The Stooge
As dream-life and waking-life unite,
so do Amy & the Living God.
(1998)
As I tried to decide where to go, the only place that attracted me was San Francisco, mainly because Cedar was there. On the phone he asked why I wanted to come. I said that I had to make a leap of faith into something and he was the only person who could support me in it.
In response he said, “I feel the countenance of God ready to pour all over you. The wisdom that you’ll be given will be passed down through generations. It’s about sky.”
On my first day in San Francisco I was walking in a park and I came to a fork in the path. I didn’t know what I was going to do in San Francisco and I didn’t know which way to go on the path. A bee came and flew two circles around me and went up the path to the right. Six years before I had this dream:
“I'm walking to work on another dull, frustrating day. I think, “I wish something would happen. Please, just give me a sign. Some kind of sign.” And a bee starts flying around my head. I swat at it with a newspaper. “That’s not a sign. It’s just a bee. It’s just a bee. Oh! Just be! Just be!”
I followed the bee up a path that ended high on a cliff where I sat down. There were green hills across the blue water, white sky, a red helicopter, the red bridge.
Cedar was attending Golden Gate Seminary School as well as ministering out of a center called Father’s House, located in Haight-Ashbury. Father’s House offered food, showers, blankets and spiritual guidance to homeless people and street kids.
Cedar told me Jesus had been calling street kids and they were coming to Father’s House asking what they could do to serve the Lord. Many of them were directed to The Land. Formerly a bed and breakfast, The Land had been converted into a year-round Sunday school for homeless teenagers. It was on a river in a grove of redwoods in northern California.
The night before I visited the Land with Cedar, and two guys named Bongo and Geronimo, I had this dream:
I am in a sacred place in nature. I know this place well, but I haven’t been here in a long time. As I walk through it I think of how Cedar told me sometimes he gets distracted by all the conspiracy theories, but understands that they are natural to people who are young and less wise. I think it must be even simpler than that: the only conspiracy is the conspiracy against love.
When we reached The Land I realized that it was the selfsame place as the sacred place in my dream.
The expression of Christianity at the Land was hippie-fundamentalist. A lot of the kids there were Deadheads and attended Rainbow Gatherings. They also performed faith healing and exorcisms.
The night before I went to the Land I also dreamed:
I am floating around a house. Inside there are naked people holding guns.
The naked people were the people at the Land and the guns were religion.
After we had been at the Land a few hours, a voice in my head started saying, “Lord Satan. Lord Satan.”
I told one of the kids about this. He replied, laughing giddily, “Don’t worry. That happens all the time.”
The leaders of the Land were Andrew and Debbie. At their house, Andrew asked what I was doing with my life. I said I was going through big changes and felt like I was entering a great blackness. To illustrate this I told the following dream which I had before going to San Francisco:
I’m on an island where me and a man try to kill each for a long time until we realize we have to join forces to fight a big black whale that wants to kill both of us. We make a bomb and blow up the whale, but the whale becomes the ocean, bigger and bigger waves of it sweeping over the island until me and the man both let it take us and we are held in its warm, black, all-compassing mass.
This didn’t spark any conversation so we chit-chatted about other stuff until it was time to go. We said goodbye and as we were going out Andrew said, “What’s the whale? Society?”
“It’s more like a womb I am inside.”
He said, “Everyone must to surrender to Christ.”
I replied, “But I have to listen to my dreams because I’ve been recording them for ten years and I understand them.”
As I said this he was going, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” as if he couldn’t wait for me to get to the end of what he already knew I was going to say so he could say what he already knew what he was going to say so we could wrap things up quicker.
I told him this dream:
I am playing basketball and it’s a next-point-wins situation. I have the ball and feel really aggressive. Suddenly, everybody leaves the court. I’m like, “Hey, what's going on?” An Asian man says to me, “Your name translated into my language has no sound,” which means it's Silence, “and your name translated from my language to yours is Violence.”
I commented, “To me, Christianity is like a next-point-wins religion, like Christians want to score points for God’s team, which is violent. The Asian man is the voice of the eastern perspective, and he says I’m violent because I’m trying to score. Silence conquers violence in meditation…In the whale dream, the whale overcomes the violence between me and the man. I don’t see what I can do but surrender to the whale.”
He said, “New age religion is a false god. Seeking power will decimate your life. Everyone must surrender to Christ.”
I said, “But that doesn’t apply here. I mean I’m being honest and I’m trying to find myself, and this whale has been following me for years in my dreams so I have to be quiet to hear what it’s saying.”
“Uh-huh-uh-huh. Everyone must surrender to Christ.”
As Cedar and I walked into the night a voice inside me was raging against Andrew’s Christianity, against its plot to murder my identity. In the chilly air, my rage cooled into numbness.
“When we were inside I heard angels and demons fighting over your soul,” said Cedar.
“What were they saying?”
“I felt it more than heard words, but the demons said, ‘This one is ours,’ and the angels were refusing to let go of you.” I imagined myself at the center of a battleground of otherworldly beings.
“I really feel the need to pray over you right now,” said Cedar. The notion embarrassed me, but I said okay. He held me and called Jesus “Lord” as he plaintively asked Him to have mercy on me. “Please, Lord. Please, Lord. I know you love him, Lord,” he beseeched.
To me, Jesus felt like a furious man that had to be begged for mercy, His face was indistinguishable from the tarry blackness of the night.
Cedar prayed without pausing, each utterance followed closely by another, with lots of repetition. This style of monologing dammed the silence and compelled attention. His emotion begged me, and God, to feel the urgency and sincerity of what he was saying so that God and I might establish a link.
I was numb and rigid. Cedar’s pleading seemed alien and far away. Sometimes I wished he would stop and other times I tried to feel his words. Petitioning the Lord, he said that he would give his life for me. Inside myself, I tried to surrender to what he was praying to, but I wasn’t aware of what I had to surrender. An awkward yelp squeezed out of my throat. Cedar heard this as a sign of surrender, and he comforted me saying, “It’s okay.” Then he said, “It hurts that I can see so much.”
I asked him what he saw and he didn’t say anything.
Morale at the Land was low, so the leaders had decided to give the kids a week off to do what they wanted. In the morning, nine of us got into two cars heading north on a two-part mission: 1) check up on a married couple who abandoned the Land in the middle of the night and moved back to their hometown, Eugene, Oregon; and 2) deliver Bongo and Geronimo to their respective families, also in Oregon.
Bongo and Geronimo rode with Cedar and I in his car. In the other car were five teenagers: Melissa and Rebecca, hat-wearing seamstresses who made, funky patchwork corduroys, Jessie, a mellow, blond guy who tended the chickens, Curtis, a small, curly-haired boy, and Tony from the Virgin Islands.
I asked Tony how he got to the Land. At the question, his eyes strayed off like flying saucers and his dark skin glowed warmly with memory. He told of how he was hitchhiking at night and couldn’t get a ride. He sat down on the side of the road to write in his journal. A car stopped immediately and picked him up. The driver told Tony about Jesus, Father’s House and the Land, and fed him pizza.
We had a rest stop at a vast beach. The kids poured out of the cars and danced across the sand like dandelion seeds on the wind. I couldn’t swing my arms when walking or let them hang when stationary or stand comfortably or relax my face. My toes scrunched up inside my shoes. Tense and miserable, I went straight to the water and stared out, but I couldn’t feel there was anything in front of me. Bongo appeared beside me and handed me a smooth, green rock.
After a few minutes we congregated back at the cars. Tony played his guitar, which was painted with Kermit the Frog and the word “Jesus.” He played simple chords and sang about society not knowing that Jesus loved us.
Further north, we stopped at a family restaurant for lunch, which Cedar paid for. All the boys piled into a round booth, while the girls sat at another table. After ordering Cedar left to use the phone and was gone when the food was served. Before finishing their food, the boys put some of it on the table to turn it into art. They were shrieking with laughter and tossed sugar packets at each other. I was worried the manager would come. I hunched over my food, wishing they would be quiet and behave.
Jessie passed me a couple pamphlets distributed by Father’s House. One had a drawing of a hippy under a speech bubble. The hippy was saying, “Hey man, put down that joint and get high on the Lord. Jesus rocks.”
When the waitress came to clear away the mess, the boys told her we were Christians and gave her a pamphlet.
~~~
When Christ had called the married couple, they were living in a van in Haight-Ashbury, selling heroin to support their habits. Once in Eugene, we discovered that they had separated. He was staying with old friends at a crack house. She was working, and pregnant. Cedar arranged for them to meet us at a Chinese restaurant for dinner, which he paid for. The idea was to have everyone together to process the couple’s sudden exit from the Land.
While we waited in front of the restaurant for everyone to arrive, Bongo told me stories about growing up on a lawless Alaskan island. There, the rite of passage for young men was to spend a summer on a fishing boat. He tumbled and floundered wildly across the sidewalk pantomiming packing and stacking fish on rough seas.
Jessie and Geronimo were the last two to show up. Jessie told us how Geronimo had just used rolls of pennies to try to buy hashish. The seller turned out to an undercover agent, who inexplicably let him go. Maybe the agent felt pity for him because of the penny rolls. Geronimo rarely spoke, but took the occasion to say, “What a long strange trip it’s been.” Everybody praised God.
Right after we sat down together at a table in the restaurant, the husband called his wife a “bitch” and walked out.
That night we stayed at a motel that Cedar paid for. The husband also happened to be at the motel because some friends of his were having a cocaine party--in the room beside ours.
In the parking lot, he and his wife had a confrontation and started beating each other. The cops came, but Cedar explained the situation to them and they went away without getting involved.
While he went for a walk with the couple, I was in the motel room with the kids. They turned on the TV. They hadn’t seen one in months. Jessie was channel-surfing with the remote and kept returning to a woman in a bikini displaying herself for thousands of men on a beach at Spring Break. Tony, said, “Yes!”
Curtis said “All right.”
Geronimo stared at the TV like an eagle with dreadlocks.
Bongo said, “Come on, Jessie, man.”
I retired to the rear bedroom. The walls were greyish-blue. I heard shouting and thumping from the adjacent cocaine party. I skimmed a paragraph of the book I was reading, Alan Watts’ Man, Woman and Nature, put it aside and got under the chilly sheets.
In half an hour I got up to brush my teeth at the sink, which was in an antechamber outside the bathroom. Under fluorescent light, in front of the wall-to-wall mirror behind the sink, Jessie asked me, “Do you follow the Lord?”
“There’s no way I can answer that,” I replied.
He peacefully assured me, “The Lord loves you.”
Feeling as if he had shot me with one of the guns the naked people in my dream had been holding, I shuffled back to bed and got between the cold sheets.
The way the kids related to Jesus awakened my greatest hatred: if a person was like them, they were good, if not, they were worthless.
When Cedar returned, I told Cedar the kids at the Land were a “Christ club.”
Frowning, he told me, “They’re just kids.”
The only thing I was sure of about my life was that I was readying myself to transcend. I was dependent on Cedar to accompany me. Spiritually, he knew me better than anyone. The catch was that I had to accept his world because if I didn’t, he would reject mine. I was trapped.
Just before I fell asleep Cedar told me one of the girls said demons from the cocaine party were telling her, “You invited us. You invited us.”
In the motel, I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart racing and my muscles cramping and twitching. I could not think. A tumult of rage was absorbing into me, urging me to destroy. Cedar was beside me. In his sleep, he opened his eyes, took hold of my arm, shook his finger at me and, as if scolding me, said, “No no no no no. No no no no no.”
The rage had consumed me almost entirely, but I felt an island of myself around my heart. I focused on it and my heart became a door. I turned away from everything except the door and I called through it to “love beyond name.” The door flew open and love annihilated the hatred with a sweetness that burned through me like white fire, leaving me as defenseless as I was when I was born. It was painful to have my organs and flesh and cells so open so suddenly. It was most painful at my stomach where I could still feel sickness that I was afraid to let go of. I couldn’t tell the difference between myself and sickness. Releasing sickness would have been like releasing my identity, which was synonymous with death. The Love Beyond Name told me, “I am Alpha and Omega.”
I was too overcome with the drama to think at all, and, after a minute, I dozed off. Then again, I woke filled with wrath and rage. In his sleep, Cedar laid his body across my stomach. I called once more through the door of my heart and love came again, but less overwhelmingly. It protected me with a vision that called itself the Eternal Monologue. In the vision I was a stone in a field at the beginning of time. Animals had not yet evolved. There was a cloudbank that extended from the ground to the sky. The Eternal Monologue was oblivious to the portals for hatred entrenched as cancer in my internal monologue.
I spent the last stretch of the night into the early morning trying to rest in the Eternal Monologue as a stone in the primeval field. When my mind still fogged over with wrath and rage, Cedar tethered me with rocking and cooing cued from the unconscious part of his being,
Before anyone else was awake, I got up, stepped over the bodies that covered the floor and left the motel to walk.
Cedar, Bongo, Geronimo and I continued north alone. I told them the details of my night. Cedar remembered none of it. Bongo remarked, “Yeah, before we went to sleep Jessie cranked the radiator to ten and then I, like, woke up in the middle of the night and it was so hot, dude. I said, ‘I’m burning in hell!’”
We stopped off at a hot spring that flowed through five pools down a hillside in the forest. There was a small shelter for keeping things dry. It had hooks to hang things on and places to sit while changing. There were a dozen nude bathers. Misty rain was tingling on my body as I stepped from the shelter to the water across flat stones. Bongo said, “Man, God is good.” Some Japanese people came and wore bathing suits. I immersed myself, letting the water from the pool above pour over my head so that I couldn’t see or hear and I let myself go to the warm blackness of the whale.
After returning to San Francisco, for weeks I spent everyday roaming the city from morning to evening. I crashed with friends and acquaintances, never having to sleep outside.
I went to Haight-Ashbury to speak with a woman who was like the mother superior of Father’s House. She had blond dreadlocks. Before she was called to serve the Lord, she had been a stockbroker. I told some stories and dreams and said I wanted to go to The Land.
She said, “I’m sorry, but you haven’t had enough experience in the Christian community. I have to go because I have to help with dinner, but here’s our telephone number. Tomorrow evening we’ll be feeding people in the Park and you’re welcome to come along. Have a nice day.”
~~~
When I first arrived in San Francisco I had the following dream that initiated me into the world of Christianity:
I agree to spend six months in the Christian ship. What am I getting myself into? Everything inside made from nice wood, but the furniture is pushed in front of the windows, and there are Christmas decorations that have been left up for a really long time. There’s a lot of masculine order, but no feminine appreciation of space.
I had this dream which initiated me more deeply into the Christian world.
Outside a church there are two shops. One is called the Game of Hell. The other is called the Gay Way wineshop.
I understood the “Gay Way” to mean that I was a closet-Christian. I was embarrassed to admit I was part of the Christian ship, so I decided to come out, which I did to Cedar and his seven housemates, who were all Christian. They accepted me warmly.
They lived on Otsego Street. Otsego is spelled O-T-S-E-G-O. An anagram of Otsego is Stooge. Because of this, and because of how progressive Cedar and company were, they called themselves “stooges” and their house “the Stooge House.”
The stooges published a newsletter that turned religion upside-down. Along with calling traditional church “stupid church,” they asserted heresy didn’t exist, the pulpit was Satan’s, and every person’s task was to find their place in the mystical body of Christ. They thought being a clown was freedom. (Clowns were synonymous with stooges.) Other than laugh and cry in response to comedy and tragedy, clowns could only love and create. They saw intrinsic value in everyone and everything.
And they didn’t clean their bathroom very often. Everything in it was covered in a layer of nasty, brownish gunk. I cleaned the sink and toilet. Then I took off my clothes, and showered as I scrubbed the tub. The stooges didn’t laugh when I told them: “You should change the name to Scooge House.”
One night everybody at The Stooge House gathered to make music. During a break Cedar was channelling words from the Spirit. He was going on warmly about the importance of community and friendship, and then, without warning he screamed, “Cowards!” Everyone’s eyes were bulging at him. He scanned us and said, “The Spirit is telling us that, too.”
I didn’t want to be near screaming people so I went to his room. By hand I copied a photo of a model, who I intended to be my feminine aspect. I turned it upside-down to draw her more freely. When I set the drawing rightside-up she looked eerily like a joker from a deck of cards. I drew the joker’s body with a clown outfit. There was a spark in it that wanted to jump out of the page, as if it was alive. I was reminded of this dream from six years before:
I am asked to be a clown for some dance performances. The dancers are divided into groups and have ornate costumes. My costume is white and light blue and I am wearing a ruff (an Elizabethan neck ornament). My face is not painted like the faces of the other people in my group because I am different. Music starts and I feel inhibited, but I quickly feel freer as I breathe and wave my arms rhythmically. Then I dance without limits as if I were bouncing on the breeze. I become a character. I am inhabited by a mischievous man-sprite. I am like the joker in a deck of cards. I am both clever and senseless. I am athletic without muscle. I have no mind. George is gone. I weave around the other dancers. I am wild.
When I associated the dream with the drawing of the model cum joker, it cued a key to turn in a lock inside myself. A door inside my body swung open. The Stooge entered through it, opening into me from my belly, at once surging down to my feet and up to my head. His skin was blue. His face was blue and shaped like the joker’s, and a bit like Satan’s. The difference was that Satan’s was rigidly locked into a narrow range of expression, while the joker’s was pliant and took on any expression. I felt the countenance of The Stooge’s face form through the countenance of my face as the possession was completing.
In an instant I was rocketing through the air in a realm of God's mind composed of fantastic color and texture, and filled with flying beings moving at speeds so great I had nothing to compare it to. It was like the speed of light. Then, for a moment, I saw the beings I had been flying with when I entered the world. There were three, flying in a V. I had been the central one. They wore white headpieces, like turbans, but without layers or seams. Mine had a blue star.
The blue sky had inhaled me. I had been “picked up” and jettisoned into eternity.
As I was being let down I saw shiny, black musical notation telling a story in the sky. The notation formed a bridge between rounded clouds that were tinted yellow and orange from the skies of sunset. Below the clouds, I looked all the way through the story that is reproduced in the Tarot deck. The Stooge was the Fool.
I was outside all stories, completely disoriented, and unable to form perspective of anything I was seeing. I was seeing everything at once.
Then, I sensed I was physically descending, coming down to a dusky, verdant Earth that was rejoicing in peace.
I found myself in Cedar’s room, feeling as if I had been resuscitated. Instinctively, I clutched at fragments of my identity, which I had lost in the collision with eternity.
Sitting on the edge of Cedar’s bed, my sense of continuity congealed a bit. I could see and hear, but trails from the realm I had been in were floating through me like clouds, tugging on my spirit to let go and fly away with them. The pull was overpowering me. Lightheaded, and frightened of disappearing, I left the room, without deliberating, to join Cedar and the others to get grounded.
I nonchalantly sat crosslegged listening to their conversation for a few moments. Then I thought back to where I had traveled in Cedar’s room and the other realm began to reassume me. My identity was dissolving. I reached toward Cedar, silently mouthing pleas for help as gravity brought me like a feather down to the floor.
Then, I heard the stooges praying and felt their warm hands on me, but, during those moments, I couldn’t call it praying and I couldn’t call them hands. I didn’t understand anything. I had no mind. I wasn’t separate from the world. I was an infant again.
As I came out of it, Cedar was saying to the stooges, “It’s high-voltage, but not demonic.”
I heard a stooge whisper “nut” to the others.
Once my faculties resurrected themselves and I became aware of the stooges kneeling on the floor around me, I said, “I want to stay here.”
~~~
These are some dreams I had while in San Francisco that spring:
If I don’t have the faith to take mescaline I will end up with black and blue eyes.
I ask God to take me and I shoot up into the blue sky.
An incredibly delicate plant of flesh is growing out of my foot.
I bound across streets when I feel no cars coming and dance across the land. Self is simple. I is complex.
~~~
The next morning the stooges went to the church they had helped start. They had intended it to transcend traditional church, but the pastor was undermining it by calling the stooges heretics because they were too freethinking. They were going only to say good-bye. Cedar was also leaving, on an overnight trip. As he was going out he told me, “Ask the Holy Spirit to comfort you.”
I went into the backyard and I laid on my back looking up at the sky and wondered if I was an alien who had come to Earth to transform into myself. No plans. No goals. No future. Just bee. I rolled onto my stomach and cried into the grass and begged the Spirit to comfort me.
I thought, “You have come way too far for this to end badly. Why don’t you just cheer up and go with it? It could be fun. Just pretend it’s a mission. Come on. Let’s go.”
I fell as still as a sculpture in the grass. Bugs started crawling on me. They seemed like lost sculptures, not knowing what they were looking for till they found it. I sank into the grass, and then below the grass, through the earth to the bottom of the sea, fusing with everything, accepting the metaphorical mescaline my dream had spoken of and my world began to flow in a dance of love and color and energy.
I felt the signature of God in everything. Nothing was dead. Everything was living. Metaphor was no longer figurative. It was actual. It was in each fiber of nature. Life was real. I sang, drew and made music more freely than I ever had. When I wasn’t creating I rested at the bottom of the sea.
While in San Francisco I dreamed:
There is a blank space between the ocean and land and I am trying to bring them together.
The ocean is the unconscious mind and the land is the conscious mind. I was “trying to bring them together” by letting them come together. Christianity was a ship because it took people across the unconscious waters, on which Jesus walked.
The stooges’ church was dying as I was being born. Three of them came into the backyard. I explained to them how the symbolic had merged with reality. They believed me, but they didn’t tell me that they thought this wasn’t normal.
That evening The Stooges rented “Scent of a Woman.” In it Al Pacino plays a blind man who hates the world, a metaphor for Satan. The stooges, as Christians, were gazing at Satan as he ranted about how he hated the world. Witnessing this craziness, I started dancing around while making jokes at the TV. Then Al Pacino became so wicked that it frightened me. I put my hands over my ears and sang.
I was grabbed from behind. I turned. One of the stooges was glaring at me. He said, “What are you doing?! We’re trying to watch a movie here!”
~~~
When I laid down to sleep in Cedar’s room that night the sounds of a growling animal and a heartbeat were inside the room. They had been audible there on other nights, and I had identified them as the heartbeat of the World and the growling of the Beast, but I didn’t pay them much attention. However, on this night, with Cedar far away, the heartbeat and the growling were so loud I couldn’t ignore them. I went to the center of the house where I didn’t hear any sounds. I started crying, and couldn’t stop. I got into the fetal position and cried about everything there was to cry about; my personal traumas, suffering and death.
I began to feel ill and got a fever and chills. The ill feeling moved into my bowels and I had to shit. I went into the bathroom and shit and shit and shit. Then I came out and cried and cried and cried, and then I went back in and shit and shit and shit. It was like a dream I had ten years before:
I am shitting and shitting and shitting and shitting.
This was the first of seven dreamless nights during which I rarely slept, but, when I did, sleep was dense and black, like being inside the whale. I didn’t need dreams because they had merged with waking life. It had taken ten years of working with my dreams and ten weeks of seeking in San Francisco to build up to the dreamless week. It took about ten weeks to cool down from it. While it was happening poems and paintings and music and dance blew around me like wind, all of them interconnected on an unbreakable web of being.
The next afternoon, while in the backyard of the Stooge House, I got a funny idea: I fished a dollar bill out of my pocket, put it on the ground and peed on it. In answer, I felt maniacally wacky laughter rolling out of the sky. I looked up into the blue grinning tentatively with my brow furrowed at how odd thing it was to hear that.
After the laughter stopped, the silence in its wake was eerie. I felt it was coming from a much deeper place than the laughter and vaguely understood the meaning of the lesson. Beneath the outrageousness of the clown was the silence of God.
Later on, I heard one of the stooges uproariously laughing in his room. Twenty minutes passed while he guffawed like a lunatic. The laughter sounded exactly like that which had come rolling out of the sky after I peed on the money. The stooge managed to whimper through his maniacal jubilation, “It happened exactly like I prayed for it. I know God’s laughing. I know God’s laughing.”
I peered into the room. The stooge was convulsive. I stepped in, smiling, and stood there for a moment. There was nothing to say—and nothing I could say over the laughter. I never found out what was so funny, but I noted that once laughter died away, God was very serious.
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