The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [29]
It would have been awful to go back having washed out. If we hadn’t found any land. But we had found land. Not just any land, really spectacular land. We returned with our heads high. The trial was just a silly interlude. Then I could get back to the good stuff, the real stuff. I had beaten a bigger, far more terrifying rap than the one I had to face in Greensburg, Pa.
From Toronto we took a buff to Bussalo and tried to get hold of Steve and Sandy. The phone number and addresses they had given us didn’t work. We sent them a “Fuck, where the fucking shit fuck are you guys,” etc., etc., letter scrawled on a napkin giving them some addresses and numbers where they could get hold of us while we were East. Got on a pitt to Bussburgh and called a girl I had gone to elementary school with who had told my mother that she and her husband could put us up for the trial.
Luxury accommodations. It was the first time we had slept in what most people would call a bed in about three months. Nothing against couches and foam pads, mind you, but this was something else. A great big old maple bedstead, a mattress, a room all to ourselves. After four days of buses and trains, after three months of camping, it felt great.
Amanda and Lou were first-rate hosts: good food, good drinks, movies. They expressed suitable indignation over the silly trial we had to go through.
Lou was in graduate school, another thing I had avoided like the plague. They were making a pretty good adjustment to all the things I had refused or been unable to adjust to. Had I been a pathetic hippie whose dreams were getting stale, coming back East to be tried for dope, I would have hated them.
The trial was a bore. I got off on a technicality but ended up having to use some political pull to get the judge to see it. Mine was the first case of its kind that hadn’t been pled guilty. People said it was an important case that would change things. I couldn’t get into it.
Hitching to Swarthmore was a bore. Being stopped by the cops and searched again and again was a bore.
At Swarthmore, talk talk talk talk talk. The shit is on the fan or very close. What to do about it? Was what we were doing good? Was it an answer? To how much? Working with the system? I had been through them all so many times. Boring. Spiced with a touch of astrology, the I Ching, or yoga, and diet. Was a bore. Was bored. It never went anywhere. Nothing ever changed. Maybe it was adding up. But how much adding up was needed? Boring, bored, bore. In the time I’ve been talking to you I could have cut a week’s worth of firewood, shingled a hundred square feet of roof, and shot three grouse.
When the shakes started coming on the talk was torture. Dope helped some.
Virginia went down to North Carolina to see her parents and I headed for New York City, where Pa was spending more and more time.
Somewhere along the line I started falling apart. My elevation stopped working. My capacity for politeness and social grace deteriorated. “I have the farm to go back to. None of this shit matters. Repeat. None of this shit matters.”
Earlier it had been “I have the farm to go back to so I can enjoy being back East, New York, etc.” Toward the end it was “If I get really awful I’ll just put myself on ice and ship myself back to Powell River, where life makes a certain amount of sense.”
Time started meaning less and less. It just hung there. Where I was meant less and less. More and more meant less and less. Just getting back to the farm where things made sense became everything. Just getting back. Where there was work to do that meant something. Something to get my mind off my mind.
Feeling something gripping the pit of my stomach.