XIII - Unbound

Dan took a drag from Bobby, Dan noticed Bobby was by now completely lost to a different world, maybe he was in Bosnia.  A faint smile crossed his lips as he saw himself as a kid walking in that blistering sun. He was just 6 or 7 maybe, Annie must have been a bit younger. He was dark brown with thick black porcupine hair, a round face, dark eyes but somehow had this look of mischief written all about him, then. Annie too was brown maybe a bit fairer than Dan, she too was small, dark hair split into two pony tails. The only difference is Annie looked more scholarly, intelligence was written all over her, Annie had an aura, a certain sense of energy that was impossible to miss.  She had a laugh that was infectious. And boy did she laugh with her eyes – once again Dan smiled the smoky visions he was looking at were so pleasant, he was glad and so he took another deep drag and exhaled.

Dan could hear the FM radio playing a song he knew ‘when she goes she’s gone, when she stays, she stays right here’ …he sang along in an undertone almost all to himself and his mind continued to take him back to that day. 

They certainly did not look the least like any runaways as they walked, hand in hand with a lot of encouraging words of comfort from Vanaja, their serendipitous escort, by now both Annie and Dan had exhausted all their tears they were now left with just a few hiccups and an occasional sob, even as they sucked on the lollipop they were given at a bakery just after alighting from the bus by a very light and smiling Vanaja – who gave it to them saying ‘OK, runaways here’s your prize catch, enjoy’ and how we did ! And as we sauntered on in the distance we could see a kind of a crowd rushing forward, we could sense Vanaja tensing up first and then she muttered oh! There they are, your parents. Almost glad she had completed her part of the story.

Dan, thought that this complete sense of disengagement, his preference for alienation and his penchant for the melodramatic that he suffered from often may have probably had its roots somewhere in those years. But the problem with him was he was too much of an actor too, he could and would almost always end up trying to be an image, a replica of someone or something he would have found interesting, he was rarely himself – except when he was lost and alone. And that made his task of sifting through layers of himself very complicated, it was tough separating the real from the actor, the fake.

And the other comfort he had found in his later years of being a clown, a slapstick comedian who wanted to see others laugh through ridiculous means flummoxed him. To him so much of it was a negation of his inner self but he never knew why people always thought he was an comic artist, people always thought he could make them smile and he ended up obliging – and the joke was always on him.

Maybe someone wanted him to be an idiot, maybe his mother or maybe his father, maybe his teachers too, maybe his friends – someone somewhere wanted him to be an idiot.

His early childhood seemed too , too hazy, somewhere in that hazy dark alley of his mind he could hear several sounds, several hymns and cries, somewhere he found his mother screaming, with pain, somewhere he found his father doing something ugly and physical to his mother. Somewhere he found his mother stealing glances and smiling at another man – how authentic can these ghost like images be? Did he really witness such events? Did they have a bearing on what he became as an adult? Are you as an adult simply a sum of your hoary past ? a past that had no real language? No real metaphor? A product with no known source of supply ? mentally ? 

Physically, the DNA, the proportions and all that were pretty clear but where did he become what he has become? Why? When? How? Danny trail of thinking continued now onto a different track 'How predictable was my past ? the questioned boomed inside his head . For Dan these questions had become critical and he knew that his mind needed some real deconstruction, deconstruction? Or was it? Whatever. Dan muttered.

Peel away they used say - at the Confucian monastery he stayed, somewhere deep in Mongolia? Or was it when he was in China? - just peel away – you’ll find the Hereros, those native Americans, the aborigines all those living, roaming inside you. Inside you you will find the oppressed and the oppressive, you will find you the idiot.  

Dan took a another drag, the marijuana seemed slow in acting but the combination of the scotch and the grass gave him a sense of being ethereal, he turned to Bobby and said Hey! Come back from Bosnia Bobby! And he started laughing, Bobby looked at him and smiled and sang the song that Dan had hummed a while ago ‘ when she goes she’s gone..’ and then said to him ‘you seem lost yourself Dan, where were you Prague? Berlin?  The questions had a weight of their own. They, the questions, referred to their visit to the Jewish cemetery where they had smoked a weed dedicated to Yehuda Ben Bezalel and later at Berlin to the play on Nietzsche that they had been to. 

They were punch drunk and had stood up and questioned the playwright and all that that was being enacted before being finally thrown out of the theater for being such a huge nuisance it was a miracle that they weren't deported. And it was even more fortunate they weren't in the Nazi era. 

In fact it was in Germany that he had first conjured up his musical on Shelley’s Prometheus and it was in Prague he thought he would corrupt his musical and give it a Byronesque twist. An effect not unaffected by the little Czech red heads who had taken him to the Sex machines muzeum one night and then all hell had broken loose – Bobby and Dan were caught in a real crazy chase, someone did not like Bobby using a machine on a pet dog , we had to run for our lives, the pet belonged to a Mohawk head – Bobby had to use his real gun to escape.   

Dan and Bobby were by now swinging , they were back near the Chevy and they were singing and dancing to a Jim Morrison number LA Woman and by now they were managing to attract attention from people around – but they were on a highway and they were oblivious. Danny, was slowly but surely blacking out.

And the wind was turning cold.