One night in August, while I was watching Cavani’s The Skin, I learned that Jay had died. In March, of course, was my first or maybe my second thought, depending on whether you can call the almost sexual groan I made a thought: the fuck before sentimentality sets in, or the shudder that overcomes you when your hypocritical mental representation of someone as alive (as if, you think, we were ever really alive) collides with their almost surrealist, almost glamorous stratagem of dipping out of existence before your bourgeois and addled sensorium takes note. Of course he’d have OD’d at the beginning of quarantine, when presumably he didn’t have to show up to his carpentry job in the city anymore, where, as he told me in rehab, he was able to make it til noon before chipping, or pretending to chip, with some of the other guys on the site, and then able to make it all the way home to his parents’ house in Rohnert Park on weekdays (on weekends he got high with his girlfriend in the city, but tempered it with afternoons of marathon fucking) before shooting up. At one point he told me, in his world-weary but not at all brutal way: they’re going to die so I can live. By they he meant the other junkies in the program, the mentally ill trans sex workers with racist instincts and the art school dropouts from progressive white families who were going to take the first bus back to the Tenderloin. The Bay Area financial real estate bubble means I always have work, he said, while they live on the streets. The second I lose that union job, I’m dead. Well…I can’t say exactly why I thought about him while I was watching the movie, but maybe something about his attitude reminded me of Mastroianni’s Malaparte, with his sad enigmatic smile before every kind of human depravity and exploitation, from cannibalism to innocence…And of course, loyal to his punk roots, he was on the side of the lumpen cannibals, the charismatic cannibals, the cannibals who’d lived many lives before…I guess I googled one of his bands that had been big in the Bay Area hardcore scene ten years ago to find his last name on Wikipedia and then I found the obituary site his parents had set up for him, where they captured him tenderly and accurately, down to the photo of him smiling: the cherubic smile of Elliott Smith, maybe, though I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen a photo of of Elliott Smith smiling. I read some subreddits about his death from fans and then on Twitter I found his girlfriend’s tweet from March about how she’d found him dead, how no one had appreciated his genius, how the world didn’t deserve him, etc. She was a designer and a sex worker, though truthfully all artists these days are sex workers in one way or another, except, of course, for the archetypal cis-male artist hanging on to his brush like a totemic primitivity, or like a dick that doesn’t work. She was provocative and nihilistic and believed that all art is bad, is shit, except for a handful of paintings by Goya, but that we should keep making it, out of desire or out of spite, which might be the same thing, in the end. She believed that all white people should wander the country as nomads, as penitent hobos, as asuras or as bodhisattvas. She had some photos of her herself on her Instagram and in each photo she was in the same bed with black sheets with a black flag on the wall behind her, wearing black leather boots, or black stripper heels, and nothing but a black bra she’d made out of bullet casings. The room itself gave me a chill, like a crime scene turned into a cell for solitary confinement. She had an aura of violence, of desperation on the edge of the abyss of mania. Since R and I broke up I’d been exclusively attracted to sex workers, in general I wasn’t interested in anyone else, though I had a few relapses. She was a single mom (somehow I knew they weren’t Jay’s kids), and her hatred of society seemed pure. She was paranoid and heartbroken, which are the qualities I look for in others. I tried to imagine what she and Jay had been like together. He was ultimately very gentle, very frail, very suburban in spite of the hell that he’d put himself through, voluntarily, and the years of touring he’d done in his life, where he’d been all over the country, Mexico and Europe. I think it’s possible that his only real life, which is true for most of us, was his sexuality. He arrived at the rehab facility just as I was being kicked out for fucking a girl in the bushes one night (she was a heroin addict, I felt there was almost a counter-incest taboo in crossing addictions, I was made to feel that way by the program’s authorities, as if a heartless alcoholic couldn’t understand the infinite developmental idiocy of a junkie). He knew her, of course, from before. Everyone knows everyone in the Bay Area, when it comes to the mercenary worlds of drugs, poverty, crime, terrorism, and counter-insurgency. I wonder if either of us could have known that our lives would have been governed by those terms. As if we were born for that shit. Though we talked about it as we chainsmoked Newports overlooking the almost prelapsarian fields of Sonoma County. He was sheepish everytime he took one from me, which became a kind of rite and a kind of joke. I think we both saw the future that was in store for us, the apocalypse in the icy amniotic fluid beneath our eyelids. He arrived in the midst of a heatwave and a dry, annihilating wind, a holocaustic California sirocco come to wipe us off the face of the earth. He knew he was going to die. He wanted to live but he was resigned to dying. After a weekend of mourning during which his presence accompanied me everywhere, like an orphic double, I came around to thinking that I was glad he was dead. I couldn’t say what point there was to sticking around, from the perspective of an artist or a revolutionary (though I was vaguely aware that there were other ways of being human, they never appealed to me on a visceral level). I thought of elaborating a new system: a Maoism of death, a Shining Path spiritualism. As if the necrocapitalist planet could be surrounded by the vast people’s army of the countryside of the other world…The last thing he said to me, as I was getting ready to leave, was that I needed to stay alive. The world needs people like us, he said. He could get away with saying something like that because unlike me, who’s always been prone to bouts of narcissistic misanthropy, he got along with everyone, he was a essentially an egalitarian, a romantic anarchist. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was a writer and he was a musician, or that I was an alcoholic and he was a junkie, or that I was a bitter refugee from the east coast whereas he was living and dying in the place where he was born, after having gotten fucked up all over the world. I don’t remember if we hugged, probably not. I think for both of us there was something insipid in the ceremony of goodbyes. I left him my cigarettes and grabbed my bags and got in the car that was taking me back to Oakland. I never got in touch with him after that. Neither of us was the type to cling to the infantilized community of sobriety, or to transfer the strange, disturbed intimacies you make in rehab into a plagiarized friendship elsewhere.
…
My therapist Z, a kind of queer and tragic left-wing Buddhist in her early fifties, recommended that I do a shamanic drumming trip to communicate with Jay to communicate with the part of myself that had been drawn to him. She was agnostic on questions of metaphysics and the self, in the same way she was agnostic on whether the cosmos was evil and whether any of this shit (the human species) mattered or could be said to be worth the cost. Though having run away from her prominent right-wing family to spend her youth working first in hospice care and then among sex workers and drug addicts in San Francisco during the AIDS genocide, she once confessed to me in a harrowing moment on one of the MDMA trips she guided me through that she did know one thing, which is that death, the moment or the threshold of dying, is beautiful, is a more sacred orgasm than birth, though probably Z, who seemed to me to be an anti-natalist, thought of birth as an act of sordid neocolonialism. Just before I went to rehab, while I was suffering from delirium tremens and something like psychosis, my former therapist broke up with me. She was sweet, young and attractive, but too Jewish, too familiar, as if my transference was onto an eroticized older sister (Z told me the patient-therapist relationship can falter especially when both have suffered the same kind of racial trauma, because you begin to suspect that all the shameful things about yourself are present in the therapist, making it a kind of No Exit situation). When my therapist broke up with me she told me it was because she had fallen in love with me, though I suspected then, as I do now, that that was just an attempt to get rid of me. But falling in love with someone and trying to get rid of them often amounts to the same thing. So I started working with Z, who became more than a therapist to me, like an ironic guru and a comrade. She got me over my abhorrence of the fascist-CIA side of Tibetan Buddhism. A materialist who agreed with me about the need for a mass vanguard communist party, she introduced me to the alcoholic charlatan Chogyam Trungpa, to yin yoga, to traditional Chinese medicine, to microdosing psilocybin, to Mazatec healing (she was connected, in some kind of apostolic chain, to Maria Sabina), to the destructive and insurrectionary side of the New Age movement, the side that would send Stewart Brand and Buckminster Fuller to the gulag, to the smutty and ugly side of psychic reality, where our power lies, to Jungian shadow work, to the books of racial trauma therapists who work with the police on their own dubious trauma, to communication with demons, to the work of Ka-Tsetnik 135633, who invented the genre of sadomasochistic Holocaust/Nazisploiotation porn as a homeless Auschwitz survivor in Tel Aviv, whom Arendt, who never really left her intrinsic libidinal Nazism behind, thought made a castrated disgrace of himself at the Eichmann trial, and who underwent an excruciating regimen of LSD therapy in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and to the MDMA therapy I already mentioned.
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Shamanic drumming trip
Session #4 (the Jay session)
August 13, 2020
Question: What message (what power?) does Jay have to convey from the other side (the winter inside our endless, scorched summer?)
Everything is very dark, murky. There are some phosphorescent brown vortexes. Jay appears in the black void, lit up in a kind of pallid, brackish light (similar to the color of the envious, grasping apparatchik devils of trip #2). He’s shooting up, his arm is cadaverously white. He’s smiling a kind of sweet, blissful but bitter smile: the metaphysical smile of addiction, I think. Suddenly I am in a 19th-century Chinese opium den with him, along with some “coolies” (but their bodies aren’t individuated, only the hunger/addiction emanates a kind of protoplasm of need, suffering, and Hadean resistance from them). Then I am floating on a black tarry river, as if through the tortured and necrotic veins of the world, of history. I see the massive scope of the counter-reality of addicts through time (shades of Burroughs). Later the addicts will be surrounding the rehab center in Petaluma with torches in the night, and I am on their side, I want to see [the name of the director of the program]’s final scream, her mutilated corpse (she seems at this moment to be the Ur-misanthrope, wishing death on all subhumanity). We are in Jay’s bedroom [the room from his girlfriend’s Instagram]. A fetid, messy, diseased place, but also a place of art and eroticism. His girlfriend is there wearing her bra made out of bullet casings. I am always the third, I say [outloud, in empirical or non-diagetic reality], and they nod, without judgment. Intermittence [though one’s memory for events and impressions remains preternaturally clear after a shamanic drumming trip, occasionally one loses track of diachronic time, of the exact sequence of events as they “happened” in the trance]: later Jay will tell me about my gifts being the “myriads” in me, as if most of humanity, even the most brilliant people, live only one solid life, which is a curse in its own right, though my “myriads” make me feel borderless, disoriented. He asks me to approach the bed where his girlfriend is sitting. She seems welcoming, not hyper-aroused but in a state of relaxation. You can hit her if you want, Jay says. But it’s clear that between the three of us there is no kernel of violence or misogyny. Hitting her is supposed to be fun for all of us, and a gift to me (a gift of “primalness”). So I hit her. She makes a little rictus of pleasure, as if I’d pressed something in her, but then she returns to normal. Now there is a fourth in the room, a completely hooded figure, wearing all black. As I approach him his face or his front vanishes, as if he’s rotating away from me or contains only a “backside, from behind.” Who is he?, I ask Jay. He’s the killer, Jay says. And then: Go ahead, attack him, gouge his eyes out. So I do. Jay says, you see, what’s strange about you is that you’re both an innocent but also very intimate with “the killer” in all of us. [On a different reality-level of the trance] I begin to see the killers in various people I know. I think about how central death is, or death by killing. I feel ambivalent about it. I feel loathing towards its unconscious, automatic element. When we are talking about me being “the third” and about “the myriad” in me I have the sense that my whole life I have been surrounded by people leering at me and that that condition is “unique” to something about me. [Outloud] I make some kind of jungle sound,a tiger’s “gah!” [With my physical body] I attack them with my hands, thrusting my hands out, again like a tiger. All the people surrounding me (people I know, more or less) disperse but are replaced by hooded KKK and by SS officers. I am not afraid or threatened, seeing their parasitism in relation to me makes me feel more powerful than they are, as if all that hate were attracted to my occult libidinality. I am a sponge, I think, in the slanderous sense of the word, but it’s a virtue (as all faults are really virtues, when seen in their true light). Now Jay and I are outside of the squalid room and by the sea at night, a night of riotous, roaring wind. It is just the two of us, though sometimes I see flashes of his girlfriend back in her room, masturbating. There’s no “other side,” he says. No heaven, no hell. There are no guiding spirits, he goes on. There’s just the shit we leave behind. Well, where are you?, I ask. My body’s rotting in the ground, he says. And where did your spirit go after it left your body? Let me ask you a question, he counters. Is your spirit in your body? I have to confess that no, it isn’t. I have a sense that I am seeing a new topography of reality, a spiritual nowhere/here. All of life is saying goodbye, he says. From the moment you’re born. “Goodbye” to the womb and before that “goodbye” to the void. Suddenly [out loud] I make a buzzing sound, like a karmic insect: “Goodbye-inggggggggg.” I think: Goodbye-ying. Gerund: goodbyeing. Goodbye to your shit, goodbye to your piss, goodbye to your cum, I think. The past is dead. I see R, in a halcyon image of our relationship. [Outloud] Dead!, I shout. Then I see her grandfather’s study, in the gray wintry murk of her decaying Westchester mansion [given to them for 100 dollars by a dying Columbia professor who didn’t know her grandfather was Jewish, since he’d named himself after a medieval magician to sound like a WASP, in order to prevent “any niggers moving in,” though later Kenneth and Mamie Clark would move into the house next door and host MLK there as he voiced opposition to the war in Vietnam.] I see the bottle of bourbon he kept in his desk, the one her mother told me he went through every day, though they didn’t know it for years. I see the intergenerational world of alcoholics as one throat/anus through which alcohol is poured, through which despair is poured.