REPORT FROM THREE FEET UNDER
I have always written to make myself happy. I put down
the rocks and see to it that they lead somewhere, a tree, some quiet.
So, I have trouble understanding why people might prefer an un–
enlightened group like the Stones to the Beatles. I say
this
because
recently I had the misfortune to take an overdose of a drug. I
swallowed, and twenty minutes later there I was.
Under the sea. Where I stood, deeply involved in the long ir–
regular mountains, the day of glass, the stars, the pitchforks coming
down on me like rain, a grayblue slanting rain that beat with an
almost diarrhetic totally intestinal speed. It was this sensation of
speed I found terrifying. Any faster and I'd then and there go mad–
off to gravy and beyond. I could even so, I realized, still quicken it.
By being stupid enough to laugh aloud, or hear someone beside me
laugh. This laughter, when it came, appeared in ricocheting bursts
like a machine gun, or a champagne christened ship.
It
rattled and
knocked so it seemed a corpse's death rattle. Whereupon all doors
would suddenly open and I'd be no more. A gash. A shutter knock–
ing in the gray blue of a deserted house.
To keep alive I not only had to forbid all speech from anyone
- speech in such circumstances easily turns to laughter - but I had
also
to excercise an entirely new patience. To see my bed on which
I sat as the mere violently rolling ship it was. The world outside it
was the world of noise, and this at all cost I had to avoid. I wanted
to go to the bathroom but couldn't - for that sake alone. Not the
flushing - that could be gotten round - but the sound, the water–
fall roar of piss emitted. So no decamping. You don't get off a boat
when it's
in
midocean. I let this thought buoy me up in these wastes
where there was no food and I sat like a monk, cold, shivering,
'worried about the speed of the great white lunar plateau which I
