Oh, the wonder of it! Why isn’t everybody in the world as curious and as searching as are we?
Oh Tina
I love thee
And the sacred ancient truths
You’ve brought to me.
November 28
Today I gave my handmade announcement of our wedding to twenty-six friends. It’s going to be a full moon and a clear night (the weatherman says and he’s GOT to be right this time for a change). After the debate in the auditorium and the dinner at the Country Club, and the Sweater Fling in the gym, wow! I’m not sure I can stand the wonder of it! Our marriage! Tina has planned all the particulars. She and Meg and Rosalee have been like three sparrows chirping, flying, and roosting up and down the halls. Everyone thinks the excitement is about the dance, because all three of them are in student government or some kind of control at school, but anyway, the excitement is about us! Not me and her—myself and her, or however the hell it goes grammatically—in reality we’ll be no more two but one! Oh man, I’m not I sure I can stand this much joy. I could kiss a cactus!
November 30
When I found out Tina was having our wedding in the cemetery, by the big tomb, I about died. It was like making a mockery of the whole thing. I knew we’d invited only the kids connected with O and it was to be part of the sacred ancient sacrament but . . . Anyway, it was fantastic! The moon was perfectly round and it wasn’t even all that cold. By the single little black candle, which we certainly didn’t need for light, we went through the ritual of eternal slavery to each other although I, the male, would always technically be the master. Then we each cut our tongues and let the blood pour into each other’s mouths. It was Nirvana. We were one! One blood, one toulca, one being!
Rosalee passed the sacred vial around and we performed the ritual of extending ourselves to extend others. Bright colors and lightning flashes streaked through the sky. Sometimes the colors exploded like rockets on the Fourth of July, both in and out of our heads.
When the chanting started Martin brought in a teensy mewing kitten. With one twist he wrung its little neck. Instantly we all put forth every gram of power at our command to bring it back to life again, that being the supreme taloa.
I don’t know how the others felt but I concentrated until I thought my whole being was going to detonate, then I relaxed . . . calling the cat’s karma . . . magnetizing its karma . . . but in vain, we had not yet advanced to that plane.
In a way the stilled kitten ruined the evening. We were progressing—but apparently not far enough to call back the karma of even a kitten that had departed at the same second we strove to bring it back. I ran my hand over its soft little body and felt a tear drip down my face. We had failed! Even during the high time of the consecrated marriage ceremony, we had failed! Someday we would bring spirits into the world through birth, that was an accepted way, but to bring the kitten’s spirit back into its own body, before it had hardly had time to leave this sphere of existence had . . . Oh Judas, I’m off into the areas that blow my mind, or is it just that knowing Tina and I are married yet still have to sleep alone in our own beds that is driving me bananas? I’m going crazy. The saber-toothed crotch crickets are leaving their abode, are taking over the whole of my body, inside and out. I am dying, dying for you, Tina! I need you, want you! This is ridiculous, not normal on our wedding night! I can’t let myself think about it. Oh sweet sleep, where is thy handmaiden, the sleeping pill?
December 3
I can’t believe that Tina and I are married. I see her in the halls and I want to take her right there. I don’t care about teachers, friends, classmates, anything. I want her! Want her! Want her! Actually I’m not that depraved, but oh Judas, it’s bad! Almost worse than before.
Our lives have become one giant INSTEAD OF! Instead of going to assembly we go get it on in Toad. Instead of sports or practice or any extracurricular activities we’re off experimenting, studying, in the occult, sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, being sucked under in some way that I cannot understand, but it’s so exciting, so thrilling, so exotically and hypnotically compelling! The mundane is becoming so much more supermundane . . . school, family, etc. I’m beginning to live for my O experiences. They’re more fulfilling than anything—life, death, drugs, even sex! I couldn’t possibly tell Tina that, or does she possibly feel the same way? In a way, I’m almost sure she does!
I’ve begun to study Sanskrit. Swami means “self mastery in all things,” that is where I want to be.
Tina showed me some material during lunch that is fragmenting. We’re getting there. The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, is aware of some of the powers. They, under the strict supervision of their Voluntary Controls Program research department had Swami Rama leave his ashram in northern India so they could check his mind-body relationships, checking his mind’s ability and capacity to regulate his physiological processes, especially those functions usually labeled involuntary or automatic. During the demonstrations Swami Rama stopped his heart for 17 seconds and produced differences of temperature in the palms of his hands at will. The Asians are so advanced. How long will it take us to learn their High Wisdoms in the simple things? Westerners are so enamored by the pursuit and worship of power and riches that they are unaware or unconcerned about the wonder of the unseen and the unexplored mysteries and truths around them.
December 4
It is so advantageous and stimulating being a man, even in our society. Dell and Brad and I are taking off with Mel for Colorado tomorrow afternoon right after school. Our parents are content thinking we are going skiing for the weekend. Life was just so yuck—nothing—dull today till this came up. Poor Tina is sick because she couldn’t manipulate her way into the trip. It must be tough beans being a girl.
I’m as excited as a little kid before his birthday! Will the Bootan really work? I’ve seen voodoo work, not once but enough times to have accepted it on a proven basis. Now . . . WOW . . . a higher power . . . BOOTAN!
This morning was like the morgue, this afternoon is like starting the circus cycle!
Hurry Friday, come on! Hurry, hurry, hurry Friday! I’m giving up a big debate in Washington for this chance . . . Please, please let it be worth it.
Tonight Dell and Mel and Brad and I sat in the back of his dad’s van and talked and marveled. Mel’s eighteen. He went up to a Bootan ceremony two years ago. He said it was practiced more then than it is now. In fact, he quoted John Welsh, some kind of biggie in the National Cattlemen’s Association, who said that in 1975 and 1976 there were about 3,000 cattle mutilations.
I can’t allow myself to think of Bootan as that. It’s a force as real as faith and stuff that people understand and accept. Mel says most seekers now use small animals for rites but that cattle are still the supreme gifters, like the hallowed bulls in ancient Egypt. I guess the ancient Egyptians knew many of the sacred secrets that have been lost.
Will tomorrow ever come? Ohhh . . . mellow, mellow . . . yellow eyes.
December 7
The whole weekend seems unreal. Driving along pasture roads until Mel found exactly the right bull. Mel’s bow with the electric arrow made from a many times increased battery-powered cattle prodder, but with a charge strong enough to stun said bull. Our rushing to the giant beast as he tried to struggle then fell to the ground.
I remember the blood sloshing up into my ears as we raced into the pasture. Dell held the flashlight while Mel made precise little surgical cuts in exactly the right places. He had practiced in the van on a big chart we’d ripped off from the market showing a side of beef. Oh, first we siphoned off the blood from a careful tiny slash in a vein, put it into gobs of gallon jars we’d ripped off from the A&W and the caterers, trying not to spill a drop. It would be used as part of a ritual when we returned home. Mel, like a surgeon, cut out the eyes, tongue, and balls. Then we had to go for another animal. Taking all the parts from one would lessen the power they retained. Each organ was immediately sealed in a fruit jar, and whisked of
f to the van. That kept me and Brad jumping. Besides, the bull smelled like nothing I’d ever smelled before and made strange gurgling sounds in his throat and belly even though he was dead. It was bad enough to see the eyes and balls in jars. I don’t know how Dell managed to watch Mel do it. Actually none of it really seemed real !
We were halfway through before I was even aware that all the cattle that had drifted away from us were mooing and making other strange noises that I didn’t know cows made. It was spooky and I wanted to get the hell out of there. When Mel finished and we sprinted across the field with the last of our stuff, I wondered if anyone would ever suspect we had been there. Mel had had his knives so sharp they had gone through the cow’s hide almost without effort and each cut had been so clean and almost bloodless that I had been amazed. A few flies on the cuts and no one would ever know what had happened except that parts were missing and that jars and jars of blood had disappeared.
In the van, Mel and I sat in the back while Dell bounced back towards the highway with his lights off, all of us grateful for the big clear moon. Even with its light, however, we hit chuck holes and rocks, without it we might have high centered at any point and found ourselves in a mess I don’t know how the hell we would have gotten out of. After we’d been on the highway for about half an hour Mel had Dell pull over and we added anticoagulant something to the blood and parts. It was important, Mel said, to keep them as exact as possible. I couldn’t wait! Kept wondering if Bootan really would work! The excitement was intoxicating!
After about another hour of driving we took off on a second side road and started looking for a cow that came up to all Mel’s requirements. It didn’t take long to find one and soon we had downed it and slit its vein also, the tiniest little incision. This time each of us took turns drinking the warm blood directly from the female animal. It was hard to get down because it came out in such great spurts, and was so hot, so much hotter than I had expected, or maybe it was me. Again we drained the blood, this time not so carefully, and took a few parts, Mel having informed us that all living things are composed of both female and male whatevers.
It was a relief when we got back on the highway and started heading towards home. Mel wouldn’t even let us stop to piss, though, and the excitement had about exploded our bladders.
All four of us squeezed up in the front area and Mel told us how ranchers from at least twenty-two states had reported cattle mutilations. Man, O must be even bigger than I thought! Brad, who was driving, slowed down when Mel added that various rural groups had gone together and put rewards up, some as high as $25,000.
The blood we had drunk was supposed to have given us the strength of the animal and at that time I’m sure if we had stopped we could have lifted the van. We felt like TV or comic strip supermen. Dell wanted to try but I guess we were all more afraid of getting caught than we were anxious to test out powers.
So we started reading each other’s thoughts. It was amazing how accurate we were. I wonder if the foreign substance in our bodies had anything to do with that. After a while we all had to stop and throw up. Then it was gone, all of the excitement as well as the strength. We were just a bunch of bitching young turkey tails, mad about everything and wanting the hell to get home to nice soft warm beds and some decent food.
We drove right past the ski resort turnoff and into a motel just three hours from home. I was bushed and it seemed like such a damned stupid thing to have done, wasted all that meat, drunk gobs of blood, which just made us throw up, and . . . oh shit . . . the whole thing was a bummer. How did I ever get sucked into this weirdo sick kind of thinking. It doesn’t have anything to do with mind control and expansion, it was just the old-fashioned, superstitious, stupid, childish kind of stupid thing the world hates and suspects about cults, and rightly so. We were just four asshole kids looking for excitement—any kookie, harebrained thing to explode the boring, boring, boring everydayness of average life.
FLESH IS CHEAP!
God, what’s got into me?
December 8
All 13 of us cut school this afternoon and went up the canyon to Dell’s uncle’s cabin. We had stashed the blood and things in the cemetery shed on our way home. Now we had to sneak them out into our cars. It was unbelievable! Tina coming out with two gallon jars of blood under her coat and trying to look nonchalant. We laughed ourselves silly on the way up. She looked pregnant with the jars and if she had dropped them, people would have thought she was having the bloodiest miscarriage ever. Eight quarts of blood in a person her tiny size? Would wonders never cease? And her still strutting on down the street, looking as robust as ever after the big loss.
I tried to take the whole thing lightly until we had all the drapes drawn in the cabin and rugs and stuff pinned up over every opening that let in the barest amount of light. It was going to be like a club initiation I told myself . . . dumb but not dangerous . . . I didn’t know then about Tina’s and Mel’s intensity, their insistence and seriousness.
I tried to pass when Tina offered the little vial of blood, having thrown it up once made me cringe. But Tina and Mel both had their little black books out, white writing on black paper, and they demanded that each thing had to be done with precision and exactness. Dell and Brad sitting next to me gagged when they took their tastes, but at least it was just a sip this time and not the spurt spurt spurting cupsful of hot stuff directly from the smelly pulsating cow.
Minutes after accepting the offering my eyes began to roll around in my head and a new kind of lightness lifted up my body. I wanted to accuse Tina and Mel of mixing some of their crazy berry or herb concoctions with the blood but the nice easy feeling told me I really didn’t care anymore.
After we, through our vibrations, had changed the hands on the clock, levitated some material things, started fires strictly by mental friction, and done a few other little exercises in control, the animal parts were placed before us, and one by one we consecrated and consumed a bit of the part which we wanted to intensify in ourselves, declaring in return dedication for the rest of our existence to the pursuit of greater knowledge about greater things.
When we first got to the cabin Mel had gone out to the pump house and turned on the water and then the heater, now through a hazy mist I saw why. All the blood was dumped into the tub and one by one we were baptized in it, washing the sins and imperfections of our pre-O life away! Our heads were anointed with a few drops of the urine we had milked out of the bull’s dingy as he was laying there. Actually it had been just dribbling out, as was his feces, which I remember had amazed me at the time.
After the blood bath the person moved to the shower and was again anointed and cleansed from aroba, or the influences of the outsiders.
What amazes me most of all, as I look back, is that I wasn’t repelled by all the ghoulishness, but rather intrigued, at least a part of me was intrigued, the other part was fighting like a scared cat with turpentine up his ass.
Tina insists that O is against drugs. She says we just use natural herbs to enlighten our minds and intensify our auwas, but that’s a pile of B.S.
I was stoned crackers. I would have to have been to have taken part in any of that crazy nightmare movie madness.
After we’d cleaned up every drop of blood from the bathroom, like slow-motioned zombies, going through slow-motioned zombie motions, Tina passed us another “potion.” Again part of me tried to fight her off but I couldn’t! It was like I’d been given sodium pentathol or something. I couldn’t stop myself from saying and doing things I didn’t want to say and do. I couldn’t hold back! I remember feeling like a prisoner of war or something, that they had taken my will away.
I fought until I literally could fight no longer and fell weeping to the floor. Instantly I felt my spirit drifting out of my body. From this stranger outer position, in midair, close to the ceiling, I watched my body sit there, perform functions, repeat astramatas. I could not control it!
I wondered if Brad and Dell’s spirits had left thei
r earthly tabernacles too—if they had I couldn’t see them.
It was kind of a nice feeling until I heard the group begin to chant together. I didn’t know what they were saying, it was new, but I desperately wanted to get back into my body, control it, protect it, make it behave, think right, talk right, do right! Stop saying those crazy things, other world things I didn’t understand, didn’t like! I was afraid! Not just kid-scared but desperately, sickeningly terror-strickenly afraid! Again I fought with all my might to reenter but however I had gotten out would not let me in, something else—someone else—had taken over. MY BODY . . . ME! I wanted to scream, tried to scream, but no audible sound came out. However my body was speaking! Saying things I would not have said. Could never have forced myself to say!
Our Father which art in Hell
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in Hell
Give us this day . . .
I could not stand it and left the room, huddling behind the wheel of Toad begging him to help me, bring me back to sanity and reality. Then worried that something I could control would happen to my body I went right through the wall and back into the cabin. Each member was dedicating their soul to a strange flickering orange kind of light on a piece of metal in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t like fire or a flame, it was like nothing I had seen before, condensed power or something conducting waves . . . anyway Brad, who had never been the school’s greatest athlete, or student either for that matter, put his first finger to his temple and said he would dedicate his auwa if he could be the school’s top basketball star. I tried desperately to stop him but it was like he couldn’t even feel my clutching and clawing.
Next Dell struggled to his feet in a slow-motioned manner. He too put his pointer finger to his right temple. I tried with every bit of power I had to pull it away, but without my body I couldn’t! Dell mumbled that if he could have money he too would dedicate his auwa.