had fashioned a new bong out of a phone charger, a sticky note, and a Coors can while simultaneously driving and navigating, and after a long rip he smogged Mack with the best solution he could muster: “Who gives a shit? We’re out.”

*Cut-up: G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus”; William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands and “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar”; Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; Mladen Dolar, “Nothing Has Changed.