Coyopa :: Lightning in the Blood » Jack Swift

Jack Swift :: Enter Jo-Ab

Tom — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:15:34 +0000

The green bus pulled around the corner, squealing on its wheels like a Formula One courgette on steroids. To the attentive eye, it was visibly pulsating with the effort of holding its psychedelic cargo from bursting out onto the street, threatening to detonate like a fractal explosion in a spiral warehouse and cover the city in squirming astral day-glow debris. It spluttered to a stop outside a shoe shop and disgorged a young man with (possibly prehensile) dreadlocks, an incredible tan, and bright green dungarees held together with yellow silk scarves. His name was Job, but he pronounced it Jo-Ab, because he liked the sound of it better that way, how it rolled out longer, the way people thought he’d said Joanne. Also, he fancied himself to be the spiritual descendant, he would say, of both Jonah and Ahab – he also said they both had problems with Whales, and though he didn’t have any problem at all with Whales the aquatic mammals, Wales the country kept disgorging him, usually around the solstice, and usually dressed as a kind of ultraviolet Merlin, always at least a couple of card decks short of his full mental quota. On such surveys as he had occasion to fill in over the years, Jo-Ab usually called himself a Pagan, but only because its opportunities for truly creative fancy dress were wider than Zen Buddhism or Islam.
He scratched his dreadlocks with his forefinger, looked around him and whistled. A closer observer could have heard him append a ‘sheeee-yit’ to the end of the whistle, as if he were seeing the street for the first time at the distant end of a vast bus-journey, and in many senses it was true.
He banged the side of the bus gently whilst watching a school of traffic-wardens moving towards him from their separate stations around the street, their eyes bulging with malevolence and barely-suppressed rage at the world in general and at this psychedelic carbuncle in particular.
“Just unloading, man,” Jo-Ab said to the first of them, but it wasn’t enough to prevent it launching into its tirade of commands, a string of sounds meaningless to Jo-Ab, as he had, through long practice and dedication, learned to filter them completely from his awareness. Not caring what traffic-wardens said was the only way to not get caught in their terrifyingly strange consciousness, he had decided; the alternative was to be sucked into their power games and become only further enmeshed in horrific paradigms of fear and control that were best left alone. Why let yourself go on a bad trip if you know how to avoid it, after all? Why let the ball of goodness drop, Jo-Ab would argue.
The traffic-warden barked more sounds of mean-ness and insecurity at him, and waved a quivering finger at some sign that, to Jo-Ab at least, was covered in the arcane symbols of a religion to whose beliefs he had never subscribed and whose dogmas he was now less than interested in. Jo-Ab only nodded and wondered where he could get some frozen yoghurt. That was it. Blackberry frozen yoghurt, now there was a thing.
“Can’t you read?” frothed the warden, and this was enough to pick Jo-Ab up out of his yoghurt trance.
“Read?” he said, surprised to be drawn back into the world of communication. “Sure. Various forms of propaganda, lies, revelations and entertainment, I guess. I can write a little too – used to make some kind of a living scratching verses from the Tao Te Ching onto hemp seeds for the tourists in Glastonbury, but the gig’s long gone now, my friend and I really wouldn’t advise getting involved. Why? You like books, you get much of a chance to read these days, friend? I like comics. Corto Maltese best of all, but horses for courses and all that. What’s your favourite book? Have you read ‘The Silmarillion?’ You’d love it, man. Or, maybe some Tom Robbins would be more your cup of tea. No, man, Jim Dodge, that’s it!!”
He stopped and squinted down the tunnel that separated the two men and saw only the red-faced anger and high blood pressure of the traffic-warden’s reality. The sadness-layer of the world attempted to drift over him like a greasy duvet of futility, but was deflected by a force-field of joy so dense and impenetrable that the sadness and desperation of humanity roused itself, just for an instant, and a glow of possibility spread out from where he stood. It warmed the world sufficiently for a young woman in a nearby tenement block, contemplating ending her own life, to snap out of the six-month depression she had been wearing, pick up her bag and leave the gloomy flat, her boyfriend and a hundred empty bottles of Jack Daniels and twenty overflowing ashtrays forever. She paused only to take a faded yellow umbrella from the top of a cupboard in the hall, because it had always reminded her of buttercups and was the last link to something good in her life that hadn’t been sold, soiled or soured by the dead-end relationships she had allowed herself to fester within. She left the flat with a spring in her step that she could not explain, and went on to manifest a shining spirit in the world that had lain dormant in her since childhood, and inspired a host of others to step outside their front doors. A pretty good break, all in all.
Jo-Ab was not aware of the effect the transaction with the traffic-warden was having on the world around him. Lacking any coherent response from his co-conversationalist, his thoughts quickly returned to yoghurt and saved him from the further frustrations of the traffic-warden’s world. It might not have to be Blackberry, but something yoghurt-based for sure. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had frozen yoghurt. He wondered if they had any fruit left in the bus. Maybe Avi had eaten it all. Maybe they’d never had any fruit – the forest had been a long time ago and the gifts they’d collected had always had a fairly nebulous quality to them. What a forest though!! The dryads had surely danced their natural-fibre socks off that night! It made him smile to remember, a smile that penetrated the traffic-warden’s defences and almost made it as far as his heart before he realised what was going on and clamped down the control routines to stop any unpredictable outbreak of inner warmth.
By now a phalanx of other wardens had joined their companion. Fellow foot-soldiers in the War On Disorder, they were comparing their watches and pointing at signs, shaking their heads and punching the consoles of their ticket-machines as if they were texting Satan. A degree of general shouting was growing, and Jo-Ab was wearying of it. The drive had been long and he had hoped for a more auspicious arrival, but he knew that unexpected wheels were turning and did not fret overmuch about their activity, merely wished for some quiet. He fished around in the numerous pockets of his dungarees until he found materials enough for a baggy roll-up, and began toning a mantra of universal salvation that he’d learned from a Ladakhi girlfriend some years ago. Little by little, as the ranting raged on, he felt himself lifted and lifted and lifted until he could feel the divinity of himself, the wardens, the situation and generally everything around. He beamed at the messengers of the Corporation and saw their childlike beauty, and they charged him £40, £80 if he didn’t pay within two weeks. Then, beautifully, orchestrated by the mysterious divine, they went away, shouting at each other and complaining about their uncomfortable shoes. Perfection, he thought, and lit the roll-up. Banging with the palm of his hand on the side of the van, he yelled,
“All clear – the raiding party tried to steal some money, but my virginity and self-respect are intact. Who’s for frozen yoghurt?”

* * *

Jo-Ab was a bodhisattva – a soul that has been back to the source, dwelt with it and decided to get another body together to come and help the rest of us bumbling fools find our way out of the forest. Of course, there’s really only one bodhisattva, one soul and one tree in the forest, which is all God, but that doesn’t make for much of a narrative, so we have to bring it down to the next level, at least, where time causes reality-diffraction into ‘US’ instead of ‘ONE’ (or ‘NONE’ if that’s the way you prefer to butter your metaphysical toast), you and I, thou and thee, this and that, and the whole 10000 piece eclectic jazz orchestra we call reality. Kabang – suddenly there are komodo dragons and pot noodles, flamingos and AK-47s, crawling King Snakes, pin-striped stockbrokers and mobile phones – less serene than the One, but with a cast of gazillions and an unlimited expense account, flamboyance and colourful chaos are bound to result. Goodbye celestial harmonics and the ecstasy of Union, hello Traffic Wardens and the sweet smell of Spring coming up to hump your leg with its vast, multicoloured schlong made of mud, berries and the wet dreams of hibernating badgers. Welcome back to the Universe, Jo-Ab.
Sometimes they are called ‘saints’ but really bodhisattvas have simply learned enough to escape the gravity-field of ignorance and dwell in their divinity enough to lift us up from our sleep. I believe that they are everywhere around us, working their mysterious magic, conscious or not, but I don’t know for sure – all I know is that Jo-Ab came back from the Source and didn’t realise it for a while, but that by the time we met, he was pretty relaxed about it all.

In Asia, in the times when you couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over the prostrate body of one saint or another, drunk on Holy inspiration (or Holy wine), and indeed when Jesus Christ himself burst back through the membrane in Bethlehem or thereabouts, the imminent arrival of a mercy-trip messenger to this earthly plane was heralded with signs and portents enough to wake even the most apathetic soul from their spiritual siesta, the ringing of bells and whistles that stopped the forgetful and told them ‘LISTEN UP,’ but when Jo-Ab was conceived, his mother was visited only by the archangels of heartburn, morning sickness and daytime television.
When an old woman appeared at her door, telling her that the restless foetus in her womb was a holy man come down to Earth to spread a message of love and universal salvation, Moira, mother of Jo-Ab, answered that she didn’t want any cloths pegs, thanks, and closed the door of the humble (possibly squalid and certainly filthy) council house that was destined to be the birthplace of this unique soul. West Midlands General Hospital would have claimed that honour if, by the time the sacred moment arrived some eight-and-a-half months later, the telephone hadn’t been cut off and had not Moira insisted on watching the end of Crossroads before calling for help.
Aquarius, with the Universe rising and a full moon fever from the day he was born, Jo-Ab’s first words were ‘Guru,’ which, of course, coming from the mouth of a six-month old baby, however angel-eyed, were totally and forgivably misunderstood by Moira as a heartfelt plea for another rusk, which was the last thing that the child wanted. What he would have said, if his voice had not been handicapped by the strange and as-yet-unformed body he now found himself trapped within, would have been “fetch me my robes and my staff – I must leave this place, good people, to visit my most holy teacher, high in the snowy Himalaya where my heart longs to be…”
Perhaps it was for the best. Jo-Ab’s father, Jo, having lost his job at the Walsall MFI warehouse, was more attentive to his young sons telepathic pleas and understood that something was going on that wasn’t written in the child-rearing books he’d borrowed from the library the week before, but everyone knew that Joe had done way too much acid in the sixties, and his late-night wine-fuelled musings on the nature of his rapidly eccentrifying son were greeted with near-universal derision or with a patronising good-humour saved for new fathers and Alzheimer-afflicted uncles and aunts. Besides, ‘Jakey’ Jo, as his friends endearingly called him, was no stranger to outlandish speculation and even claimed that he’d seen an angel talking to Moira one night when the home-grown had just been harvested. She claimed to not remember a thing, which was true and not entirely surprising, as those were heavy Bacardi-and-coke days, but even in the depths of her housing-estate slumber she was quickly realising that Jo-Ab was not like other boys, a fact that caused her some immediate embarrassment and a deep, warm pride that she kept hidden deep within until the day he left home.
Joe tried to feed his son’s growing appetite for esoteric knowledge as best he could, mainly through a heady diet of cheap science-fiction paperbacks and frequent visits to such scarce sites of spiritual interest that he could find nearby in the RAC Atlas of the Midlands. If Jo-Ab was impatient, he kept it under wraps for his father’s sake, and the two of them scoured the area in Joe’s Mini Cooper van until one fateful summer day when Joe and Jo-Ab arrived, at the end of a rare excursion beyond the confines of the Black Country, at the ruins they call these days ‘Stonehenge.’
It had been twenty years or more since Joe had set foot in the stone circle – more adventurous friends had taken him there one solstice night and he’d had sex on one of the stones with a white witch from Plymouth called Sylvia. Returning to the stones was thus an emotional affair from him, and made more so by the fact that his 12 year old son chose that hour to tell him who he really was.

* * *

The conversation began simply enough…
“Dad…”
“Yes, son…”
The two of them were sharing a thermos of sugary tea a few hundred yards from the ancient site, having spent the afternoon mostly in companionable silence, walking round the site and thinking their own thoughts. Joe had a lot to ponder, coming back here after all those years. He had found a little trio of magic mushrooms growing off the path and was enjoying the slight crackle of magic they were making in him, but the wave of emotion was stronger than the mushrooms’ urge to dance, and he sat for a long while sighing deeply on one stone in particular, smoking a baggy roll-up and looking out over the Wiltshire countryside, oblivious to the roar of traffic from the main road. Jo-Ab’s thoughts were of a less sensual nature, if no less nostalgic, in their way. He was fascinated, and the buzz of electricity at the place was so strong that there was no sign of the asthma that had troubled him for the last five years. By the time they came back together, he had remembered a lot about this place, and about himself, and though he could see that Joe was in a happy state of personal time-travel and reminiscence, it was time to put his cards on the table. The cards were the Fool, the High Priest and the Universe, and the table was a slab of stone as old as the memory of the divine, but it was time, nonetheless. As he sat in meditation, feeling the roar and rush of the ley-lines and the whispers of the ancestors that had gathered in the air around him, Jo-Ab was, for the first time in his life, uncertain how to proceed.
Terrence McKenna has said ‘if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed…’ and this was the problem now facing Jo-Ab. What to say to his dad so that it would be understood?

Imagine, a 12 year old boy says to his father:
“Dad… this body you see, it is not my true body – my true body is made of light, because I am a perfected being. Thanks for the packed lunches and the upbringing and all, but I’m off now. Ta-ra.”
Or perhaps:
“Dad… Let’s cut the crap – you know I’m an incarnation of the Light and so do I. Send my love to mum – I’m off to save the world…”
Or even:
“Dad… I hate to tell you, but you are not my father, and Moira is not my mother. My true father is Consciousness and my true mother is Energy. I have come for my birthright. It is time…”

Any way he thought of it, it just didn’t seem fair – after all, for all Joe’s human faults, he was a good-hearted man, a rare and special good-hearted man, in fact, whose life hadn’t gone quite as he had expected, and the very last thing Jo-Ab wanted to do was hurt him any more than he knew he had to.
Once, years ago at his birthday party, when Aunty Doreen had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d looked her in the eye and said ‘God,’ and she had thought that he was a horrible little boy who wanted to rule the world. Now she didn’t even send Christmas cards, and Jo-Ab had learned the most difficult lesson there – that you have to make them understand you. There was still so much to learn in dealing with people – it wasn’t enough to just tell them the truth, you had to know the way to tell it. If life is like a joke in that sense, then perhaps it’s also a matter of the…
(Timing.)

So, when he said “Dad…” that afternoon, he was as nervous as he had ever been. More nervous than the first time he turned water into Fanta Orange; more nervous than the first time he had, by accident, brought one of the gerbils back from the dead; even more nervous than the first sweet kiss with Maria, the pretty Italian girl from number 63. Perhaps, although it was a close call with that one. This was different, though.
But he started at the beginning, with what he remembered first about this lifetime, and Joe helped him. He was as affected by the magic of the stones as was his son, and although it was painful for him, mostly because it reminded him of how far he’d wandered off his own path, he was waking up to what was really real and what was, as his own Dad would have put it, just stains on the furniture. Once Jo-Ab had started, Joe didn’t interrupt, but he did put his arm round his son as he listened, and when Jo-Ab had told him everything he could, he didn’t rush to speak. He crumbled the last of his special reserve 1976 Lebanese Red into a single-skinner and smoked the whole thing before speaking, and when he did, all he said was, “Fuck me, son. I knew you were a special one n’all, but I’m bloody glad I never really knew. Imagine changing the nappy on a screaming kid when you know it’s a bleedin’ bodhisattva, eh!”
The thought of it tickled his Leb Red reeling mind so much that he couldn’t speak for a further ten minutes, and Jo-Ab spent the time marvelling at humans, marvelling at his earthly father in particular, how much he had under-estimated him. He felt his heart swell and his smile expand, and he thought to himself ‘I could have done this years ago…’ Another lesson for Jo-Ab, and it was the flip side of the lesson about communication – it was that if he spoke his truth, from his heart, without anything in between, chances were that it would speak directly to the heart of his listener. Of course, not everyone’s heart was as open as Joe’s, but it was a lesson nonetheless, and he felt himself accelerating, his life and his destiny making two lines closer to one another with every second.
Once Joe’s laughter had subsided to a few intermittent giggles, he turned to Jo-Ab and looked at his face for a long time. The Leb Red, the tiny Wiltshire mushrooms, the energetic configuration of Stonehenge, and the presence of this holy being next to him, were all serving to lift him to a place he hadn’t known for a long, long time. Not since him and Mad Harry Singh had taken that batch of Sandoz acid at the Sri Chinmoy concert in Wolverhampton back in ’71 and he had seen all the Lights. He too was remembering who he really was, and though the distance between his everyday being and the true Joe was a gulf he was painfully aware of, it was mighty fine just to be close enough for once to at least exchange telephone numbers with his higher self.
“Go for it, son,” he said, when he was able to speak, and then he leaned over and hugged Jo-Ab, and they both cried for a while, tears that didn’t need an explanation or soothing away. ‘My god,’ he thought, afterwards, walking alone back to the van, ‘life’s a peculiar affair, for sure. Who’d have thought it, eh? Little Jo-Ab!’ Never has a father been more proud of his son than in that moment, and it kept him going for half the way home, until he started wondering what to say to Moira, but that’s another story, and Jo-Ab was not there – he was sheltering from a late summer drizzle beneath the mighty stones of the henge, eyes rolled back into his head, listening to a soundtrack of angelic, ancestral singing that only he could hear and possibly, very possibly, hovering several inches off the ground.
Jo-Ab had come into his inheritance.

* * *

Jo-Ab wasn’t entirely sure why he had come in Edinburgh. He was fairly certain that Ozric Tentacles weren’t playing, and reasonably sure that he hadn’t arranged to meet anyone there at any date in the next couple of years, but the van had a mind of her own sometimes – maybe she wanted to feel some cobblestones under her wheels or had a craving for shortbread. Perhaps she was asking to be re-fitted in whatever breed of psychedelic tartan Jo-Ab could muster from one of the New Age shops on the Royal Mile… It seemed unlikely, but Martha had a peculiar sense of humour and he might have to investigate the possibilities. Everything would become clear, that much was certain, and clearer still once he had found the frozen yoghurt.

A tardy gaggle of hitch-hikers emerged from the back of the van, squinting in the daylight. They looked battered and confused and held on to one another with the air of emerging hatchlings. When they had seen the huge green van slow down and weave into the slip road outside the A1 services at Lincoln, they had thought their dreams had come true. A genuine hippy van, driven by a genuinely freakish looking king of hippy-dom, was going to give them a lift. As the van tooted its horn and the be-dreadlocked driver rolled down the window to confirm that yes, Edinburgh was his intended destination, a billowing cloud of ganja smoke had engulfed them, and they thought that they had died and gone to heaven.
Jo-Ab had recently given Martha a new coat of paint for her twentieth birthday, and she was now proudly shining engine green and emblazoned on one side with what Jo-Ab considered to be a fair, if freely-interpreted, modern rendering of Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan Sky God, resplendent in hues that could peel the paint off any less well-dressed vehicles at 100 metres and psychically deflect police vans as they tried to pass or draw level to peer inside. The paint had been mixed at the infamous Potts’ brothers studios in Glastonbury and had quartz and lapis lazuli crystals ground into it. On the other side, the side that the hitch-hikers could see as they picked up their rucksacks and instruments, was a throbbing double spiral of horrific proportions – it turned on itself thirteen multi-coloured times and ended in the centre with a giant Buddha embracing an oak tree. In the branches of the oak tree, a huge floating eye blazed out rays of blue and orange light that reached all the way up onto the roof of the van and down into the wheel arches. Jo-Ab had planned to really go to town on that side of the van and give the roadsides something good to look at, but had held back and settled for the spiral motif instead. A renegade Nepalese lama in Devon had blessed the van with the peacock-feather-and-vase treatment and a somewhat liberal priest from County Donegal had sanctified the interior in exchange for a bottle of Jo-Ab’s renowned Autumn Supernatural psychoactive mead. Martha was in fine form.
As the four hitchhikers climbed into the be-cushioned interior of the van and began asking the usual hitch-hiking questions, some of the more alert of them began to realise that they had climbed into something way beyond their reckoning as they found places to sit amongst the carved wooden mushrooms and silver birch trees that Martha was temporarily housing. Within an hour, they had realised that what they had really wanted was a pretend hippy – instead they had got Jo-Ab and Martha. It was like climbing into the mushroom-infested belly of an entheogenic whale.
They arrived in Edinburgh two weeks later, but by then their notions of Time had suffered extreme and possibly permanent alteration, and they had stopped trying to count the days just after they crossed the Welsh border.
They had never been to Wales and, despite their futile protests that the route from Lincolnshire to Scotland didn’t traditionally bend like an over-worked banana to take in the land of the sleeping dragon, once Jo-Ab had discovered the gap in their experience, he felt it his duty to educate them,. His paternal instinct thus aroused, he also took it upon himself to enlighten them in the ways of the Welsh mountain mushroom, and now Jim, Suzie, Charlie and Avi (whose name had previously been Dick, but who had changed it on the sixth day after the Preseli Mountain Experience in the light of a dream in which he remembered his previous life as a disciple of Bhagwan Rajneesh) emerged from the belly of Martha slowly, touching the ground tentatively as if it might prove to be another illusion in the long string of uncertain realities across which Jo-Ab had pulled them like tentative water-skiers on the multifarious and unplumbable waters of the cosmos.
It had been a great journey, thought Jo-Ab, as he surveyed the wide-eyed children of wonder emerging from the van. Great kids. Good hearts.
“Avi – you want some frozen yoghurt?”
“Only fruit, Jo-Ab. Apples. I like apples. Apples are good.”
“That’s right, Avi – apples are good, but frozen yoghurt is good, too. Maybe you should put some clothes on, eh? We’re back in Babylon now.”
“Clothes, yes.”
“You others? Frozen yoghurt sound good, or are you all on holy diets too?”
There was general agreement that frozen yoghurt was a good thing, and pretty soon the five of them were slowly and happily walking the streets of Edinburgh in search of Ice Cream Eden like explorers of the New World, pausing only and occasionally to rescue Charlie and Suzie from being trapped for too long in the sensory delights of stroking lamp-posts and watching the traffic lights change.

The children also couldn’t remember why they had been coming to Edinburgh, but didn’t seem to mind too much. They too now had faith in the Universe. Jo-Ab stuck around them long enough to make sure that they made themselves comfortable camping in the back garden of a Mind, Body and Spirit centre in the city, where they caused no end of trouble by laughing too much and refusing to dance properly to anyone else’s tune, and then he left them there with the last few bottles of Autumn Supernatural and a book about Tantra.
Another holiday over, Jo-Ab, old son, he thought to himself. It was time to find out what was next and get down to work.

Jack Swift – Kin, 10th June 2009

Tom — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:11:22 +0000

I have surfed the stars and ridden the wind. I have walked between the worlds, been eaten by a bear and swallowed by the turquoise wolf that steps between the molecules of the sky. I have died and been born a thousand times and I know the secret name of the sycamore, the oak and the elderberry. Mine is the hunger of the sacred hermits and the dance of the Eternal Beloved. I AM NOW AND FOREVER; MY NAME IS JACK SWIFT…

I thought my CV was looking pretty good. I had attached one of my favourite sparkling OM stickers to the front page, just below where it said ‘I AM GOD; WHO ARE YOU?’ and arranged my employment history in such a way that the first letters formed an acrostic that read ‘THE ONLY WORK IS LOVE’ if you looked carefully. Upon reflection, I highlighted the acrostic with glitter glue in case it was missed in an employer’s hurry to get to the really good bits, then began shading in my picture of how I viewed the nature of employment in relation to the impending earth changes of 2012. That was on page 8, of 13, to reflect the sacredness of the number in the 13-day cycle of the Mayans and I was agonising over whether to include a short guide to the sacred calendar as an appendix, or if that would render the 13-page symmetry of the thing unstable.

Writing a CV is a tricky thing. How far do you bend the facts of your life to fit the mould of potential employment? How much of the nature of yourself do you include or leave out? I was unclear about such a thing – I’d never had to apply for a job, as they tended to fall on me from a great height, leaving me gasping for air, but now it seemed to be unavoidable. I had read a guide to writing a CV, but it had left me perplexed. It seemed to have been written by aliens, for other aliens, to help them submit their souls to work in the crystal mines of some dark planet, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that kind of job. Still believing that I was destined for greater things, I had taken it upon myself to write the Truth About Jack. I was having difficulty with parts. Date of Birth: ‘today and every day’ seemed honest enough, but I wasn’t sure that it was clear enough. Writing ‘I AM ETERNAL and UNLIMITED by SPACE AND TIME’ beneath it certainly got the point across, but I felt it might be seen as somewhat arrogant and adding ‘Though I am Not Yet Fully Grounded in my Omnipotence, only having received the 1st attunement of Usui Reiki’ was making it cluttered. I considered erasing all the text and filling in each category simply with I AM, but last vestiges of my mortal common sense nudged the suggestion towards me that, though true, God is also in the details. Besides, I AM, yes, but also, in truth, I AM NOT. I was going to have to start adding footnotes, and that was really going to screw with the Mayan symmetries of the thing… Ach – I couldn’t believe that none of this was mentioned in the guidebook. I thumbed through it again, hoping for rescue from having to explain the truth in apparent paradoxes of AM-ness and AM-NOT-ness, but there was nothing there. I was on my own.

I didn’t even want the job. I’d thought I’d wanted it, but writing the CV was taking its toll on my enthusiasm. On the telephone, I’d suggested that I drop by and show them my slide show, but they said they’d only accept a written CV. The ‘I AM JACK’ puppet-show didn’t tickle their fancy either, and I probably should have given up there. Who wants a job, after all, where you can’t perform your history and character to an ambient psychedelic trance soundtrack with shadow-puppets? Well, I did, or had thought I did. Holding the CV in my hands, I wasn’t so sure.
Not everyone wants to work at the crematorium, of course. I figured that the competition would be thin on the ground, perhaps a few goths and the odd thin stranger who had drifted into grave-digging at an early age and was now looking to diversify his portfolio. I wanted to work with fire and ashes and meditate in the charnel grounds, but when I’d asked about them, there had been a silence on the phone.

Charnel grounds, Mr. Swift?
Charnel grounds. Body parts and prowling dogs. The initiatory grounds of saddhus, yes.
Saddos?
No, saddhus. H. U. Two Ds. Saints.
I don’t think we have saints in Mortonhall, Mr. Swift.
You’re wrong, I said. You’re so wrong.

But she remained unconvinced, even when I explained that Jo-Ab, a genuine bodhisattva, lived just around the corner and could pop in at any time to demonstrate any miracle she liked, so long as it involved dreadlocks and turning water into cider. The conversation had wilted somewhat after that and I wished, briefly, that I hadn’t given my name.

When I’d seen the advert in the paper, I had known it was the job for me. Now… Now I was unsure.

I’ve had jobs. I’ve done work, some of it honest and a little of it paid in the shiny tokens of joy that seem so popular here on Earth. I’ve done things I didn’t want to do and I understand that you’ve got to balance the element of earth in the circle of things, but ever since I sawed the caravan in half I haven’t been able to take it as seriously as other people want me to. At the job centre, they’re becoming impatient.

No, Mr. Swift, there have been no vacancies for Holy Men this week. I think you should widen your jobsearch.
Well, I think I shouldn’t. And it’s a trainee position I’m after. If I was already a holy man, I’d hardly be here wasting my time and yours, would I?

Petulance does not help a jobsearch, I’m told. I’ll show them petulance… Well, actually I won’t, because they’ll stop my giro. Once you’re in the system, your balls are theirs, friends. I envied Gola in his treehouse in the woods, and Jo-Ab in his van, following the leylines towards the rainbow’s end.

I resisted the urge to write I WILL NOT BE CHAINED on the CV. I have an attitude problem, I know. The best and worst of us surely do. I flicked through the photographs I was going to attach. Jack lighting a fire; Jack skilfully holding an urn. Jack comforting a bereaved relative. I was pleased with that one, though you could just about tell that the relative was made out of balloons if you looked carefully. Then, Jack covered in ash, sitting amongst the bones of the ancestors… I hadn’t seen anyone doing that at Mortonhall, but figured they probably kept the saddhus in a private area so as not to scare the children. A photo of my special saddhu blanket that I’d got from IKEA; a photo of my trident. My spirits were sinking; they all seemed empty now. I wished I’d taken a photo of Sri doing fire puja – that would have shown them I was serious. The pictures seemed pathetic, truth be told, and I understood then that the CV wasn’t about the job. It wasn’t about showing them how qualified I was or wasn’t to push a rosewood box along a conveyor belt and it wasn’t about trying to explain why I didn’t have any A levels and hadn’t been to school. It was all about the saddhu. Of course they weren’t going to talk about saddhus over the phone. That was the whole point. If I was really a saddhu, would I be trying to convince them that I was one. No. I saw the truth of it now. I took a blank piece of paper and wrote only these words on it:

I AM JACK.
I AM NOT A SADDHU.
BUT I AM KEEN.

I posted the revised CV the next morning, having peeled the stamp off a postcard from Jo-Ab that he had sent from Calanish.

I never heard from Mortonhall crematorium and I wasn’t surprised. I peeked over the wall every so often, and broke in once on the full moon to try and find the saddhus, but they weren’t there. Probably at some big Mela festival down by the mouth of the Forth that no one had told me about, bathing themselves in the sewage outflow and praising MacShiva’s ginger dreads. I sat for a while in the garden of remembrance and tried to remember what I was doing. The question came to me there and then and changed my life:

If I am not a saddhu, who am I?

The answer, of course, was Jack. I had told the truth on my final CV. I am Jack.

I gave the special saddhu blanket to a homeless man, but he gave it back to me because he was allergic to rayon.

I gave away my trident. I don’t think Shiva minded too much — it was made of plastic and briefly delighted a small child in Portobello as her parents gathered her away from me. Shiva’s got enough tridents and the children have few. I want the children to have more tridents. I am Jack. I am not a saddhu.

I got a job in an Italian deli in Newington — I just went in and asked them and they gave it to me and didn’t ask for my CV, which was good, because I fed it to the swans in Holyrood Park. One of them came up to me and said his name was Shiva, but I didn’t believe him, because you never know where you are with a swan. He tried to tell me something about the Himalayas, but I blocked my ears. I’m not going there; I’m just not doing that kind of shit.

I am not a saddhu.

I am Jack.

Jack Swift – Kin, 13th May 2009

Tom — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:19:45 +0000

In which Jack, having fled the city, is reminded of perspective by a skylark and is assailed by visions of Pacha Mama.

____________________________________

In the morning of that night, I woke from a dream. In the dream, I was taking ayahuasca in the jungles of Peru and I’d met Pacha Mama, the great Earth mother. She was huge and kind and smelled of damp earth and told me I should use a revolutionary new hair product that would restore shine and bounce whilst retaining control and I grew suspicious. She said she could offer me a special discount on a bulk purchase and a loyalty card and all the chicks would love me and it turned out she was working for Aveda in the astral plane and I shook her off. Blinked my eyes and she was gone. Flying lizards and rainbow serpents for a few moments, a glimpse of a possible humbleness in the face of eternity, then another Pacha Mama came up, said she was the Real Thing and offered me a drink with dirty leaves in it. Tastes like coca cola, I said, and she said, Nothing but the Real Thing, like I said, kid… It’ll give you superpowers. Get out of here, I said. You’re not the real Pacha Mama, not the genuine article at all, and besides, I’m more of a dandelion and burdock kind of a guy, if you know what I mean. A whole succession of Pacha Mamas, all trying to sell me things in exchange for their magic tricks. Looks like the corporation’s got in there deep. I’m lovin’ it, she tells me. Just do it. Does what it says on the tin… Inspiring capital… Watch out for swine flu… I was expecting something more along the lines of the medicine wheel, the sacred hoop of creation. Turns out it comes in three refreshing new flavours, one of them sugar-free, all fair trade and no bitter after-taste. No more embarrassing moments with the women, it’s claimed. Keeps your gums clean, she says. I’m being spammed in my sleep.

I woke up and forced myself back into the world. It seemed like a more honest place to be, lying out in the may morning with the skylarks exalting in their praise of the world. Didn’t seem like they were struggling to much with complex integrations of the spirit. Simple pleasures of flight and singing, susceptible to dancing mirrors their only downfall…

Dream-remnants were wandering around the nether regions of my brain, trying to interest me in time-shares and subscriptions to glossy magazines about saving the earth. I ignored them. Not interested; do not disturb. Move along now, nothing to see.

The day was glorious. Simple shreds of white cloud high above gave no suggestion that they might turn into thunderous downpours and, though that in itself made me think they might do just that, I allowed myself for a moment to believe that it might remain a sunny day. Such is the earth-element security of Scottish weather. Expect the worst, dress for the deluge. Delight if you are overdressed and then discard everything you can for the brief moments in which the wind isn’t tearing the skin off your bones. I was daydreaming that I was in a country where the sun shone all the time – I’ve heard these places exist somewhere, but that it drives people mad with happiness and they turn to killing one another for the simple relief it affords. Safer to stay in Scotland in the relative certainty of misery. No jihad or holy war could ever really take off here; a sunny day would throw it into chaos. Knights and lords stripping down to their skinny white carcases and drinking buckfast in the blistering brightness. Holy Land? Mine’s a tennents, son. That and the sullen sky do not inspire us to delirious heights of such holy madness – a quick stabbing here and there, nothing fancy, mind; the odd riot if the pubs are closed. When Scotland storms the gates of heaven, it’ll be for the free drinks and a scratch-card…

I remember being young. A snapshot, if you like; a small vignette of Jack-the-lad, before the sorrows… An ascendant youth with his eyes on the stars.

Back then, I once met a man who looked like a monkey, but it turned out to be a trick of the light. I said ‘Are you Hanuman, the monkey-God aspect of service to Rama? Is this a cunning disguise that you’re letting me see through to illuminate my soul?’ He looked at me askance and asked me my name, but I said, ‘no, you first. I want to see what level we’re playing on here…’ Then he asked me where I lived and I told him, ‘in the present moment, friend, the eternal present moment.’ He stole my watch and I took it as a sign that I was on the right track. That’s the wide view for you. Full-throttle illumination and not a toehold on the ground.

Look at me, Mama, i’m flying!

Get down here son; do the washing up!

It doesn’t exist, ma, it doesn’t exist: you’re beautiful. Woah! Watch out for the buzzards, Mama!

Ha. It’s all good, man, it’s all good. Took me a while, but I came down to earth. Fell through, up to my neck – feet really on the ground now, hanging out in the underworld. Baby Yaga cracking my bones ‘til I learned the new script. It’s all going to shit, man, it’s all going to shit. Heavy with soul. An extremist, of sorts, you could say. Took me just as long to clamber out of Hades and curl up in a ball on the Earth and admit I didn’t have a clue. Wrestling with my human-ness, I called it. Father sky, mother Earth, what’s that you say? Walk in balance? Great Mystery? Mystery to me is where my rent’s coming from, man…

Those were the days…

Now I’m all grown up and nowhere to go. That’s the cold steel Zen for you. Now it’s Pacha Mama sponsored by Easyjet and the Pope’s really a lizard. The age of conspiracy theory in full swing. Edinburgh is actually Hgrubnide backwards, see… What the mind does when it doesn’t have anything better to do. Next thing, you’ll be telling me the politicians aren’t to be trusted and there’s something wrong with burning all the oil. Craziness.

Skylark sings its song. Clouds gather in the wide blue sky, hatching schemes of delusional grandeur. I lie on my back, waving my arms in case the aliens are watching – look at me: I’m making angels on the Earth and no one can see. it’s beautiful and tragic and the world keeps turning.

Some day in the end of things, Pacha Mama will come along and take me back to the bosom I was in all along and I’ll meet myself there, try to elbow myself out to make some room and complain about the cramped quarters, the damp earth and the smell of milk. i’m a vegan, i’ll say. Not drinking that. Got any tempeh? Any carob, Pacha Mama? She’ll split my ideologies down the middle and i’ll get the message. Just shut up and drink, Jack.

All her illusion-sisters are trying to sell me their line, trying to get me to be this and that and I can’t take it. Spiritual materialism – all the powers of the universe at your disposal, Jack, just wear this logo in your aura… I see a bright, orange future of gurus sponsored by KFC and Macdonalds. They’re the high-fliers. Here it’ll be Greggs and Lambert and Butler… Mecca Bingo and Somerfield… Buddhas in drag-paint so thick you can’t see whether they’re smiling or crying or both.

So says my bitter and twisted mind, but the skylarks say otherwise. Singing of the beauty of the world, they remind me that the Scotland of my dark perspective is only a passing dream on the face of the world. Look, they sing: the may morning, the bright, clear sun that will not last; the soft, slightly damp grass beneath you, this fertile wonder of green and blue and, yes, somewhat overbearing grey. The hills and the streams know nothing of the city’s madness. The hawthorn is blossoming; cast worries like clothes. I try to tell the skylark that there are two sides to every story, you know, and never a rainbow without rain and all that, but it sings on, defiant, unsponsored, unclaimed by any corporate branding. If I detect a fraction of the Nokia ring-tone in its warble, that’s my problem. My gloomy estimations of the country’s fate don’t stand a chance in the face of such overwhelming cheerfulness.

Slowly, the ground begins to restore me. Dreams are dreams are messages from the unconscious, e-mails in my case, of dubious origin. The Earth beneath me speaks a simpler language. Skylark sings; dandelion glows; stream bubbles. No imitation Pacha Mama can sing that song, only the true mother of the Earth. I feel the grass press against my back and I stop waving my arms at the aliens – they can take care of themselves for the time-being. The hills around me are buzzing with early summer life and my own little life buzzes along with it, singing its mad song of wonder and despair. The city-sickness drips off my bones like coffee into the ground. Something is entering my body from the earth, not only the centipedes and the myriad tiny beetles whose purpose is unknown. Soon enough, it will rain, certainly, but there is the possibility of dancing in the downpour and howling in the wind. I am remembering.

Skylark sings and the clouds that were far apart begin to gather together for the afternoon’s conference of rain. I feel the first specks blown on the delicious, slightly chill wind and smile. Once, I was young and thought I knew the world – the mystery of life could be contained in the circle of my mind. Now, I am older and know less than I did before, but it is a softer knowing; skylark, dandelion, uncertain weather and the annoying beetle in my armpit. I lie on the Earth and breathe in the morning. Heaven above, ground below – it looks like the right way up from here.

Jack Swift – Kin, 8th April 2009

Tom — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:56:06 +0000

In which we rediscover Jack on the streets of Edinburgh. Since we met him last, Sri and the Bear have passed on, and an Angel is haranguing him. Jack, drunk and disgruntled, is not in the mood for Angels, Bears or Dead Gurus.

____________________________________

This is a story about the angel. She came and went quickly, just passing through. There’s a whole lot more to the story, but this is the end of it.

Well, she was seven feet tall and had wings of gold and everything she touched burst into flames, but apart from that she was just a regular girl. Just your average Saturday-night-on-Lothian-Road-cold-kidneys-warm-heart-and-a-bellyful-of-fizzy-blue-vodka-kind-of-a-girl, looking for a good time and the perfect clutch bag. Likes her mobile phone and follows the season’s fashions and gets the high street bargains.
No, that’s a lie, of course, she was nothing like that. She’s not an average kind of an anything. I keep trying to find boxes to put her in. They just melt. They burst into flames, turn into butterflies, armadillos. Don’t box me in, she said. Flames. My house is in ruins. When we met, she said:

do you recognise me? She looms over me, burning, gold, wings and face of fire. So beautiful you want to die and live all at the same time. But, aah, burning…
Oh, I said. I don’t know. Shit. Joan of Arc? Bridgit Bardot? Shiva in drag? Give me a clue, I said. Cary Grant? Abraham? Goliath? You are very tall… She rolled her eyes and I died another death.
Forget it, she said, and I wished I could. Angel comes and takes apart your life, you’re going to know about it, friend. Watch out. Start running. Seven foot tall and everything burns.

She sat in my house burning dust particles with her eyes and then she left and I try to remember how she came to be here and how she left and it’s the same old story — boy meets angel, angel tries to burn boys soul into a recognition of its higher destiny, boy prefers to smoke fags and watch his life go by. Bum zen, I called it. Zen schmem. Or bum schmum, I don’t know. Schmem schmum for all I care.

It goes like this. I’m walking down Princes Street with an angel and ghost of my guru and the ghost of my bear (because Sri died, you see, and so did the bear, but that’s another story) and I’m trying to look inconspicuous. Trying to blend in. Because you have to, don’t you? Or do you? No, I guess not, but I was. Had my fill of being noticed shining too much. Ended up riding a Bear down the A1 with police marksmen shooting at us. No, sir. Instead, I’d taken my place at the table of the crooked, lined myself up at the soup kitchen of the soul to take some of that 21st century snot-green technogak into me, make myself small like a good little fellow. I was practically dragging one foot behind me and drooling and it was working a treat — I was almost invisible. Ancestral memories — been burned too many times, you see. You learn to keep your head down, one life, two lives; before you know it, it’s a habit, then it’s a fucking affliction and then you can’t remember what it feels like to stand up straight. How the Neanderthals are reborn. Take a shining spirit and crush it and crush it and crush it and before you know it, shazam: voila Bonnyrigg; voila Penicuik… Ah, the beauty. ‘Getting cocky, little soul? Haha — there you go: couple of lifetimes in a small ex-mining town in Midlothian. That’ll work that one out of you, you little gobshite… Who’s next? Let’s work on some nuns… Give me my phonebook, Gabriel…’

But, I am walking down Princes’ Street, shuffling, drunk in the afternoon on homebrew and a determination to remain unconscious that is my only friend, with an angel and the ghost of my bear and the ghost of my guru and they’re all looking at me as if I’m mad and I’m playing my part so well that I can’t even make eye-contact with them. The angel was all too much and I couldn’t take any more. Sri and the Bear? I don’t believe in them and it looks like they’re beginning to stop believing in me, and it hurts. I eat another Drifter to try and dull down the memory, try to remember where I hid my hipflask and roll another roll-up.

Jack, they say. I pretend not to notice. Hum a little song. Finished with my woman ‘coz she couldn’t help me with my mind…
Jack, they say again. The bear taps me in the ribs and it’s like being hit by a spanner, like being struck by something that’s been thrown out of a vast organic machine, just for the purpose of striking you. I’d like to fall to the ground, but they’re holding me up, protecting my disguise.
Leave me alone, I say. You’re crowding me. Fuck off. Leave me alone. This always works a trick, as you can imagine. ‘Deranged man castigates invisible foes…’ A bit too convincing, Jack. You can work that trick all day and the people will leave you well alone — only the junkies and the angels can see you at all. I tried to flap my arms like a gull or a heron. I imagined myself to be a magnificent bird trying to take off from some moon-struck Loch, but Sri sat on my head.
Jack! he said. She’s ready for you, Jack.

Now, whenever someone says that kind of thing, you can’t help but pay attention, no matter how determined you thought you were. ‘She’s ready for you…’ Which ‘she’ exactly? The One? Hahahahaha. Been there, still alive, kind of. Well — been there as in ‘passed through briefly and couldn’t stand the intensity.’ Couldn’t stand the love. Kali? Maybe. It usually is. The dark goddess, the black widow in the yew tree? There’s your soul Jack — on the fire. Who’s the Daddy now? Wahaha. Great. My mother? She’d never forgiven me for killing the reverend, though I’d tried to explain about the mushrooms and the aliens a hundred times. My grandmother? The one with the beard and the hobnail boots and the jar of spores that I ate when I was 5. She was gone, gone, gone beyond, over the hills and far away. Far gone and out. Really far. She? Ready for what? Lunch? Children? Hopscotch? Kali hopscotch? Grandma children? Black widow lunch party? None of it looked good. That’s perspective for you. People are strange, when you’re a stranger, but ghosts and angels are even worse, Jim. Didn’t tell us that, did you, you fat drunken demi-shaman.

she? Which she, Sri? I asked. I don’t see the ‘she’ you’re shpeaking of, Sri… So sorry… Sri sells sea-shells, on the seashore, for sure, for sure… He shook his head and rolled his eyes. This seems to happen a lot.
Christ, Jack. You’re unbelievable. ‘Which she?’ You’re a cocksucker. You should be in Peru opening the portal by now — what are you doing here?
Laying low, I said. Getting some R&R, you know. Cocksucker?
R&R? Asks Sri. Reincarnation and renunciation? Sri doesn’t really get R&R the way I like it. Or pretends not to. He’s a tricky bastard, but then dead gurus usually are.
What about you? I say. Shouldn’t you have reincarnated by now? Eh? Shouldn’t some little baby be attaining states of meditative awareness previously unknown and asking for his special bell or something? Why are you still here?
Unfinished business, Jack, he said. Besides, it’s not as simple as that. Get with the plan, Jack.
I was with the plan, I said. I sounded like a petulant toddler. Look what happened. You’re dead, the Bear’s dead. The Mayans are angry and I’m homeless again. Thanks for the plan, Sri. Look at me, Sri — I’m a mess.

And of course, Sri says: no, you’re BEAUTIFUL, Jack…

It was just about then that the angel punched me in the face. Her hand felt like a cattle-brand. A beautiful, perfect cattle-brand in the jaw. I reeled and the Bear blocked me. Beaten up by spirits on Princes Street. Just another day, Jack.

when are you going to stop pretending, Jack? says the angel. When are you going to shake out of this slump — it’s been lifetimes already… Sri’s tried, Bear’s tried, I’ve tried, countless times, countless forms. You’re the biggest arse in all of creation, Jack. Her style is different from Sri’s — bad cop, worse cop. They just enjoy fucking with my head. Really, they do.

You see, it is the same story every time. Jack pretends to be a fool — more evolved forces attempt to rescue me from my idiocy. I am too stubborn for them. If I am god, as they keep claiming, then I shall be the God of Ignorance. The God of Stubbornness and Blind Insistence. The God of Samsara’s Triumph. Suck on that, you holy pains in the ass.

So I looked the angel in the eye and said:

are you talking to me? I think you perhaps have me confused for someone else. I am but a travelling dishwasher — you are evidently mistaken in your appraisal of me. I was very proud of this line, proud of my composure in the face of overwhelming provocation. Man plays poker with angel. Cool-hand Jack, that’s me. I’m a cool fucking customer. Yeah. Cool as a frozen cucumber from outer space, that’s me… Great work, Jack.

I can still see her eyes. Burning, burning, burning fire that passes so quickly and leaves only sadness. The look in every woman’s eyes is an echo of this fire becoming water, as they see the man they love insist on remaining a fool. And that sadness containing the knowledge that something has passed, that something living has become no longer alive, that an opportunity for change is now no more.
I realised it just after she turned away. Just as my stubborn facade played itself out and some fragment of myself saw the game for what it was — just then, just too late, just a perfect moment too late to retrieve what can no longer be retrieved. Words cannot do it. It is the ‘sorry’ after the blow has landed, the apology that does nothing to balm the wound. War reparations; pretty plaques to holocausts. She had turned away and a door that had been standing open waiting for me swung closed. I looked at the bear and the bear turned away. I looked at Sri and the old dead guru turned away too.
Sometimes you’re just alone. Sometimes you’re just a useless idiot in a sea of other idiots, thrashing the water so that none of us can see we’re drowning. I wanted to die. It had been Her after all; it had been the ‘She’ I was waiting for… But what if the angel comes and you’re not ready? What if the door is open, but you can’t find your sandals? What if the door is open, but you’re in the other room, watching snooker. Or you’re trapped in the bathroom by a panther? What then, my friend? It doesn’t add up.
I don’t know. Angels, bears, dead gurus and lost sandals. Too much. I walked away down Princes Street and left the Bear and Sri to find their own way home.

Bum Zen — that’s the problem. Shit happens again and again and you’re too intent on remaining in Bum Zen to catch the wave. Today, Bum Zen — tomorrow, shining eyes clarity and the cosmic enema that is purity.

I threw my hipflask off North Bridge and stubbed out my cigarette. The hipflask ricocheted off a statue and struck a passing ambulance and two environmental wardens began to run towards me with their notebooks. In the distance, I saw the Bear and Sri laughing, and as the police sirens began to approach, I took to my heels, heading away from the madness of the city and into the sanity of the green hills beyond.

Jack Swift – Bob Mullet, retired guru (Kin, 2003?)

Tom — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:50:45 +0000

In which Jack hitch-hikes up the East coast of Britain and encounters the denizens of the road, only to become lost in the Services just outside Newcastle

__________________________________

Hitchhiking is sometimes a joy, and sometimes it is hell. When it is a joy, you can do nothing save simply give thanks. When it is hell, there is nothing that you can do except pray. I should have prayed harder, much harder.

I passed half the day in the pleasant company of psychotic, amphetamine-stoked van drivers in whose vehicles I clang desperately onto the dashboard, begging them to slow down or at least look at the road while they told me the stories of their lives and lost loves, and the other half with doddering farmers who would take me five miles along the road and then leave me in such desolate places that the few cars which did pass me slowed down to get a good look at the lost fool that was trying to hitch a lift there before speeding up again, their drivers safe in the knowledge that now they really had seen everything there is to see. I spied a couple of the passengers taking photographs as they crawled past, ignoring my pleas for help. I am a good man. I try my best, but at the time, I cursed them one and all and hoped that they would burn in hell forever, waiting in the inferno for a lift that would almost, but never quite come…

In the end, I managed to get one apparently promising lift with a middle-aged vacuum-cleaner salesman, and he took me a hundred miles or so in his immaculate Vauxhall before suggesting that I could spend the night with him and then go on my way in the morning ten pounds richer, if I ‘knew what he meant’. The offer did not appeal, and so it was that I found myself climbing quickly and quietly out of his car when he stopped for petrol and breath-freshener at the Washington services, just south of Newcastle, as the dwindling afternoon threatened to become evening.

Washington is the place where hitchhiking stops working and space seems to contract to one single, useless point of impossibility. It is to hitchhiking what the Sargasso Sea was to sailing ships: a becalmed, stagnant area where nothing happens except by sheer effort of patience bordering on the realms of an ascetic discipline — patience and the will of the Gods. If you have hitchhiked up the east coast of the United Kingdom and never been stuck at Washington, your time will come. I had hitchhiked the stretch of road several times without giving the Washington services more than a passing glance of curiosity and horror as I passed, and now, for certain, my time had arrived.

I had been in the service station at Washington for almost ten hours when I met Bob. After the fifth hour there I had abandoned any hope of catching a ride and had retreated to the dubious sanctity of the service station complex that was to become my home for the seemingly-eternal night, and by the seventh hour I had passed into a state of near-exaltation at the strangeness all around me, but I had known that it couldn’t last. The eighth and ninth hours had each lasted approximately a month. They were heaven itself compared to the tenth.

The carpet was beginning to burn fractal-shaped motifs into my retinas and my forehead was sticky and slightly bruised from where I had leaned it, tying to sleep, on the soiled Formica tables. Through the night, a succession of bewilderingly lost and peculiar souls had visited and tried to talk to me. Several of them had tried to sell me things of varying legality. A few had been wanting to buy things that I did not have, or did not wish to offer for sale, and a couple of girls had filmed me with their camcorder. They were staggeringly drunk, and said that they came out to the services once a week or so, to film the life that passed there. Stranger still, their father drove them there and back again each week. When I looked at him, he wasn’t giving anything away, but seemed content or resigned enough, smoking a cigarette and reading the Sun while his teenage daughters reeled about the café, bouncing off the tables and recording the strange stories of Washington at midnight. After they left, it was quiet for a long time, very quiet, until a carload of young Orthodox Jews arrived and sat at the table next to me, but wouldn’t make eye contact for the hour that they stayed. They left as unknown as they came and I thought how sad that was. Their lives were kept in a secret box. I wondered who, if anyone, saw inside the box.

Bob did not keep his life in a secret box. He kept it on display, like a head wound.

Bob was a perfect creature of that tenth, terrible hour in the Washington services. I was staring at a newspaper, but had passed long beyond reading. The little creatures of tiny text were jumping up and down and vibrating, misspelling themselves and creating havoc with my brain. Every line of news had become a cryptic crossword clue that I had no hope of solving and when I looked at my hands holding the newspaper, they were barely my hands at all, simply pale lifeless things on the end of my arms. I kept having to jerk them around to prove to myself that they really were my hands at all. Washington had got me good.

Bob sat down heavily in the chair opposite me and cleared his throat with a noise that sounded like it might have half a lung attached to the end of it. He put his decrepit Adidas bag on the table in front of him, fished out a bottle of beer and a packet of cigarettes, and leaned back into his chair, one knee jigging up and down as if he was a speeding munchkin operating a tiny, tiny sewing machine. He looked across the table at me with sad, alcohol-bruised eyes and took a loud suck from his bottle of Bud, looked around once, then leaned across the table to tell me his Secret.

“You know what, mate?” he said. “I used to be a Guru,” He paused for dramatic effect, but it was sadly lost on me as I tried to focus my stinging eyes on him. “Robes,” he continued, “Robes, disciples, Rolls Royce’s and that.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and lit a Regal King Size, inhaling through clenched teeth and exhaling in a wheezing cloud that hung over the table, almost completely obscuring him from view, before it drifted off to harass an elderly American couple at the next table. They looked at us forlornly through the smog and I grinned helplessly at them as they reached for their inhalers. What were they doing here at this hour? Washington must have caught them somehow in its gravitational field — perhaps they had been here for months.

Bob leaned towards me and wheezed in my face.

“Mantras and that.” He winked and I blinked.

“Mantras?”

“Magic words.” He rolled his eyes. They looked like two hard-boiled eggs spinning down a long, wide tube to nowhere. He waved his hands and winked some more at me. “Spells, if you like.” His eyes drifted away to the end of that long narrow tube and he shaped the end of his cigarette against the edge of the tinfoil ashtray. “Fucking spells, alright.”

He looked up at me again with a frightening intensity that made my head jerk back away from him.

“Now look at me. Traffic Warden. Parking Attendant. Christ! I mean, I try and all, but it’s hard — it’s fucking hard, alright. You try believing you’re an incarnation of the Light when you slap a £45 ticket on a Morris Minor because the Disabled sticker’s out of date. You try seeing the Pure View when you’re standing at the meter waiting for the last ten seconds to run out so you can get your commission.” He shook his head.

I thought he was going to cry, and I wanted to reach out to him, but he lurched back into consciousness of some kind, stabbing his finger into his chest.

“I could have been a saint, me. I could have been a Holy Fool, a genuine I am Nobody, mate. When it came to speaking in tongues — no contest. Manifesting sweets… Pah! Listen — I taught Sai Baba everything he knows. The gall of it!”

“Hold on.” This was going too fast for me. “You’re saying that you taught Sai Baba miracles?”

“Miracles schmiracles. Who needs miracles when you’ve got big sleeves and an Afro? Sweets! I used to manifest pies.” He looked at his hands as if they were broken, useless things. He shook them limply at me, but there were no sparks, no sweets, and no pies. “Shit. I used to be Sri Mahavajra, revered manifestation of Shiva. Garlands, sandalwood paste, dancing all afternoon, pretty American anthropologists and all the mangoes you can eat. Now? Now I’m just Bob Mullet from Romford.” He sagged again like a punctured puffball.

“There’s nothing wrong with Romford,” I ventured, hoping to soothe him out of the uniquely bizarre trough of depression into which he was sliding. He looked up at me with something approaching hatred, but it was truly desperation — even I could tell that.

“Have you ever been to Romford, mate?”

“Er, I… “ No, I hadn’t. I didn’t want to, either.

“It’s in Essex, alright? London Essex.” He looked at his hands again. The cigarette was shaking between his thin, nicotine-stained fingers and I was becoming genuinely concerned for him and the sadness of his spirit, but nothing in my library of counselling books had a section on rehabilitating retired gurus. A stab in the intuitive darkness brought only a pinprick of light:

“But, you must have hobbies?”

He slowly lifted his eyes and blinked at me several times while I cursed at my ever-baffling stupidity.

“I like shooting,” he said, eventually.

“Shooting?”

“Yeah. Small-bore. Or shotguns. Bang bang. Two barrels, motherfucker, yeah. I tried an Uzi once, when we had the ranch in Oregon, when we, when I…” His voice faded out even as he was miming machine-gunning a strafe of bullets around the service station, and I thought we’d blown it, but he rallied, saying:

“And adverts.”

“Adverts?” I knew I was being slow, but…

“Yeah, adverts. You know that one where the Pot Noodle turns into a sumo wrestler and farts the tune of “We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying’? Laugh? I nearly cacked myself! You know it? You know the one?”

“Er, no…” I said. “I haven’t got a television.”

“No television?! Now there’s a real miracle for you. You press a little button on the remote control box and — karuma! — there’s John Snow staring out at you. Magic!”

He shook his head, marvelling at it with a joy that both baffled and somehow inspired me. It soon passed, though, and he lit another Regal with the end of the last. The fog around us billowed and expanded with each suck — through the haze I could dimly see the American couple staggering to the car park. The old man was retching while his wife struggled to loosen his collar, but my attention was brought back to the table by a whisper in my ear.

“Want to know something, mate?”

“What?” It was Bob, peering at me with blood-laced eyes, pupils whose centres were lost in a scrotum-tightening whirlpool of agitation and loss. Those eyes were scanning left and right across my face as if reading it. Could he see the footnotes that said “You are dangerously mad’? Did he see the chapter heading “Why Does This Always Happen To Me?” I wondered what my face looked like from his world.

He grinned, looked around, as if to check that we were alone, although I doubted that anyone could have heard a thing through the density of smoke anyway. Satisfied, he leaned closer and whispered.

“See, I’m enlightened, mate.” He nodded smugly like he’d just told me that Bob Dylan had stayed at his house for Christmas, and sat back in his chair, sprawling an arm across the back of the next.

What can you say? The conversations I was having these days were becoming increasingly bizarre. It was worrying, and exciting, but in the moments of fear when I lost the Now, I did wonder where it was all going. At moments like these I had intimations of it ending badly, forecastings of me saying the wrong thing to one of these nutters that circled around me like vultures around a stillborn wildebeest and the police arriving too late, too late, to pull their psychosis-fuelled arms from around my crushed, useless neck… Bad visions.

I looked at Bob Mullet and Bob Mullet looked at me and tapped the side of his nose and winked. I wanted to ask him “if you’re enlightened, then what the fuck are you doing sitting here talking to me at four in the morning about how shit your life is?” but instead opted for the banal-but-sure-fire-safe option:

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “Sweet.” As if he’d just reeled off the performance stats of his new car.

Okay, I thought. If the dice are loaded against me, I may as well at least try to roll with them. Throwing caution to the smoke-laden wind, I leaned forward until our faces were almost touching.

“How do you know?” I asked. I thought that, reality being a dream and all things being possible, I might get a free nugget of wisdom, or perhaps just a good story, but when he said:

“Because I’ve got a certificate,”

I was floored.

“You what?”

“A certificate. Look.” He fished around in his jacket pocket, squinting as the trail of cigarette smoke rose into his left eye. “Here.” He pulled out a crumpled sheet of A4 paper, smoothed it out on the table and pushed it towards me, but when I made to pick it up, he grabbed my hand and whispered “mustn’t touch” fiercely Gollum-like in my face.

I looked down at the faded document. Barely legible at the top of the sheet, in big 1960’s purple and green San Francisco concert-style letters was written:

Dharamsala School for Applied Avatars

“Excellence through Enlightenment”

I read on.

In faded typewriter print it said:

This document hereby certifies that (then, in bubble writing the words Robert Stamford Mullet) has completed the Advanced Course (modules 1, 2 and 3) in Tranquil Abiding, Completion Stage Tanta, and the Madyamika View of Shunyata and is hereby declared Fully Enlightened (with honours) under the articles of the School.

A squeezed note at the bottom of the page read also Joint Honours in Flower Arranging. The piece of paper smelled of stale beer and cigarettes.

An illegible signature certified the authenticity of the document, a signature full of flourishes and a few little birds that flew off the ends of the letters, and when I looked up, trying to imagine this gun-crazy traffic warden arranging flowers, let alone unravelling the mysteries of the universe with the tools of Tantric Buddhist philosophy, Bob was beaming at me like a clumsy child who’s won first prize in the egg-and-spoon race.

“1972, mate,” he said. “Those were the days.”

What can you say? The universe was conspiring against me in ever-more peculiar ways, and who was I to argue with the authority of such a certificate? Besides, the sides of my head had begun to pound from the battering that the Regal smog was giving my sinuses and my brain was melting from the acid-attack effect of the fractal carpet and the droning muzak that wheezed into the air like the death-throes of civilization. It was time to go.

With an effort of will that I may not have since equalled in my life, I levered myself out of the plastic-cushioned seat that had been my home for these incredible hours. It made a gasping noise as I left it, as if betrayed, but I ignored it and, trying to remain standing, bid Bob Mullet, retired Guru, ex-Mahavajra, goodbye and was about to stumble my way to the door when I couldn’t help but stop and ask, so help me God, “What happened?”

Bob looked up at me blearily from the throne of his despair.

“‘What happened?’ I’ll tell you what happened, mate. 1983 happened. 19-bleeding-83.”

This left me none the wiser — I didn’t remember much about 1983, but it hadn’t struck me at the time as a particularly bad year for gurus or pie-manifesters, but before I could tell this to Bob, he had seized me by the collar of my shirt and pulled me close to him again.

“Disgraced! Disgraced!! Everything I had — poof!! Gone, just like that. Just like that.” He clicked his fingers, spraying cigarette ash in a grey arc across the table. “And me enlightened and everything, but humiliated in front of my peers! Who would have thought it?” Hmm, well…

“Disgraced?” I could imagine any number of ways that Bob Mullet might have fallen from grace, but when he moaned ‘the adverts,’ I was, once again, flummoxed.

“The commercials. I never should have done them, should I? ‘Dharamsala Light, probably the best lager in this world, or the next…’ ‘Sunshine Ghee — you’ll never put a better bit of… ghee… on your chapatti…’ ‘Col-gaté — don’t let your teeth go beyond before you do…’ Aargh.” He struck his forehead in anguish, leaving specks of ash in his greasy, greying hair. “The shame!! They sounded so good in the studio, and I never thought anyone here would see them, let alone my old mum, and I always just wanted to be on TV… Oh, the horror…” His head sank once more to the table and he began sobbing.

I tried, again, to console him, but I knew that it was useless — he shook of my attempts with cries of “I don’t want your pity…” through the sobs. He was a broken shell of a man, lost in past humiliations whose depths and complexities were beyond my comprehension, so I tiptoed off and left him to contemplate the horror of his advertising downfall before more of his tales could destroy my mind completely. He called out after me, “You don’t understand…” and I suppose that he was right. All I understood was that to preserve my soul I had to leave him, and as I stumbled out into the Washington dawn, I sucked in huge lungfuls of air like a drowning man and tried to focus on putting one step after the other. I could barely see, and held my arms out in front of me in case I collided with anything dangerous, like traffic. As the door closed behind me I thought I heard him shouting “enlightened, mate…” one more time, but I tried not to hear, and pressed on out past the petrol pumps and the thundering lorries to the slip road of the motorway, waiting for my eyesight to return and knowing that my day could only improve from here.