Coffee with Kuwait

A novel

By Kevin M. Cowan

1990 Pure Pulp Press

1

Hush now! say I to the lightning bolt life that once was mine. Quiet now, from former lives unruly. Serenity to the weaponry; Peace now to my cocaine nostrils and junkie back tracks. I once ran drugs for the Mayan cartel. I flew a hollowed-out Piper Cub with an AK-47 slung about my shoulder and a German Luger at my side.

I was once a millionaire, snorted cocaine with Scarface, ate heroin with Janis Joplin and dropped acid with Timothy Leary.

I experienced this all in a frantic one-week experience long, long ago.

This was how I came to meet the Donegal brothers, this was when I met Kuwait.

As I said, the chaotic happiness of vice, of Byzantine acquaintances, was once mine. My life is quiet now. Too quiet. The clacking of my lonesome keyboard resounds clumsily off these walls so nurtured by brilliant cacophony. The clacks sound like cracked billiard balls on worn kelly-green felt.

Danger was my life. Danger is still my life though now it lives in distant rooms. I await its return. My name is Enrico Calderoun; but please, call me the caretaker.

# # #

Said Kuwait: "Many thrashing tides it takes to smooth the black-sanded beach souls of strong spirits."

Of my soul he said: "You could shade the Sahara, if it were your intention."

Think of that!

# # #

Kuwait lived as a mutt on the Earth. That is to say, he held no loyalty towards any particular political or religious institutions, had no living blood relations, had only one true mentor.

His mentor was an outlaw-monk hiding out in the mountains of Tibet.

Kuwait was of Bedouin extraction, raised by a nomadic band of Christian Gypsies who found him 'neath a palm tree, near death, when he was only two years old. A message, written in Sanskrit, fastened to the rug he laid upon. He was smiling. His skin was rich sandy-olive, his hair black pitch. His skin would remain that way, but he would be bald at age sixteen.

Kuwait traveled with the Gypsies for ten years learning con-art magic and febrile Christian doctrine. He learned of the Egyptian god Bes, the god of music and revelry.

At age twelve Kuwait, who then spoke only an off brand of pidgin English, was sold in Baghdad by the Gypsies to an expedition headed for Tibet.

Only Kuwait would gaze upon the lofty thoughts and mountain tops of Tibet, however. The rest of his group would be killed by the Chinese Army.

If this sounds like a lot of history in a short amount of space, you are right: it is. Kuwait talked in short cryptic bursts, just like the fortune cookies he wrote, just like the strange paintings on his root cellar wall. With his help, it is I who translated and assembled them. Of his life with the Gypsies he said this:

"Dipped I my hand deep into unsuspecting pockets of Arab royalty with the heart of Bes and the head of Jesus Christ."

He was caught once, which cost him the loss of his middle left finger.

"Heavy fingers grow light on clumsy hands." he said.

# # #

I write now from one of the four sitting chairs built on a raised bleacher-like creation behind the three massive houses. The houses are those of the Donegal brothers, but they are gone, and I am alone and taking care of the estate.

I am a penniless, aging, drug-gopher with three mansions to my claim. Imagine that.

The bleacher-like sculpture sets centered between two large stone monuments, built over the two gaps between the three houses. The stone card houses are minimalist and reminiscent of Stonehenge. That is, on September 21 and March 21 the sun sets into the ocean precisely in between either of the works, depending on whether it is turning fall or spring.

I refer to the houses as 'card houses' because of the oddly triangulated towers comprising the upper floors, or towers. The towers are conal with thin stone planking set at certain angles rising to 20 meters.

The towers were not constructed with shelter in mind. The towers were constructed to amplify sound for maximum clarity.

The three mansions are built entirely of stone and brick. Limestone, fired clay both beige and red, Granite, Pumice, Tourmaline, Quartz, ferrous shale, Redstone, Andesite and on and on.

This geological wonderland sits on the coast of Northern California, Humboldt county, U.S.A.

Guess what day it is, this day I've begun to chronicle my one and only mentor.

Well?

Yes, it is September 21!

I know this without a calendar, because the sun sinks now into the sea squarely caged by this lonely drug-runner's personal Stonehenge.

Who needs to know exactly how many days it has been since Jesus Christ died, anyway, when I have this?

Thank you, sunset!

# # #

The Donegal brothers came to America as mere lads, toe-haired and naive, with their father and uncle from Dublin, Ireland on Halloween evening in 1912, only 698,662 days after Jesus Christ allegedly died amongst thieves and Gypsies, transients and prostitutes.

One of Kuwait's descendants, a Gypsy king, died on a cross just to the left of Jesus. His last words, passed down around frenzied campfires, were these:

"We'll be back! You Bet! We'll be right back!"

Gypsies and Christians are still waiting. It's just that the Gypsies are having more fun.

# # #

Lonnie, Seamus and Ignatius Donegal came to America on the coattails of their ancestors. Their father was an alcoholic politician, their uncle an alcoholic musician. Both received formal training in stone masonry and architecture. The Donegal brothers drank for a time when they were young, though, upon completion of the houses in 1935 all liquor, save for home-made wine, was removed from the premises.

Their father, Donnie, and uncle, Chauncy were very close. So close, in fact, that they would embark from the ferry at Ellis Island and not give New York so much as a look see before they would head off, arm in arm, for the coast of the great frontier, for the shores of California.

There was nothing sexual or incestuous about them, they were simply soul mates, as would be the next generation of American Donegals.

None would marry. Donnie bore the three brothers out of wedlock with the daughter of a mountain sheep herder, the daughter of a Catholic priest, and the daughter of a stone mason.

"Daughters, daughters everywhere and only sons to preen," said Kuwait."

How true, how true.

# # #

The Catholic priest, incidentally, had a baby girl and then abandoned her for the priesthood. Her name was Heather Mooney, Lonnie's mother.

# # #

I said that I flew the piper cub with weapons covering my body. This is true. And though I carried a loaded automatic rifle and pistol for nine years, I never had to shoot anyone, police or otherwise, while running large amounts of cocaine from Brazil to America.

The only man I killed was a Baptist preacher in Atlanta. He was insane and frothing at the mouth, beating a pregnant woman on the head with a sign bearing the grotesque figure of a fetus aborted and then photographed for posterity. The woman's head bled from two small punctures holes on either side. The preacher, as he beat her, said these words:

"Unborn babies have a right to life! Stop killing unborn babies!"

He hit her again, hard.

So I shot him.

I guess I thought the woman had a right to life, too.

# # #

The preacher's name, incidentally, was Edwin Bishop. One of Edwin's descendants was crew along with the expedition that bought Kuwait in Baghdad. His grandfather. He carried the foodstuffs for the cook. This was a lucrative job to have on the expedition for two reasons: one, the food pack became lighter as the expedition ate it off; and, he got to eat as much as he wanted.

Kuwait got to carry the documents and logs and books. They were very, very heavy and only food for thought.

So, while Edwin's great-grandfather got fat, Kuwait got smart.

He would walk along, now accustomed to the weight (he was already in fair shape from traveling with the Gypsies), and read the text books, and the small assortment of Classical British fiction. He taught himself, was helped occasionally by one of the geologists along, Roland Withersbee.

Roland was a kind man, though very British. He could not trust Kuwait due to the fact the he was an Oxford-educated plutocrat and Kuwait was a sly-eyed smiling Jackal Gypsy boy.

And nobody; nobody, has ever consciously trusted Gypsy boys.

But Roland could not resist Kuwait's genuine desire to learn, so he would help him secretly by leaving him little notations inside the textbooks in the morning and then work them out with him at night after everyone else was asleep.

He never spoke to him if any of the other scientists were around.

"Strong mind, weak spirit makes a teacher for sure," said Kuwait.

Roland would die trying to surrender to the Chinese in 1957, on that fatal expedition to Tibet. He ran towards them ranting and raving, a Chinese infantryman shot his heart out.

Roland Withersbee raved no more.

Not fair! Not fair!

# $ #

Edwin Bishop's grandfather died, too, though not fighting or surrendering, but by accidentally falling over in the rice paddies and not being able to get back up because he had a fresh pack of food on and he was so fat. He drowned in the rice paddies bubbling like a half-beached sea lion.

# # #

Here's the scoop on the expedition:

The group comprised elements of the various sciences: Geology, Archeology, Theology, Anthropology, Psychology, Physics and Chemistry. The expedition was privately funded by the Rothshire Foundation, a company that, among other things, made guide fins for conventional 50, 100 and 500 pound bombs.

They also manufactured church supplies.

The expedition was a secret. The Rothshire Foundation wanted the scientists to sneak off to Tibet and see what they could see. If there was substance to the Tibetan religion, which was Lamaistic Buddhism, and if it contradicted the teachings of Jesus Christ, the scientists had been picked and trained to become soldiers and destroy it.

The ironic thing here is this: that's precisely what the Chinese army was intending to do, what they would accomplish soon after, when they crossed the path of the expedition right on the border of Tibet.

The expedition had no business being in China or Tibet without consent from aforementioned countries. That was the way it worked then, it remains the same today.

So the Chinese army opened fire on the group. They felt they had a right to do so; they were also in the process of making their culture live on and on.

Despite what anybody said or believed.

Amen! Amen! Amen!

# # #

How is it that I know of the fate of Mortimer Bishop, of Edwin Bishop's grandfather? Well, Kuwait, of course, filled me in on the details of the expedition, as he'd been filled in by Roland Withersbee.

And an article I read once while awaiting a large shipment of cocaine in Sao' Paulo, published in the Christian Cross, written by Edwin Bishop, said this:

"I devoted my life to praising Jesus Christ when I found out the heathen Chinese killed my grandfather while he was on a mission from God."

And as for his death, well, I read about it in an old edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. At the time it was published, I had only shot him the day before, I had not known who he was at the time.

"I know that guy," I said when I read the article.

News sure does travel fast.

# $ #

This is how I came to devote my earlier years, before the Donegal brothers, before Kuwait, to running drugs for the Mayan cartel:

I was born into peasantry in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1938, on Halloween, only 711,802 days after the crucifixion of the King of the Jews, after the death of the King of the Gypsies. I was not a king, a prophet, or a Gypsy. My parents and I worked the coffee bean and cocoa plant fields virtually all over.

Most people in Brazil get such jobs.

We worked for pennies, roughly translated about $1.50 a week.

One day, 22 years later, as I worked the coffee bean fields Emilio, another peasant, asked me if I wanted to make 200 quick American dollars.

I said yes, of course.

He and I stole a car, a squad car, and drove the car and the 20 kilos of cocaine to an airstrip south of Sao Paulo. As we arrived, a police helicopter appeared and started shooting. They wanted the squad car more than the drugs, I imagine. Nobody cared too much about cocaine exportation back then. Anyway, as Emilio and I ran for the plane they managed to wing him, or, rather, leg him, and he fell to the ground a writhing mess.

I made it to the airplane and struck my head as I was getting in. I was knocked out cold.

# $ #

Why did Emilio and I steal a squad car?

We were simple, uneducated peasants who took advantage of the first ride we saw. The ride, we thought, would provide money, would provide food for our families.

Besides, someone left the motor running.

# $ #

When I awoke the plane, the field, the squad car, Emilio were all gone. I looked now around a plush den/office. I had never been out of the huts and fields of Sao Paulo.

I was astonished! The den had brass fixtures on everything, down to the last brass tack in the desk; the wood was dark oak and mahogany; the carpet plush red; the chairs were leather bound and ermine lined. A man of Portuguese origin came through the double doors, he wore a simple though tailored black suit. I recognized the suit. It was of the same style as worn by the executives of the United Fruit company. When the Brazilian militia showed up at the small farms run by peasants to destroy their crops, there were always several of these men wearing these same tailored suits who would stand behind a large black DeSoto and watch our crops burn and burn.

He spoke to me in Portuguese, which I have here translated:

"You're alive," he said.

"Yes, " I said, bewildered, "I see. Then this isn't heaven."

"Some would argue that it is."

"What am I doing here?"

"Well, you were more resourceful than we imagined. You weren't shot or captured."

"What about Emilio?"

"Shot, captured."

"Why didn't you throw me out of the plane to die, then?"

"It's a policy the head man has. If a peasant makes it to the plane alive, we give them a job."

"A job?"

"Yes."

"I made it to the plane."

"Barely," he said.

"What kind of job do I have now?"

"You get to tend to Remo's private coffee bean garden."

What luck!

# * #

I would return to Sao Paulo again two years later. I would never see either of my peasant parents. These, however, are the last words I spoke to my mother before Emilio and I went to steal a car, before I unexpectedly began a brand new life:

I'll be back, mom. I'll be right back!

# * *

2

Tibet.

# * #

Tibet retains the loftiest peaks anywhere on the face of the planet Earth. They get the closest shot at God, so to speak, they get the best shot at jumping off the planet. The plains, which lie nestled inside the vast mountain ranges, are fertile only next to the rivers that flow to the ocean. The mountain ranges are arid and desert-like, climbing up to 29,000 feet above sea level. The temperature wildly fluctuates. Vegetation is scarce .

These ranges met Kuwait, nearly naked, lost, hungry, but still smiling.

# * *

Kuwait had evaded the Chinese army by hiding underneath the drowned and flabby remains of Mortimer Bishop. Mortimer had vomited as he had drowned, as well pissed his pants. Kuwait laid in vomit, piss and stagnate rice water for four-and-a-half hours.

When he was sure they had moved on he came out from underneath what was once Mortimer Bishop. Making sure there were no survivors, the Chinese army stabbed the entire expedition in the napes of their necks. Kuwait felt the steel scrape his throat when the soldier had come to Mortimer.

Of near Death experiences Kuwait said this:"In life's dream I felt, time and time again, the piercing steel-barbed brush of Death tickle my heart. It knew who I was, told me it's name, laughed, said this:

'I'll be back. You Bet! I'll be right back!'"

# $ $

When the Irish quintet finally reached the Pacific coast in 1912, they found life a little more to their liking than New York City. The coast was jagged and mystical, brazen and endearing. The people: miners, cowboys, lumberjacks, gamblers, drinkers and travelers, seemed to better suit their lifestyle, which was alcohol, carpetbag politics, music, Masonic architecture and body surfing.

One might think body surfing an improbable past-time for aged Irishmen. However, the first night on the west coast when Chauncy passed out in the surf, drunk, was revived by the water pulling him out to sea. He realized where he was and started swimming for shore at, coincidentally, the same speed as the wave coming into shore directly behind him. The wave picked him up, he rode it into shore.

"That's fantastic, Donnie," he said, "you ought to give it a go! I'm going on back out!"

Since then the Donegal clan surfs whenever possible.

Surf or die!

# % #

Of course, there was more to do than surf. The west coast remained largely untamed in many places; where the Donegal's made their nest was one such place.

There were mansions to build!

The Donegal's were not dirt poor. They were not dirt wealthy, either. Being educated in both formal and trade vocations, they could work varied sorts of jobs to add money to the small bundle they'd carried in their boots all the way from Ireland.

And with ten boots for a bank vault, you can carry a small, dependable fortune.

This is precisely what they did.

So Chauncy would work in the near-by villages as a free-lance stonemason; Donnie became a notary public (after they became American citizens) and worked as an architectural consultant, part time, as well acted as the only notary public for two hundred miles, in a bureaucracy quickly swallowing the common laborer. There was a need for a notary public. Especially one that could read.

The two men hired a Tibetan who had taken the name Ralph Wong when he'd entered America. His real name was K'un Chi' Wong. He held a doctorate in wave dynamics signed by the Dali Lama himself. He had studied sound waves in the mountainous caverns of the Himalayas.

K'un Chi' Wong was revered in Tibet as one of the finer nomadic philosophers.

Donnie found him working in the basement-closet of a shoe shop, mending soles by candlelight.

Some things never change.

# # %

The Donegals, Chauncy and Donnie, received their education via an art and architecture grant from the Rothshire Foundation.

The foundation wanted the Donegals to build churches!

# #

I never met Donnie or Chauncy Donegal. What I know of them I learned during my encounters with the three Donegal brothers: Lonnie, Seamus and Ignatius.

And as it stands this story is not about Donnie or Chauncy, really. They figure in to some degree, but don't mistake them for main characters. They were supporting actors in a drama waiting 10,000 years to unfold.

# & #

When Kuwait crawled from underneath Mortimer Bishop, he held only vague notions as to where he was. The Chinese, in striving for efficiency, destroyed all the maps, took all the food and usable clothing. All Kuwait could do was follow the path of the Chinese army.

"It is a desperate human who follows the path of slaughter," said Kuwait.

This particular path of slaughter, however, led Kuwait to his most profound learning experience while a passenger on planet Earth. This path led him to the Kuen-Lun mountain range of northern Tibet, led him to his one and only mentor Vijaya.

It is fitting, I think, that both Kuwait and I crossed only one true mentor each in all our various sorted and separate travels. This is why:

"Strong spirits choose their clan with sharp-edged razors and wild rubber bands," said my mentor.

"Great spirits will always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds," said Albert Einstein.

If I had ever met and befriended Albert, he could have been my mentor, too.

Albert also said this:

"Energy equals mass times velocity squared."

That simple six-word sentence set the world on fire.

Literally.

I can only hope, one day, to construct my own simple six word sentence to set the world's cerebral lobes ablazing. It could happen at any moment. I am in a constant state of near-awe. I'm patient.

Who knows? Who can tell?

# ? #

Vijaya practiced Lamaistic Buddhism in a tiny Tibetan village.

He'd foreseen the Chinese army.

Until 1957 Tibet existed under Chinese suzerainty, that is, the feudal lords of China allowed Tibetans to retain their culture though not their own governing ideals.

In 1957 they took the culture away, too. The Chinese were not the first to try (well, and succeed) to remove Tibet's Way of Living. The British tried it also in 1905, without much success.

The British were confounded that Tibetans resisted being "opened."

Didn't everybody want to be British?

Anyway, Vijaya foresaw the invasion and fled to the hills just two days before the Chinese army moved through his village, killed all the other priests, destroyed the libraries and temples, outlawed the speaking of Tibetan tongue.

Efficient Chinese Despotism.

A despot is a place where the leaders decide what the people should see and hear and believe. Not think, mind you. Thinking is not encouraged in a despot. If you need an example, just look around you. America, these days, exhibits many despotic traits. Look:

"Just Say No."

"Just Do It."

"Read My Lips."

Despots like to capitalize everything.

So Vijaya figured out the situation and made, as an outlaw burro back, for remote caves; began what he thought was going to be the life of a Buddhist monk hermit.

He was Wrong.

Vijaya never counted on Kuwait.

I never counted on Kuwait.

The Donegal brothers never counted on Kuwait.

Kuwait counted on ending up in prison.

Not hardly!

Oh Kuwait! what a family you alone have brought together.

Vijaya found Kuwait draped over a rock, a pale-blue sand olive lump of flesh suffering from starvation and exposure. Kuwait's feet were calloused, bloody. He was unconscious.

Still dodging the path of slaughter and control, Vijaya retained no permanent hut where he could shelter Kuwait, as it were, from the storm. He wrapped him in a Llama's wool blanket, placed him on his burro, continued dodging.

"A frail reed nearly broken by the wind, lifted above stone-faced death once more, once more," said Kuwait.

He slept two days straight.

Again, when he climbed from underneath the Mortimer Bishop security blanket of Llama's wool, he had no clue as to where on the planet he might be.

The same way I felt the day I arrived, unconscious, in Miami.

A small fire warmed a blackened teapot; no one seemed present to tend to it.

Kuwait was confused.

An ass stood at the entrance of the cave, tethered to a boulder; the ass seemed content. It was then he noticed a small man sitting cross-legged at the far back of the cave. This man was, of course, Vijaya.

"Hello," said Kuwait.

Vijaya nodded. He rose and walked to the teapot, poured a small cup of tea, handed it to Kuwait.

"Who are you?"

Vijaya nodded. He went to the burro and removed a small pouch of cold rice. He gave it to Kuwait.

Since Vijaya spoke no English, since Kuwait spoke no Tibetan, the conversations were limited to this sort of by-guess-and-by-golly dialogue for quite some time. Vijaya, incidentally, never learned much English. Kuwait learned to speak to him, instead, in Tibetan.

Unfortunately, I still speak not a word of Tibetan.

"English rapes the pure-breath passion of true speech," said Kuwait. In English, of course.

This may be true. Though in our rape and pillagement of the voice box, and possibly the human brain, we've become fantastically precise labelers and definers. Humans of Classic Taxonomy.

Hoorah for squares and boxes! Hoorah for columns and straight lines left to right, left to right.

Though I am disturbed about this I must tell you: Kuwait is my Junior!

We were both born in 1938: myself on Halloween -- October 31; Kuwait on December 9, 1938.

He is almost a month-and-a-half younger than me and so much the wiser!

I'm so embarrassed.

# #

The Donegal brothers, not related by blood, were born one week apart from each other in the year 1900: September 25, Lonnie; October 2, Seamus; and the runt of the extended litter, October 10, Ignatius.

I'll bet Donnie sometimes wished he'd used a rubber.

?

Kuwait stayed with Vijaya four years time, learning the Tibetan Way of Living, learning of life with a minor prophet. Vijaya maintained, it seems, a running contact with the thinly-viscous fabric of space and time and action.

Kind of like an interstellar fax machine.

Vijaya regarded Kuwait as his fate-given pupil and tried to teach him everything he could, given their pronounced language barrier.

"The rapids of Universal knowledge ran before me and all I had to drink with was a broken straw," said Kuwait.

But by the time the prophecy came, four years later, Kuwait's Broken straw transmogrified to fire hose.

3

Writing again from the observation deck behind little Stonehenge, taking in this monstrous aesthetic masterpiece, I feel ashamed. I've never done anything with my life! I've been a peasant, a drug-runner, I've shot a priest and had one massive experience with Fate -- amongst all this chaos I never really experienced or created anything.

I've never even been to Japan.

I've never found out what it is my masterpiece is supposed to be.

I think everybody needs to create a masterpiece.

I came to this conclusion reasonably late in life, my biological clock ticks and ticks melting evenly away like bourbon on the rocks.

Any ideas?

? ? ?

When I went to work for the Mayan Cartel, tending to their private coffee bean field, I thought coffee beans plants were my masterpiece. For two years I tended, nurtured and lived for coffee beans. They were my mantra, my existence, my prison.

I found purpose in the way they clung to the vine.

I clung to a vine myself, as it were.

No one ever spoke to me, save for one other gardener by the name of Lou Holtz. Lou was gay, wanted to teach me English and then have me be gay, too. I did not want to be gay. I did, however, want to learn English, so I was friendly though not sexual. I did not do cocaine, save for chewing on cocoa leaves. I was not yet interested in money, guns and fast living.

I was interested in women, but there weren't many around, save for the 'boss's ' groupie. She was beautiful. She thought I was a mosquito. Her name was Sally Reinhold, she was born in New York City to upper-class urbanites in 1941. She was 19.

She went to Miami to get a tan. She never saw New York City again. Sort of like me and Sao' Paulo.

I wonder if that happens to a lot of people who go to Miami?

Sally was related on her mother's side to Arland Marsh, Chairman of the Board within the Rothshire Foundation when they sent the secret expedition off to its death near the Tibetan border.

I know this because she told me one night after we'd made love in the boss's den, the one I'd been brought to when I first came to Miami.

Thanks, boss.

Thanks, Rothshire foundation!

Incidentally, I did not go to Miami to get a tan.

# $ #

As I said, the coffee bean lifestyle lasted two years. Sally and I never made love during that time. To her I was simply a gnat who'd dodged the swatter.

I remember I was packing a wheel-barrow full of manure compost into the coffee bean garden, walking by the car port of the estate when three men strode out onto the port. They were all dressed in tailored black suits. Two were white, one was Portuguese. The Portuguese man was named Johnny 'The Surgeon' Mateo. People called him 'The Surgeon' because he was so methodically precise when performing any act, be the act snorting a line of cocaine or slitting someone's throat.

Johnny, it would turn out, sometime in the last couple days during a fight must have lost precision for only one brief moment, let someone get a rabbit punch to the kidneys edgewise.

On the way out to the car Johnny's right kidney burst like a toy balloon. He collapsed, very, very near to that stone-faced specter of Death.

He lay on the ground screaming and wincing in pain. One of the men told him to be quiet and lie still, when he did not, the man shot him in the back of the head. He was still.

The two men discussed something amongst themselves.

They looked at me.

"You ever make the Sao Paulo run?" asked the one who only moments before had brought an abrupt end to the precision of 'The Surgeon'.

I nodded.

# & &

Minutes later, aboard a private luxury jet, I was headed back to my home town of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I still wore my gardeners clothes, looked a bit strange grouped up with men with perfectly tailored black suits, flying in the lap of wealth. I was nervous.

"Okay," said James, the one who shot Johnny, "can you fly a small plane?"

I nodded.

This was a bold-faced lie.

"What types?" Charles asked. Charles was James' technical henchman. He figured out details.

"Only the small ones," I said.

"The small ones?"

"Yes. The kinds with one propeller."

"You mean like a Piper Cub?"

"Sure."

"Alright," James said. He was satisfied and gullible. "we want you to fly a small plane back to Miami. Do you think you can do that? But I must warn you first that if you're caught, if you fuck up, you're a corpse. Okay? So, do you think you can do that?"

I nodded.

This, of course, was purely bold speculation.

I was tired of tending to coffee beans with so much action whining about me. I wanted drama. I challenged death. I tempted Fate.

How hard could it be to fly a plane, anyway?

# # $

Kuwait almost had to fly a plane once. This happened when he came from Tibet to America. The pilot suffered a massive stroke over the Pacific Ocean. He collapsed on the flap controls and the plane took a nose dive straight for deep marine waters. Kuwait ran up to the cockpit, pulled the pilot from his seat and took the controls.

"Hey, can you fly this thing?" someone asked from behind him after he'd pulled it out of the dive. Kuwait shook his head. He held no desire tempt Fate.

"Then let me in their, heathen, and let a Christian pilot take over."

This was 1961, remember, and Kuwait still wore the mountain robes of a Buddhist priest.

Ironically enough, the plane landed safely in San Francisco.

# #

We, too, landed safely in Sao Paulo. I was thinking it would be a great time to look up my mother and father and try to explain to them what kind of job I'd stumbled upon. I don't think they'd have understood.

As it turned out, we never left the airport.

We disembarked from the plane, embarked a Willy's Jeep, drove to a dirt runway behind a hilly patch of forest on the far end of the airport.

"Here, have a line, Juan," James said.

"My name is Enrico."

"Have a line, Enrico."

I tasted my first cocaine.

AGH! My burning nostrils and the sour taste of chemicals. I nearly vomited on James, but I managed to hold it down.

James laughed. He could see the displeasure I'd taken with the line.

"Just making sure you weren't a cocaine junkie, kid."

We arrived at the plane soon to be known as the 'Enrico Sleek.'

# ?

Not one of the Donegals ever flew a plane. Not one ever even boarded a plane, save for the B-17 hangered forever in the Davis Monthan air force graveyard.

Let me write for you the literary clock on the wall. I am chronicling a series of events taking place from 'then' or 1912, and 'now', which for the moment is one week after the fall equinox, 1993; only 731,793 days after Jesus and Zoltab were crucified, Zoltab being the King of the Gypsies, ancient elder of Kuwait himself, hung and bleeding like a coffee bean on the crucifix just to the left of Jesus.

But who's counting?

Also, I must warn you about my reference material. I am using The Encyclopedia Americana, issued under the supervision of The Scientific American, published by Frederick Converse Beach in 1906. Donnie and Chauncy purchased it from a traveling encyclopedia salesman whom they met on the train ride to San Francisco.

Back then it was 'hi-tech'.

The encyclopedia, of course, is pre-industrial revolution. Which meant most labor was still slavery-oriented.

Most factory labor today is still slavery-oriented, it just manages with fewer people.

Again, some things never change.

The Encyclopedia Americana is the one who let me in on how surprised the British were that Tibet resisted 'opening'.

Tibet can, no doubt, find comfort knowing that they were not the only ones being 'opened'.

?

'Opening', I think, likens to the despotic double-speak term used by American politicians when they invade smaller countries for their resources, which is this:

"Keeping the world safe for Democracy."

Or another one, made popular by the charismatic figure head, Ronald Wilson Reagan, which was this:

"Trust but Verify."

Both of those, in a less technical sense, in a pre-industrial sense, are what the British had in mind when they attempted their 'opening'.

# # $

Ironically, what the Chinese army did in Tibet, according to Americans, might be called 'closing'.

Like Tibet was a corner grocery store run by the I.R.S. or the C.I.A. .

# $ #

Since I appear to be on a data roll-call roll, allow me to draw a quick semantic distinction.

The word 'world' is an arbitrary term. 'World' is a construction of Marble and Ivory and Gold; or, in more modern metaphor, Silicon, Titanium alloy and Styrofoam. 'World' can mean the Universe, the social republic of man, or the planet Earth.

The word 'Earth' confines itself to the third planet from the sun, the one making itself known to the entire Universe as infested with humans.

Just about anything can be a world, but there is only one Earth.

We let 'them' know 'we' live, incidentally, by littering the Universe with space garbage saying 'Property of planet Earth'.

All we're really trying to say is this:

We are here! We are here! We are here!

'They', no doubt, already know this.

# ? $

I spat, rubbed my nose as I got out of the Willy's Jeep. I headed for the soon-to-be 'Enrico Sleek' confidently, as though I'd done it a thousand times. Of course, the last time I headed for a plane in Sao Paulo, I knocked myself out cold.

# #

4

Donnie and Chauncy Donegal started constructing their ideal estate in the summer of 1913, less than one year after passing through the harbors and gates of Ellis Island. They would not be around for its completion. Chauncy would suffer a surfing accident in 1922; later, in 1930, Donnie would suffer a grotesque masonry accident.

He would be drunk, of course.

Neither would fight in World War One.

Neither, for that matter, would the three Donegal sons.

Though unfashionable at the time, Donnie and Chauncy believed war was purposeless conquest; but if you had to fight at all it should be with swords, cross-bows, lances, hammers, axes and pitch forks.

Bullets, bombs and aircraft, for them, missed the point. War was one group of humans hacking on another group, looking hard into the eyes of fear and pride and rage.

The largest, fiercest, smartest, luckiest group won.

It was their own opinion, they bestowed it upon no one except their sons.

Today, the winner is the one with the most nuclear weapons and the most viciously efficient media campaign.

?

So all six remained on the estate when war broke out in 1914. There was no television, of course, so news seldom broke the early days of construction.

Coincidentally, the same year that the Donegal's started what was to be one of the strangest secret architectural phenomena in America, coincided with the first correct postulation of the atom by Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

An atom, he said, consisted of a nucleus of protons surrounded by electrically charged units, called electrons, rotating around the nucleus, each in its orbit, like a minuscule solar system.

Kind of like the Donegal estate!

A few years later Albert Einstein would take that one step further.

As would Ralph Wong the Donegal sons.

But for now it was 1913 and the mansions were dreams and visions. Construction started slow. There was land to clear, trees to cut for firewood and winter-housing, stone to acquire, help wanted.

They caringly cleared only enough trees for what they needed. No more. They laid the jagged plane, they dug caverns and a large root cellar and laid them with an interior layer of limestone and a thinner exterior layer of granite.

The foundation and flooring consisted iron agate, quartz and marble.

Stones were the cheapest thing to build with back then, but regardless, the Donegal's were a family of masons and they'd probably built it of stone, anyway.

As I said, they had three separate structures in mind. It was a classic Dream of Grandeur. And they probably could have never completed the project, so many years later, if it hadn't been for Ralph Wong.

Ralph was a member of a grand and unfortunate category -- he was a minority. He had many other minority friends in San Francisco who needed work, needed a place to live.

In 1916, during the 'Great War', fifty-seven of them showed up on the Donegal porch step one morning looking for work to do.

This was not a surprise. The Donegals invited them with the promise of free food and housing.

The pay was minimal, one dollar a day.

No one minded working for a dollar a day because it didn't cost them a penny to eat and sleep and stow their few belongings. Besides, the Donegals weren't slave drivers, they just didn't hold an inexhaustible amount of currency. They took the best care they could manage of the people who'd come to help them build dreams and visions.

Many of the workers were Buddhists and Taoists, so they knew what dreams and visions were like.

? $ #

And there really is magic on planet Earth.

# &

You might have noticed that the three characters used to separate bodies of Ideas and Instances change continually. This is called 'Las Vegas style' fiction. It is not my creation. I stole it from an outlaw who spent a week here not too long ago. His name is Jessie Devine. He seems to be slowly going crazy, raving endlessly that a Matchbook Spy is chasing him. He talked about fiction and story-telling as if it were a roulette wheel.

I preferred the slots.

Grasp the lever, pull it down and:

? *

Nothing.

$ $ $

Jackpot!

# &

So the Donegals adopted a minuscule piece of a minority to create their 'atom', to realize a vision.

It's important to note here that neither Donnie nor Chauncy drew blueprints defining their vision.

It existed entirely in their heads.

When the mass of Chinese immigrants showed up at the site in 1916 this, as I imagine it, is what they saw:

an area of roughly 5000 square meters razed, lying on the crest of a hill, the hill leading down to the swell of the Pacific Ocean. The estate was located near Klamath, which was about 15 kilometers away. Three foundations of 25 meters long and 25 meters wide were evident. The foundations were not quite complete. The foundations were constructed entirely of stone.

The Donegal quintet and Ralph Wong slept in the root cellar.

"My friends are here," said Ralph.

"Aye, so they are," said Donnie.

"They came all this way because I told them you were building something very special."

"What is it that we're building here?" Donnie asked, "I thought we were just building someplace to live."

"Ah, live. Yes, yes it works for that as well. Do you realize what you will have if you finish it?"

"What?"

"Three minor amphitheaters. Responsive to sound. Perfect for music."

"Huh?"

"Wait and see."

"Hey, Ralph," Chauncy said as he emerged from the cellar rubbing his belly, "can these lads surf?"

# @ #

Many of the original 57 Chinese immigrants still worked for the Donegals when Chauncy was killed in a surfing accident.

In 1917, the group built a massive stone-cutting band saw run by a paddle wheel set in a near-by river. This increased productivity six-fold.

At the time of Chauncy's demise, in 1922, the three mansion's exterior walls, built with limestone and andesite, and the interior walls, made of two-centimeter -thick, two by three meter sheets of polished granite, stood approximately 4 meters. The floors, made of marble, were finished.

This is how Chauncy Donegal left the planet:

Late one night Chauncy noticed the waves breaking a meter or two higher than normal. They normally broke at four meters.

They do that today, too.

Anyway, he walked to the beach, stripped naked and, like any true surfer, surfed. He had just finished his third run in. He swam out farther than normal, the current carried him half a Kilometer down beach.

That's where they found the body, at least.

Donnie Donegal had been watching Chauncy from the top of the hill. He saw him surf in three times. He swam out for a fourth and that was all. Seamus found him in the morning matted on the side of a massive lavitic coral formation just down the beach. He'd obviously caught a ten meter wave and been impaled on the nub of a boulder.

Ten meters was the guess, because that's how far the body was impaled above the shoreline. Chauncy Donegal lived and died on stone.

Surf! Stone! Die!

$ # &

Chauncy Donegal, Irish surfing musician dead before his time. Dead when, as time will have it, Mortimer Bishop, Edwin bishop's grandfather, still sucked his Mommy's nipples for lunch.

My mom was only two years old.

Kuwait and I were only windy whims of campfire lust, though I was a mistake, for the most part, but Kuwait's birth would be prophesied.

Chauncy was sixty-two.

#

Donnie and Chauncy Donegal were biological twins. In other words, their father's sperm fertilized two eggs in their mother ovum. They grew up together in northern Ireland, schooled together, traveled together.

Donnie even let Chauncy make love to the priest's daughter when he was done.

What brothers!

So, when Chauncy was found, Donnie went blank. He acted as though he'd lost half his soul.

All things considered, he had.

That very same day he said this to Ralph Wong:

"She's all yours, Ralph."

By this he meant the construction of the Estate. Ralph and Chauncy, you see, developed the vision. Ralph explained how, when dense stones were constructed in a conal formation, formed amplifiers.

It was Ralph's idea, essentially, to turn each of the four 20 meter towers on each of the three structures into large megaphones.

And, with the aid of the Donegal's, Ralph's vision, his masterpiece, continued expanding on and on.

"Leave it to a Tibetan to mine music from the Earth and play it to the stars," said Kuwait.

And Lonnie, Seamus and Ignatius perform their rendition of Little Irish Storm.

It was all they knew how to do.

Go figure.

$ $

I feel as though I make light the construction of the Donegal estate.

It was surely no lackadaisical sunny Sunday barn-raising.

I wasn't here, of course, and all I have to go on is the structures themselves and the stories told around the mammoth Redstone hearth.

Which is, in fact, where I write to you now. A steady rain hammers away as best it can on the stone roof. The roof will beat the rain for hundreds of years to come. I can't even hear it. I wouldn't even know it was raining if it weren't for the towers, the only openings in the main room of the middle mansion, which is Ignatius' place. I have the hearth kindled to a roaring six feet and the old stories seem to return with the fire. And though I wasn't there, these stones breathe with blood and labor.

I imagine this:

A shetland-drawn wagon rolls up to the estate carrying boulders and cubes, picked and cut from the innards of mastodon mountains, and delivered by hand, by hoof, to the Donegal estate. Metric ton upon metric ton delivered every other week.

One wagon left behind to unload, one empty one picked up to load again. The stones came from all over the world.

Mornings the crew would rise, many would chant, others would meditate scattered beneath various trees on the estate. The Donegals included. Though they'd been raised Irish Catholic, the intensity of the Buddhist spirit enchanted and enticed. The workers labored long and hard. They seemed contented an unashamed of their position on the social ladder in America. That was, in part, due to what they labored on. This was no rail-road job, with racist redneck head-men and week-old beans and gruel. No kind of job where they were required to work until exhaustion.

That is not to say, however, that the work was not exhausting.

Sunrise, meditation, rice and vegetable breakfast, off to work.

And the days that those carts came in brought both fear and rejoicing.

Fear because those were always the longest days, the hardest days, because the rocks needed to be carried down to the stream to the stone-cutting band saw. By hand, no less.

The day brought rejoicing because many of the deliveries came from China and Tibet and it brought many fine memories of childhood for the multitude of Chinese immigrants.

The Donegals enjoyed watching the workers dote over the rocks, speaking of the days of climbing mountains and skipping stones.

Then they'd set out to carry those stones to the creek, about 300 meters downhill. They attempted to build some sort of massive stretcher to cart the rocks in, made of wood, but they turned out either too heavy and cumbersome or too frail.

Nobody wanted the stretcher to break and the rocks come smushingly down onto their toes. After multiple trials and errors, they just carried them by hand or rolled them down the hill, which, I imagine, was truly a site to see.

From there the rocks were put to mill, to blade, and made smooth and square. This was the case when the Donegal brothers ran the show. When Ralph Wong took over in 1922, however, he had the rocks cut in an interlocking puzzle fashion, each piece an individual component of a larger whole.

Looking now, 71 years later, it is plain to see where Ralph took over.

Ralph Wong would, incidentally, eventually retake his real name.

$ #

It is also important to know that the Donegal elders were not sculptors. They worked with stone to build things, not to chisel image and vanity. They kept a complete stone working tool collection around, though used it only for functional purposes of construction and not aesthetics. They wanted to build a place to live.

As well, it appears that when Ralph continued on he pursued the functional aesthetics of acoustics and architecture.

Simply enough, no one has yet to carve, in stone, the story of what took place here just a few thousand days ago.

There are five of us left on the face of planet Earth who know the whole story.

? $ &

5

"When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the Earth, and the Dharma will come to the land of the red men."

-- Padmas Sambhava, founder of Buddhism in Tibet, sometime in the late 8th century A.D. .

# # $

Somewhere in here I'll need to write a story. This shift will be hard to explain. This has nothing to do with prophecy, Kuwait, the Donegals, nothing, in fact, except for my self.

I am vain.

I've tried for years to get over the fact that I thought of myself as a beautiful peasant.

I cannot do it.

I run, hide, hold myself in a void vacuum. The cartel wants my corpse on a palm tree, on a budding Ironwood cross, for sure, and I'm so vain I cannot, will not, give it to them. Like Snow White's evil step-mother, I'd rather contain my vanity to a burned out castle, to an ancient belief, than risk being human.

Than risk being Human.

Isn't that it? Haven't I learned, now, from American Swine? Haven't I felt the cold clench of capitalism driving the thirst from my Gonads? What more could they want, the Capitalists. the drug-lord-kingpins, the bankers, stock brokers, insurance salesmen, lawyers, they're all the same occupation.

They're Capitalists.

Great Gods Whomever! Isn't it about time we strung those greedy Bastards by their thin cranks and hung them from living room walls all across liberated America.

CHRIST! BUDDHA! ALLAH! MOHAMMED! MARLEY! BOB! YAHWEH! ASTARTE! ATUM! BES! MERODACH! SHAMASH! SHIVA! OSIRIS! ANU! EA! BEL! LA0 TSU'!, and most important, CHU'ANG TSU!

Just what the hell is a savior supposed to do in the nineties?

I've paced this castle, sat in all the right places, tried to bring this bizarre patch-work-quilt of a story together, chanced the reaccountment of labor I could never have known, brought into play Time, Fate and Irony where I've thought it pertained to the subject at hand and as well as the limitations of the Author could conceive -- I've intended you no wrong -- but I've left out one important aspect.

I remain, thirty-two years later, a vain illegal alien in love with a 51-year-old New York runaway: Sally Reinhold.

This entire work that I do, were I to do it without saying anything, would be Stoic Masturbation Fantasy without including this one four word sentence:

I Love Sally Reinhold.

And the worst conclusion that is possible is this: That it is not the body of Sally Reinhold I lust after, but the mind. Technically, I lied when I said we made love in the office of 'Remo' the head-man, in the first piece of American scenery I ever laid eyes upon.

It was, honestly, a dog-like reaction to sensual stimuli.

"Follow me," she said.

"Okay," I said.

As Pavlov predicted, I began to drool.

And now, for every human who ever asked me why I always disdained from sex, I say this:

I penetrated; I never came once.

Blame it on me, on the World, the Earth and stars, the drugs, my mother, father, estrogen, Fate, Irony, Time, my hair-style, masturbation, shoes, underwear or lack of cologne, this is the point, this is one reason I never leave this place:

I never came.

Though we spent hours in the attic of Remo's headquarters frolicking wildly, I never could reach orgasm.

This frustrated both of us.

Now, in the year 1993, I write to you with decades of pent-up sexual frustration. And the plain truth is this: If I am to continue living I can never leave this estate, can never pursue Sally Reinhold to tell her I'm sorry, because Capitalists and bureaucrats and organized crime would bust my nuts in a vice and stake me out for the Condors.

What, is masturbation the only way I can retain my humanity?

# ? ?

But fret not, I've thought of a plan.

? ? ?

Jackpot!

# $ &

The prophecy of Padma Sambhava drove Kuwait to depart from his mentor, Vijaya, to take leave of his formal Buddhist training, and head for America.

"Dire, it seemed, for I to dream in the land of the Red Men," said Kuwait.

Unfortunately, when Kuwait arrived in 1961, most of the Red Men and Women and Children were as scattered as Tibetans and dreamt on seedy, out-of-the-poplus' eyes, wayside reservations.

Many dreamt only dreams of alcohol black-outs.

Dream no more, no more; only nightmare of the slaughter.

Needless to say, when Kuwait disembarked the iron bird that nearly cost him his fleshy existence, he was a bit stunned to see almost nothing but White people.

Kuwait had seen this scenario before, it was the same thing the Chinese army had done to Tibet, that the British had done to India, that every one had done to the Gypsies.

"Frog eat fly, fish eat frog, human eat human and everything else -- the chain remains unbroken despite a hundred million dreams of Peace," said Kuwait.

# * &

Peace.

* * #

How, I wonder, can we call ourselves an 'Advanced Society' when we can't even seem to break the food-chain habit of cultural devastation?

Strange World. Marvelous planet Earth! Violent and primal World.

See the difference?

$ &

What Kuwait had not seen before was the amassment of iron birds, iron horses, iron buildings, concrete roads and neon.

Kuwait was shocked, intrigued, and a little dizzy. He had, after all, almost never made it here.

Kuwait walked away from the airport in a stupor. He really hadn't expected what lay before him ready to swallow him whole. He moved carefully, as though the sidewalk were laden with claymore mines. He was not wholly unprepared, however. He'd spent four years in the mountains of Tibet training for this soul-testing moment, now it loomed upon him, he did what any good Buddhist would do:

He sat down.

He thought unthoughts.

He closed his eyes and waited there until something happened.

Hours passed.

"Hey there, son, you look as though you could use some help." This was Seamus Donegal, down from the estate for a weeks walk about town. His blonde hair was long, he had a beard. He smiled when Kuwait looked up at him. Kuwait looked him in the eye, grinned his famous grin in return.

Recipe for Instant Friendship: Just add understanding.

# ? *

Kuwait hadn't heard English for four years, though he remembered most of what Roland Withersbee taught him. He nodded, asked this question of Seamus Donegal:

"Just where the hell am I, and where are all the Red Men at?"

Seamus understood the question, Donnie and Ralph taught the boys what the herds of White Men did to the once vast herds of Red Men:

They shot them, burned their villages, destroyed their tongue, gave them something they had no natural tolerance for, which was alcohol, and sat them down like an unruly school boy in the middle corner of nowhere.

Seamus explained this to Kuwait.

Kuwait understood.

"Need a place to make camp, Laddie?"

"Yes."

"Follow me."

And, as Pavlov predicted, Kuwait began to drool.

% $ #

"Why did you talk to me?" Kuwait asked as the two headed for the Marina District.

"You have the robes of a Tibetan monk. My teacher wore the same. You seemed to be waiting for something to happen, I figured I might be that something. K'un Chi' said that's the way it works."

"Who?"

"Ku'n Chi' Wong, an old instructor of mine."

"I'd like to come to know him."

"You can't."

"Why not?"

"Well, he up and died eleven years ago."

"Of course," said Kuwait, "well, I'll see what I can do."

# ? *

Yes, as I said, Ralph Wong, after completing his masterpiece, took back his original name.

"Fuck' em if they can't take a joke," he said. He'd learned this from Chauncy many years before, and used it with memorial flair, reminding all of his partner in art, architecture and music.

After that, the brothers only called him Ralph when they were teasing him around the supper fire.

Everyone thought of it as one massive joke, kind of what they thought about life itself.

# &

For Ku'n Chi' and the Donegals, Life is too important to be taken seriously.

$ ?

Be advised, faithful reader, that I will embark on no theology lecture. I am not an expert on Buddhist practice nor principle. Like so many other humans on the planet, I can only tell you what someone else told to me.

Nor is this an extended history lesson, save for the fact that it happened in latter times.

Again, I can only tell you what's been told to me, and whatever hodgepodge I happen to run across in an 87 year-old set of Encyclopedia Americana. This is the lot of my reference material.

There is a phrase that applies here, a pearl handed down to me via the lips of Ignatius Donegal, it is this:

ipse dixit.

These two words, I have realized, are all I would have to have to said to anyone questioning anything I ever said.

Translated the phrase means, simply: "The Master has said it."

So I say this to anyone, now, who questions my validity:

"Ipse dixit."

I find it very American.

? #

Also, I want to apologize to the feminist readers, be there any, for the fact that there are more men in this story than women. This is, of course, not my fault. This is the way it happened. But maybe it would help if you thought of it as a story about this: it is all about men who failed to please women.

"God would've been crazy to make men first, and the Mud sure didn't do it. You've got to have something fertile, first, to fertilize."

Ipse dixit.

# *

The boat owned by the Donegal brothers was bequeathed unto them in the Last Will and Testament of the widow Hattie Wilcox. She maintained a modest estate in Klamath until she died in 1938, the year Kuwait and I left the sanctuary of our mother's wombs.

The boat was named the Heather Patty Mae, after the three separate mothers of the Donegal brothers.

Not one of them knew their respective mothers.

The Donegals had constructed for Hattie Wilcox, in 1932, a rather large gondola, in stone, of course. Though rather than follow the blueprints she had had drawn up, they fashioned an oddly-shaped monolithic monstrosity featuring a massive megaphone, pointed skyward, for a roof.

And though she dismayed, the gondola remained unchanged.

"It's our trademark," they said.

$ & *

The widow Hattie Wilcox spat on the gondola for two years following its completion. It wasn't until one day when a nephew of hers arrived from Crescent City, California with violin in hand ready to perform for an aunt he'd not seen for years. He just happened to play for her in the gondola, despite her protest, and it was then that Hattie Wilcox fell in love with the gondola and the Donegal brothers.

She could walk anywhere on her estate and clearly here the violin concerto performed for her.

As it turned out, she started having bands out every other week.

When she left planet Earth in 1938, the nephew, Malcom Wilcox, sailed the sloop down the coast to the Donegals.

He could not believe what he saw.

* $

The Heather Pattie Mae was made of Yellow Cedar and White Ash. It was one of the few wooden things the Donegals owned. The other things were place settings (plates, chopsticks, spoons and forks) and various parts of the three instruments. She was a 15 meter sloop. She was all the transportation the Donegals owned.

I write of this in the past-tense because I don't know whether or not the Donegals live today. I haven't heard from them since they left the estate in 1985.

Kuwait left in 1986.

I've been here alone, now, for seven years. I see no one save for an occasional wanderer.

The Heather Pattie Mae only had room for four, they'd asked Kuwait to go, though they'd not extended the same invitation to me.

"We need someone to be the caretaker, would you like that?" was the invitation I'd received.

I couldn't leave anyway, so I said, "I'll take it."

And then the Donegals set sail southward.

That was the last time I saw the Heather Pattie Mae.

# # *

So when Seamus showed Kuwait the Heather Pattie Mae, told him it was the only way there from here, Kuwait had said: "Truly refreshing, it is, to leave the death-forked fiery belly of iron animals and ride relaxed on the benign back of a hard-wood dolphin."

Ironically, Kuwait would be sea sick in under two hours, crying playfully, of course, for the bellies of iron birds, vomiting and laughing, headed North for a point near Klamath.

?

6

"Start that thing up, Enrico!" James yelled from the Jeep.

"Just looking it over. I'll be ready in a moment."

Actually I had only a vague notion as to what I was doing. I knew this about airplanes: you pull the handle back to go up and push forward to go down. And when you land you always, always keep the nose of the plane up.

I had learned this, incidentally, thanks to American war movies shown in translation in the television store in Sao Paulo. If they hadn't sent down these silver-screen-gems-of-soundstage-war , glorifying ignorant and proud soldiers who fought in Hollywood so many years ago, I never would have learned to fly a drug-laden Piper Cub to Miami, Florida.

Thanks Hollywood!

"Start that fucker, Enrico. Now!"

I fiddled with the knobs, there weren't too many on the simple control panel. By chance I hit a button and the engine shrugged. I hit that button some more.

Sputer, sputer SPUUURRRRRRR!

Eureka!

I felt as though I'd just climbed the Klondike. I gave James a big coffee bean grin, though he couldn't see this because it was dark.

So far I was no corpse.

We were close to the ocean and I could hear the waves break on reefs of coral I'd surely seen as a young boy. I would not see them in day light anymore, only hear them break and grind the rocks to sand.

James came over to the plane with two maps and a pen light, and an old M-1 carbide.

"Here, kid, you may just make it yet. I was just about to shoot you."

"Thanks for not doing that."

"Oh, no problem, you got the plane started. Now if you wreck you'll die anyway. Or at least hope you do. You don't want us to get ahold of you if you live."

"I understand." Now that I think about it, I knew that James was on to me and was just having a good time watching me face probable destruction. I was calm, now that the engine ran and I still breathed. These were two bonuses.

"Here's a map of where you'll refuel, a small strip in Belize. Stay low, watch for the Coast Guard."

"Good advice," I said, trying to sound casual.

"Get going."

James closed the hatch, went back to the jeep. Charles pulled a cord attached to a generator and a runway appeared before me.

Agh! I was so nervous! My stomach wrenched and my colon was sucked up tight as shriveled persimmons. My gonads sweated profusely; they itched, too.

Tension was everywhere!

I put my hand on what I thought was the throttle, the engine jumped. So did I.

I pulled back a bit on the stick so the plane wouldn't dive forward on to the ground right in front of James and Charles. I would have been a corpse, then.

I eased the throttle back, the rear-end came off the ground and WAHMMO! I moved down the runway! I was shocked, intrigued and scared shitless.

More throttle, the plane roughly sailed down the strip. A feeling of lightness, I recall. All of a sudden I weighed nothing.

The 'Enrico Sleek' and I were one and airborn.

I felt as thought I were born to fly.

And the ironic thing is this: I was. Not only did I land the 'Enrico Sleek' in Belize to refuel and then again outside Miami, I made it in record time! To this day, honestly, I can take no credit for that. I have no idea how I made it that quickly, and I've never been able to duplicate that in the hundreds of runs I made for the Mayan Cartel.

Sheer Beginners Luck.

I learned, incidentally, what the names of all the instruments in the 'Enrico Sleek' were. They are: Altimeter, for altitude; Tachometer, for engine R.P.M's; an airspeed indicator; an oil pressure gauge and a fuel gauge.

As I said, the 'Enrico Sleek' was a humble plane.

There was no radio. I flew low and avoid contact with radar. Since I carried contraband, this seemed like a good idea.

The steel boxes the cocaine rode in were made by a sub-division of the Rothshire Foundation. Their name was printed on the bottoms of all the boxes.

At that point I had no clue what a role the Rothshire Foundation would play in my life.

Maybe I should write them a letter.

$

But what could I say? That, thanks to them I became a celibate, ex-drug runner Buddhist apprentice to the sole survivor of that secret Tibetan expedition of their's that didn't quite make it to where it was going; and, oh yeah, I sort of had sex with the grandaughter of the Chairman of the Board.

And by the way the steel boxes you produce make great cocaine-transport containers.

Please send church supplies.

Thanks a million, signed, Enrico Calderoun.

Do you think that they'd believe me? Do you think they'd send the church supplies?

The World may never know.

? ? *

I need to confess yet another weakness, despite self-chagrin, because now that I think about it, it may be why the Donegal brothers didn't ask me to go along with them. It is this:

I've never surfed.

I find this hard to believe, being that I've lived close to the ocean, both Pacific and Atlantic, as well as the Gulf of Mexico; yet I can't recall a whimsical swim in the substance that composes two-thirds of the surface of planet Earth, which is seas and oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, straits, fjords, swamps, ponds, puddles, bays and channels and so on.

I guess I never cared much for water.

Again, your humble narrator begs your pardon; if only because of the body odor.

So much to do, so many things to experience and create, and ever so little available time.

Maybe it's time I learned new tricks.

"We need to never forget to continue to look to the Earth with the wonder-filled eyes of a child -- fondling, poking, probing, playing, dancing,seeking, climbing and drawing sunshine rainbows in the sand. For the Worldlings surfing is a mere pastime. For the Earthlings it's a Way of Living."

Ipse dixit, of course.

Surf! Yes! Surf of die, die, die.

≈ ≈

Though I made record time from Sao Paulo to Miami, I did not beat the luxury turbo prop containing my new boss, James, and his sidekick, Charles.

They beat me by three hours.

"Good Christ! James said, congratulating me on a run he'd not intended me to return from. As it turned out, I was either to crash or be arrested with papers identifying me as Johnny 'the surgeon' Mateo. This would, of course, cover up for his temper tantrum on the day before yesterday when Johnny's kidney failed. He was flabbergasted. He continued, "How the hell did you do that? You weren't supposed to be here for at least another hour. Just who the hell are you anyway, Bean-picker? Some sort of narc for Mendozin cartel, maybe? Or worse yet, a cop? Just who the fuck are you anyway?!

With all the humility of a coffee-bean peasant I said, "I am Enrico Calderoun." I had no idea what I'd done. I had, as I was told, flown the plane back to the strip from where we departed. With my fortune rose the sun and I found the landing strip through recognition.

Had it been dark I would have flown on north, no doubt, to Georgia.

A car was pulling up to the site; a black DeSoto, I thought. As I would ride home in it I would learn it was a Cadillac, not a DeSoto.

Up until that time I thought all Americans drove large black cars called DeSotos.

This also, Remo would explain to me, was an American faux pas.

It would not be my first.

$

Incidentally, the phrase 'faux pas' is French and pronounced "FOE-PAW".

The first time I saw it in print I pronounced it "FAOX-PASS". Lonnie thought it quite amusing. Seamus said it was a joke unto itself. The two of them started poking me in the ribs and chanting "FAOX-PASS! FAOX-PASS!" I thought this was uncalled for.

I thought I'd let everyone know so they wouldn't have to go through anything as traumatizing.

I wouldn't want to see them make a social faux pas.

# $

The Cadillac pulling up the the end of the runway contained the notorious head-man whom to this day I know only as 'Remo'. I do not believe, however, that this was his real name. This is not ipse dixit, so I could be wrong. For a namesake, I will stick with Remo.

Remo's Cadillac pulled up while James busied himself with my death. He was ready to make me a corpse now.

"You fucking bean picker! Leave it to a moron like you to blow a perfectly good cover up. How the hell did you pull that off? You've never been outside a bean field. We knew that. What, you didn't think we knew that? You greasy, bean-brain whop.! Turn around so I can blow the back of your head off!"

"I wouldn't do that, James."

James froze. He recognized the voice. It was Remo.

Remo, as it happened, was a 'whop', too.

"Uh, Remo, hey! Just found this coffee-bean tender of yours about to run off with 20 kilos of cocaine. You want to finish him off or should I handle it?"

"Where's the surgeon, James?"

"Now that's the damndest thing, Remo. Johnny, dropped off in Sao Paulo. Real quick thing. Up one minute, down the next. Charles and me, well, we tried to bring him back with heart massage but it didn't work. And, well, we stripped him and left him there on the beach. Charles flew the plane back. Otherwise, we'd been totally fucked."

Remo looked at Charles who pretended to be figuring out some important detail, he looked back to James.

"James, Sally saw you shoot the surgeon in the back of the head the day before yesterday. I wish you'd told me the truth. Charles."

Charles pulled a revolver from his jacket and shot James in the forehead.

Like the scientists on the secret Rothshire expedition, Charles could be either a detail man or a killer. Whatever was necessary.

Some people are not what the seem to be on the surface. I'd never pegged Charles for an assassin, which by most people's standards made him a pretty good one.

Remo spoke to me then about my new and short-lived boss.

"Put him in the trunk with the surgeon," he said. This was the trunk of the Desoto, where James put Johnny after he blew his head off. Now I laid James next to Johnny. They looked very similar. You could never guess that one was of Portuguese extraction and the other one of mutt American. Now they were two lumps of dead flesh with severe head wounds, wearing black suits.

Before I laid him in the trunk, however, Remo took the Luger and handed it to me.

"You'll need this," he said.

He was right.

How else could I have been able to shoot Edwin Bishop?

$ #

By this former passage I do not mean to imply that shooting people solves anything. I want not to make light of murder. It does, in fact, solve nothing. It might only give a rationale to those who think shooting people is O.K. .

I am advocating many concepts in this chronicle, but shooting people is not one of them.

And though today I feel no guilt for my one killing, I don't think I would do the same thing were I to find myself in a similar situation.

Thanks to the Donegal brothers, I'd probably just grab a pitchfork and poke Edwin Bishop in the ass. This might make him think before he strikes a pregnant woman with an anti-abortion sign next time.

As it stands here, I do advocate thinking.

As it was then, in 1969, I was frustrated with a foiled love affair and a boss looking to have me dead. Also, I'd just met Scarface in the restroom of a fine restaurant. I was nearly insane with grief.

I guess I took my frustration and grief out on Edwin.

As I said, this was not a proper response. It was, however, a human response.

Humans are very proficient at killing because we've been doing it for thousands of years. For humans, it is easier to kill; or, rather, to have something killed, than it is to try to adjust and learn about it.

Peace, by all means, remains much more a challenging pursuit than War.

Again, Peace.

≈ ≈ #

"This is a fine DeSoto, sir."

"It's not a DeSoto. It's a Cadillac, uh, . . . what's your name?"

"Enrico Calderoun."

"It's a Cadillac, Enrico."

"I see. Thanks for the pistol."

"Like I said, you'll need it."

"Why? Aren't I returning to the coffee-bean garden?"

"You flew that plane from Sao Paulo, correct?"

"Yes."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"Yes."

"Well, thanks to James I've got a couple places open. Could you fly that run again?"

"Sure."

"Get this guy a black suit, Charles."

It was that simple.

Strange and marvelous Fate in our little tick-tock-a-day World.

# ?

This instance of Fate begat my career as a pilot. It lasted six years. At the time I was an enthralled, hardly reticent, uneducated peasant whose only dream was to be obscured by clouds of cocaine nightfall.

Now I'm an informally educated, terminally aging caretaker whose desire to fly goes this far: the next time I leave the surface of Earth will be when I find my Death.

I learned a great deal in my six-year stint as a drug-runner, but we'll come back to this.

We need to finish those mansions.

A & Ω

7

Wind and waves tear the trees and beaches to tattered remains here and now at the Donegal estate, as they have for eons. It is October and as caretaker I must prepare the estate for November though March -- shroud it from death and await rebirth. This includes covering the instruments and oiling their complex series of cogs and pulleys.

As I said, the mansions remain open to the environment -- not a glass window-pane in the place -- and as such these openings must be covered with large tent-like flaps of canvas and then shuttered from inside. This isn't as hard as it sounds because all these awnings hang from their respective places atop the mansions, rolled up and ready to drop at the dangle of an unwound rope.

And one merely closes shutters.

As you might have been able to surmise, my job is not all that time consuming. This leaves me stone-loads of time in which to pursue my newly-found creative streak, leaves me ample time to prepare this chronicle for those who may visit later.

Yes, I think I found my masterpiece, my mantra, my path to make the world slip away. Again, we'll come back to this.

# ?

For the 57 Chinese workers employed, now, by the one Donegal brother and Ralph Wong, work didn't change much after Chauncy splattered himself on an extended chunk of lavitic coral.

They still had stone, still had temple-mansions to build. For the workers these structures were in the realm of monastery, not mansion.

Ralph felt this way, too.

Donnie became good only at simple stonemasonry. It was as though he'd never read a book, or drew a blueprint, or notarized a public document.

He drank, he carved stone: that was all. He didn't even object when Ralph turned the mansions into large interlocking puzzles from 5 meters on up.

He would die near the completion.

With Ralph at the architectural helm, the mansions took a turn towards the circular; rather than the linear. At this time, which was 1922, only the endostructure of the towers existed, and the walls stood only 5 of their 12 meter proposed height. There were no roofs, of course, though they had completed each of the Redstone hearths, constructed in the center towards the rear of each, over which they'd stretched a circus-tent canvas purchased from a traveling circus named The Hooper Brown and Billy Goldtooth's Asian Oddities Extravaganza -- the show was a farce and as such they had had a tent for sale.

The tent worked well for covering the Tibetan-Irelandian spectacle, rising slow, like a Andesitic Redwood, from the bosom of northern California.

In the winter months the entire crew moved into the root cellars.

The root cellars were oblong and spacious, meeting in one large oval-oblong-shaped room in the center. This is the room, incidentally, Kuwait would take for his own when he arrived 39 years later.

"These corridors hold the snow-white contemplations of life and death," he said, then commenced painting

Kuwait was not far off. In the winter, Lonnie has told me, there wasn't much exterior work that could be done except when the weather broke. Most of the time spent in the cellar was devoted to meditation, learning, and music.

Until Chauncy died, he taught Lonnie, Seamus and Ignatius all that he knew, most of which was music. He made each one choose an instrument. Ignatius chose percussion; Lonnie, the accordion; and Seamus, the Dulcimer and Mandolin.

Chauncy could play just about anything.

They used the time in the root cellar for learning from the Encyclopedia Americana, studying sound waves and Buddhism with Ralph, and making music with Chauncy.

Donnie, were Chauncy and Donnie to be a Vaudevillian duo, would be the 'straight man.' He taught the young Donegals science to the best of his knowledge. They tell me he knew enough.

Chauncy was what you might call the 'late man'. They were a classic Abbott and Costello, perhaps.

"From great Gaelic halls sailed the laddies, we,

to roam vast shores of liberty.

We mean to be peaceful, sing songs of the free,

and craft our ideals in stone harmony."

-- Chauncy Donegal, lyrics from "Little Irish Storm"

& * ?

Over time and living in isolation, the Donegals, Ralph and the 57 Chinese-Americans formed an extended family -- existed as a minor community.

With Donnie's help prior to 1922, all the Chinese became United States citizens.

The family was quite nearly autonomous, importing only stone, tools, cotton, wool, leather and rice. As well as constructing the mansions, they maintained a varied vegetable garden. They kept a stock of several milk cows and a dozen chickens, only for their eggs. They sewed their own clothes, made their own wine.

What more did they need?

? $ *

Spring's tides washed the winds of spring in around March, and they took back to labor on rising songs and visions. It was more meticulous to craft each piece as an individual, though everyone remained patient because they knew when it was finished that, barring some sort of natural disaster, this piece of art would stand for thousands of years.

It didn't feel the same as railroad work, factory work or slave labor, which was what most of the jobs were at that time.

Which is what most of the jobs are today. What is worse, in fact, is that before you can get such a prestigious job -- say, putting nuts on bolts or sorting dead fish on a conveyor belt -- these days, you must take drug tests to make sure you're dreadfully sober when you act as a piece of machinery.

And, to manufacturing executives there's nothing worse than a bunch of fucked-up robots who won't do what they're told. Thus, they say this:

"Just Say No."

Nobody told anybody to 'Say No' as far as I can figure where the Donegals were concerned. I don't think they saw the enjoyment of oneself as "an Evil Addiction."

I guess they thought that altering one's perception of their surrounding was okay, as long as you were still a productive human.

Now, of course, the Government says that this is not okay at all.

Who do you believe?

Ipse dixit?

Go figure.

*

Donnie Donegal left the planet like this:

In 1930 the walls, standing their full 12 meters of andesite and limestone, were complete. It was time to lay in the rafters. Several massive lengths of mined diorite arrived, pulled by a team of burros, on the same day they'd arrived for the last 17 years. The diorite, Ralph thought, made perfect rafting material. It took two weeks to cut the stone to length.

The years of boulders and slabs sandpapering the mountainside wore a smooth rock-shaft-slide, they used it for rolling down and pulling up. Twelve men pulled the shafts of diorite, each 12.5 meters long and 50 centimeters think, roughly 300 kilometers up the side of the hill stone by stone.

Donnie only supervised. He didn't say anything or make any suggestions, only watched. He followed them slowly, mootly along shuffling his feet and cradling a bottle of wine.

There are 48 such rafters, 16 per mansion, supporting the andesite roofs.

They rest on a mainbeam running the length of the middle. They interlock and are completely secure. At least that's what the Donegal brothers boast. I never climbed up there to check it out.

Anyway, when the workers finally heaved a monolith rafter to its spot below where it would hang, they rigged an intricate assortment of pulleys strung on thick tree-trunk beams and hoisted it slow, like one might hoist a herd of elephants.

It was a very slow process.

Donnie would watch and watch and when they were done he'd move in to inspect, for whatever reason, the work. Probably because he felt he needed to do something.

On one warm July day drunk Donnie Donegal thought he'd show up to inspect the pulleys. He stood directly underneath the beam, despite Ralph's chagrin, observing the pulleys as they moved slowly the beam to the ceiling.

Donnie had the unfortunate experience to see a pulley pull loose. The beam slipped no more than a meter, but Donnie's stood so close that he took half of that meter in the head.

He never knew what hit him.

? *

I think that would make a good epitaph for Donnie Donegal: "HE NEVER KNEW WHAT HIT HIM." Say this of a man whose life went nothing like he'd tried to plan. A man who merely wanted to take shelter from the storm with his brother and three illegitimate sons died drunk in the company of a family from lands and ideas eons apart from his own original Way of Living. Through it all he'd remained the 'straight man', even though he drank a lot. He always had a plan for Life.

And in the end he never knew what hit him.

"What was that," Chauncy asked.

"I don't know," Donnie answered, "but it sure is nice to see you."

? ? ?

Jackpot?

* ? $

"The temple mire house of Life hosts an elaborate weave of experience hallways, joy-a-day rooms, deep-wisdom cellars and lofty- knowledge attics, but most humans never leave the foyer."

You can guess who said that.

* $ &

Ralph Wong and the Donegals et. al. completed the rafters on Benjamin Franklin's birthday, in the year 1931.

* ? #

Roofing proved not nearly so strenuous. A cedar scaffold across the top pulled the interlocking pieces of granite to the roofs where they hooked into the rest, each of individual shape. To this day I find no two identical. Similar, though not identical.

If you don't believe me look for yourself.

Only one worker was injured during the raising of the Donegal roofs, this was a man from Tientsin, China named Lu Lin Sun. Simply enough, he fell off the roof by accident and broke his collar bone.

When each roof was in place they covered the entire surface with thick coat of pitch and gravel, and were done with it.

They built the little Stonehenge lastly, I think, because they couldn't quite believe they'd actually finished the project. By this time, which was 1932, and everyone had long since embedded themselves in the vacuum of the Donegal estate.

I mean, they'd worked there for nearly 20 years.

The lifestyle was autonomous and peaceful.

It was Ralph's idea to give them a Stonehenge to build, and to build it in memory of Chauncy and Donnie. He told them the plans and the proper angles and let them go to it.

He and the three Donegals kept other projects in mind.

? #

This is the part of the chronicle that is a bit difficult to understand. You can talk about someone building a house out of stone, this remains somewhat common even today, though it is far too expensive to build entirely of stone. Steel and glass are cheaper.

But when you start to talk about what type of shelter the Donegal mansions were, well, let's just say it rests on the fringes of Fate and creative impulses.

I've said these structures were designed for the sound they would emit. They weren't built to keep sounds in but to allow sounds to come and go as they pleased.

Built, they are, to let sound out.

So while the Chinese-Americans continued to build on their never-ending project, Ralph and the boys took a trip to San Francisco on a buying adventure.

What did they go there to buy?

They went to but a lot of things, actually. They went to by brass pipes and steel bands and barrels, they went to buy cogs and levers, axles and armatures, springs and great flaps of leather, pulleys of wide variety, and one massive pipe organ.

. . . and Lonnie riddles the keyboard as Seamus strikes a warp-around low C chord that sends Kuwait in circles; Igantius just pounds the rhythm driving on and on and on.

This is where it gets weird.

& ≈

"That all phenomena are transitory, are illusionary, are unreal, and non-existent save in the sangsaric mind perceiving them."

-- 2nd fundamental teaching of the Bardo Th dol from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

* ? ∆

I think the best part of the fundamental teachings of the Bardo Th dol is the part that says that humans are phenomena, too.

"That all possible conditions, or states, or realms of sangsaric existence, heavens, hells, and worlds, are entirely dependent upon phenomena, or in other words, are nought but phenomena."

Fortunately, this is ipse dixit from Tibetan Central.

Tibet. Nice philosophy, but it sure doesn't grow veggies in the spring.

I could be wrong.

& ? ∆

What have I said? Don't get me wrong, now. I think every human on the planet ought to hold privy on such thought. Everyone should at least be informed! I sometimes wonder what would happen if so many humans were not shut off from the pure Knowledge Source. If, indeed, we were exposed to bits of this and that, taught from square one how to think and react for ourselves, to take responsibility for our own actions, to pride ourselves on our originally constructed System of Beliefs.

But no.

What would happen were we to actually have to sit down and hold varied discussions night after day and on and on -- each having its own separate form -- things would never get done, to be sure. And could that be so bad? That we put off inevitable destruction and sweeping malaise and lay in its place mere speculation?

If somebody really got hungry, I'm sure they'd find something to eat somewhere.

Why not sit and talk about it for awhile?

What else have we really got to do?

"So it is that we find ourselves in the dragon's tail-teeth of eternity. In this situation it is best to think before chewing."

This is a fortune cookie by Kuwait.

% *

Strange things happen in San Francisco. There exists some sort of elated sense of perpetual urgency, some type of euphoric malaise. It might be the people, or the fact that it lies on a highly unstable fault line, or the thought-provoking geography; maybe a combination of the three. It's hard to tell, for sure.

San Francisco was where Twain drew many ironic stories, was frenzied by gold-greed fever, was burned to the ground and rebuilt -- built, for that matter, on an architects nightmarish collection of high grade knolls.

San Francisco was where I read about Edwin Bishop, was where I met Timothy Leary, so near to my crucial moment of self-destruction.

San Francisco was where Ralph and the Donegal brothers came up with the parts and professor needed to assemble their instruments.

Lonnie's organ presented no problem. These were the depression years and everybody needed the money. They found an old church on Broderick street, ironically, a catholic church, and offered the clergy cash for their large pipe organ.

Hard times loomed and the clergy said "yes."

The Donegal brothers also unexpectedly bought the carillon bells from the church tower, unsure of who, exactly, would be playing them.

"What are we going to do with these brass beasts, Donnie?"

"We'll find some use for them."

"I kind of like them," said Ignatius.

"Yes," said Seamus, "but will they fit on the boat?"

? ? *

For Seamus and Ignatius, for the drums and the strings, it was a matter of a trip to the ship yards and the hardware store, a cattle company and San Francisco's municipal college.

Actually, they met Dr. Jorgensen in a coffee house on Haight street, but they needed to return to the college so he could quit his job and grab his tools and notes.

Dr. Jorgensen retained a degree in mechanical engineering and music. He built instruments for a hobby. He introduced himself into their conversation. They were talking about were to go to find barrels big enough for drums and cables for strings.

"Why not try the ship yard," Jorgensen said.

"Excuse me?" said Lonnie

"Well, it sounds as though you've got some big instruments in mind, and there's all sorts of large refuse acoustically convenient for just such construction. I go there often"

"Why? Do you build ships?"

"No. I tinker with mechanics and sound."

"So do we."

Dr. Johan Jorgensen joined up the the group, going as far as to come back to the Donegal estate with them and prove to be essential in what might have been one large waste of time were he not so inclined to follow.

Strange, playful Fate.

$ ? ∆

I have made an extensive inventory of all the parts included in the instruments for mere documentation. Like the Donegal estate was a cereal box and this book a list of ingredients, they contain the following: 88 brass pipes and one slightly used pipe organ; eight carillon bells and their rigging; 20 square meters of cowhide; 8 hammered-iron barrels ranging from 75 to 180 centimeters; 8 wooden-casks ranging from 30 to 90 centimeters; one center-section of a steel-hulled tug boat standing 3.5 meters; 46 wound brass and steel strings ranging from 2 to 4 meters, and varying in thickness 5 millimeters to 3 centimeters; 2 shaved and bowed planks each 5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide; 92 pulleys; 193 cogs; 123 springs; 3 rubber belts; 344 carriage bolts; 342 carriage bolt nuts (two are missing which means I need to do a better job of maintenance); 279 brackets; 558 cement screws; 681 assorted bolts and their respective nuts.

Like a grocery list, this random assortment of hardware represents nothing but potential, nothing but the desire for a feast.

Most important is their method of assembly, the nature of their form.

Ralph and the boys, even with their abnormally intricate knowledge of the way things go together, could have only come close to what Johan created.

Johan created his masterpiece so that other artists would have the medium to produce a masterpiece of their own, to play on the masterpiece created in the heads of their father and uncle and Kun Chi' Wong.

Without trying, the Donegal estate slowly became one of the grandest unknown Museums on the coast of northern California, one of the oddest attributions to human playfulness, one of the last human attempts to culminate the arts.

Some box of cereal! Some grocery list!

$ ∞

Did Kuwait ever make a trip back to San Francisco? No. He declined, took to the middle room in the root cellar and began work on his abode. He covered the floor with a large, round thatched mat and set to painting the walls.

"After one finally finds a shelter hallow in the raging storm of life one needs to stop and write it all down," said Kuwait.

Kuwait's writing was like no other I've seen before, not that I am an expert, suffice to say, it's extremely eclectic. Paint-written on the interior of the root cellar is a story crafted from Tibetan, English, Sanskrit and Hieroglyphics explaining in detail the entire life experience of Kuwait.

Only Kuwait can read it.

He started it on the day he arrived, pausing only for a moment outside the middle house of Ignatius to admire the archically-eccentric architecture.

"This is going to take a while," he said, and went downstairs.

When Seamus asked him if he wanted to go down to San Francisco Kuwait replied: "Once a man begins his one life work, travel seems only to delay and persuade astray. See if anybody needs a fortune cookie writer."

∆ ≈

Kuwait's first fortune:

"A truly Great Human knows where enlightenment ends and futility begins."

?

8

The Donegal brothers would not play their instruments until American Independence Day, 1945, one month before America blew Japan to bits and pieces with knowledge they'd acquired from the peaceful brain of Albert Einstein.

"I never thought anyone would take me so seriously," said Einstein.

Japan, in this case, had blown them to bits and pieces first, but only with conventional weapons, that is to say, explosives wrapped in iron.

America knew Japan was coming, too.

The guide fins on most of the bombs, incidentally, were manufactured by the Rothshire Foundation.

They sure had a lot to do with history.

Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Remember the Rothshire Foundation?

So it goes.

* ∞

"How should we get at building these instruments, Doc," Seamus asked Johan. Johan and Kun Chi' conferred between themselves in the court yard standing afront to all three mansions.

"Percussion should be built in the middle and the strings on the left and the pipe organ on the right. This will, you see, concentrate the sound towards the percussionist, where it will be the loudest."

"Well, we'd thought of that, already, Doc. I mean, how should we take to actually putting them together?"

"The best way for a musician to begin to become a musician is to learn the mantling and dismantling of their instrument. I'd say we could get started by you boys unloading the Heather Pattie Mae, separating all the various components, and start piecing them together as best you can. I'm going to take the young Kun Chi' aside here and teach him an interesting point of acoustics I'll bet he never came across in the caves."

Kun Chi was one year younger than Johan Jorgensen.

Kun Chi', it turned out, knew three times as much as Johan about the nature of sound waves, though Johan could build better instruments. Together they made a sound crew bettered by none.

And Fate deals another card in a game of Donegal Black Jack.

* ∞ ∆

The Chinese-Americans still constructed the little Stonehenge, would continue to work on it for another year. It wasn't that it took so long to build; rather, they wanted to wait for the sun to be in just the proper place to make sure everything was properly in line.

They built it, they wanted to see it work. It just took some time to get started.

Most would leave, fourteen would stay on after the completion to hear the instruments when they were finally completed.

Of those fourteen, six would leave within the first five weeks after completion.

The sound was awful.

What once was a serene and therapeutic workplace now emitted sounds of dying cats and stampeding cattle.

The surrounding towns thought they were being bombed, again.

The sheriff was summoned more than once.

It may be noted, somewhere in the police records, that the Donegal brothers were the first residents in the area to be cited for 'excessive noise'.

? %

"An instrument is nothing more than a sophisticated noise maker," said Johan to the brothers, "and when you build this noise maker, you can determine whether the noise is harsh or melodic by the method of construction. In other words, you can build a fiddle or you can create something in the realm of Stradivarius."

Stradivarius, he told them, was one of the best instrument makers ever to create on the planet, and when he died he took the secret with him to his grave.

"He didn't want to give up the secret of pure melody," Johan said, "a man makes the most beautiful sound ever conceived and he won't share it with anyone after he dies. It's a pity. I'll tell you boys what I've got in mind.

I want to build a veritable orchestra of Stradivarius. I want to make it so everyone can hear. It will, however, take total devotion to learn to play. These will be no ordinary instruments"

"We know, we know," said the Donegal brothers.

"What do you think we've been waiting eighteen years for?" asked Seamus incredulously, "a fucking fiddle?"

∆ ?

"Why are we doing this, lads," Seamus asked the brothers as they sat smoking their pipes after dinner.

"To make music, of course," said Lonnie.

"What else have we got for us, brother? the World? With nothing but labor and greed to look forward to? Thank you kindly, Seamus, I shall remain here."

"But what about the planet, laddie, when do we take the boat and see the Earth?"

"When we've learned to play these things we've spent our life to build, when this routine becomes mundane, there will be travel," said Lonnie.

"Shouldn't we at least bring up some lassies from San Francisco?"

This was a re-occuring joke.

They all laughed.

? ∞ ˙

It is winter now and I've taken several weeks off this chronicle to pursue my masterpiece. I've started in the connecting halls of the root cellar, with any Fate, improving as I work up.

I am learning to use the masonry tools discarded upon completion of the estate.

I am attempting sculpture.

I hope this works out. I wouldn't hate to ruin the appearance of the mansion. When the mansion was completed, for some reason no one felt the urge to carve into it. No one felt the need to so much as scratch their name into the corner stone, felt no need to carve a dedication into little Stonehenge in memorial of the men they were built for.

This chronicle, this sculpture, can serve as my advancement from caretaker to creator in the Chronicles of the Donegal Museum of Culminative Arts.

This chronicle as well serves as a note saying this to anyone should they come here after we who have created it are all gone:

"We'll be back, we'll be right back!"

& ∞ ?

9

Working for Remo turned out not as exciting as I imagined. In fact, my life soon became as routine as growing coffee beans. I would fly the plane down to Sao Paulo, turn around and fly it back to Florida.

I never drew my Luger once.

I flashed my M-1 carbide at some teens threatening to rob me, shot it once in the air to scare them off, that shot was the single time I fired a weapon in my employment as a drug-runner.

I returned to the mansion to sit beside the pool and flirt with Sally Reinhold while Remo slaved away at organized crime.

Who says criminals don't work for a living?

The days I spent poolside with Sally are some of the best I can remember. Sally was the one exciting bonus of working for Remo.

Our relationship was childlike. We pretended we lived with a lecherous old uncle who made us stay inside the walls of the estate.

"Is Uncle Remo around?" I'd ask.

She'd giggle, crouch down and peek around the corner, if no one was there we'd run quietly squealing to the locked attic door, unlock it, escape to our playpen aloft.

We made a secret code so we could have entire conversations while speaking in front of others. Listen:

"What time is dinner tonight?" (Meet me in the poolhouse after Remo is asleep.)

"I don't think Remo wants supper 'til late this evening." (I can't tonight because Remo is feeling frisky.)

"I think I'll just take an early dinner in the gardener's house, then." ( See you tomorrow morning in the playpen!)

And so on.

No one, save for the hired help, knew of our blossoming affinity, of our blooming unconditional love.

In the clay-roofed attic of Remo's mansion we made secret hideaways and passionate love, during formal dinners we exchanged jokes cryptified in our speech by secret verse, sat by the pool every other day, days I wasn't running to Sao Paulo, and talked about how we should get out of this situation.

"We're gonna get caught," she said.

"Sometime," I said, "if we ever get sloppy."

"You never get sloppy," she said.

"Oh, that hurt."

"Just kidding."

"Let's runaway," I said.

"You've said that before. Where could we go? How could you provide for me. I'm spoiled, you know that. Our relationship wouldn't be nearly so romantic if you actually had to work all the time for a living. I'd get bored being a poor man's lover."

"You're just saying that."

"No I'm not. I mean it. I love you, Enrico, but I like an extravagant lifestyle, too."

"That's too bad."

"Well, it's just the way I was raised."

"An American pity. What were you to do if you ever accidentally turned poor?"

"Kill myself."

"Sally, don't be a fool. There's all sorts of good reasons to kill yourself and a simple lack of wealth is not one of them."

"I know, I know, but it all seems so dirty and pathetic."

"Listen to yourself! You're smarter than that! This is the pathetic lifestyle. These people live behind walls, trapped by their own greed, jailed by their own desires for freedom."

"You are one of those people, Enrico. Need I remind you of the game?"

The game, of course, was the one where Remo, the mean, old uncle never allowed us to leave the estate, except to get some more cocaine.

"So what you're saying to me is that I must find a way to support your lifestyle, otherwise you'll stay here with Uncle Remo."

"A girl needs her comforts."

"So you've said."

I pushed her into the pool, dove in behind her. We swam to the deep, deep end, splashing.

* ? $

Our lives went on like this until 1969. It was then that I finally had the chance to grab enough quick money to ensure the lifestyle of my playmate, the lover of my boss, the only woman I ever loved.

"Enrico, how long have you worked for me now?"

"Six years, Remo. Eight if you include the coffee bean job."

"Eight years. And you've never tried to steal a dime."

"Nope. Not a dime, boss."

"That's pretty remarkable in this business," he said, "So you think I can trust you?"

"As much as anybody, Remo."

"Well, that is the problem, you see. I can trust no one. Some more than others, yes, but no one person in particular."

"That is a problem."

"Yes. And at this particular moment in time a very serious one. Charles, you see, normally runs to Chicago to meet with a Boss from Miami who takes the load over to New York. We supply the cocaine. Do you enjoy cocaine, Enrico.?"

"Not really."

"Good. I need you to make this run for me, Enrico, as a personal favor. You carrying 15 Kilos, you need to bring back 1.5 million. Can do?"

"Can do, Remo."

"Don't fuck me around, Enrico. If you did and I caught you I'd be forced to kill you slow."

"Everything will be fine, boss."

"Good."

"When do I leave?"

"In six hours."

"Ah, good, I have time for a swim, then."

∞ ? *

I calmly walked down the hall. Inside myself, however, my heart ran with the hummingbird's and my head with the speed of a guru on LSD. I was alive again, like the day that Emilio and I stole a car to make a quick 'fortune'.

My pursuit of fortune had obviously matured.

The difference was this: love.

The only reason I would ever even think of double-crossing a rather heartless man like Remo would be to win the heart of his girlfriend, Sally Reinhold.

I was thirty years old, back then, and still a fool for love.

I am fifty-five years old, now, am alone with this estate that would sway Sally Reinhold right off her size seven's.

Am I still a fool for love?

I suppose.

Go figure.

# $

Sally lay by the pool, as usual, working on her tan.

"I just spoke to Uncle Remo."

"What'd he have to say."

"He wants me to fly to Chicago to deliver cocaine and pick up money. A load of money. Enough to keep us happy and comfortable for the rest of our lives."

"True, save for the fact that you wouldn't be alive to spend it."

"We could get away."

"Where?"

"Anywhere you want to go."

"Enrico, don't be crazy. Please don't be crazy. I care for you so. I'd rather sneak around here with you for a hundred years then have to move from place to place and run all the time from a man who'd kill us both if he caught up. Stay here, Enrico. Bring the money back and we'll live happily forever in our playpen."

"Sal, don't be absurd. Do you actually think we can get away with this forever? The result will be roughly the same if he catches us here or in Timbuktu. If we leave we can at least try for a quietly open existence. Pack your clothes in my suit case, sneak off the estate and catch a plane for Chicago. Meet me in the coffee shop. We can fly, there, into Canada."

She stared out across the ocean, looking at nothing in general, seeing nothing at all, it appeared, though looking far, far away.

"This is a foolish thing, Enrico. I'll go pack."

* $

I left the pool, took a shower, then napped until it was time to go. I loaded the plane, my mind racing gangbusters for ever and ever, my suitcase was there, was light, though it always was that way and I didn't let it clutter up the other things running through my mind.

As my lover, I had the ultimate trust in Sally.

My flight to Chicago only ran three hours, I was to return within the day. As per my plans, this would not be the case.

And so it would be that I would never return to Florida, though the outcome was nowhere near what I expected.

My brain, with all its ranting and running, neglected to actually produce a decent alternate plane, or any real plan at all for that matter.

The whole incident was, upon reflection, hopelessly romanticized.

Again, go figure.

? $ ∆

Another black Cadillac waited for me when I arrived at O'Hare International Airport. Two large men with mirrored sunglasses quickly unloaded the plane and took me to a lounge near the airport.

The lounge was private that day.

"Hello, I'm Enrico. I'm filling in for Charles. He sends his best."

The lone gentleman in the lounge looked up at me from an article he was reading, looked at me indifferently, went back to reading his magazine.

"It's all there?" he said.

"Yes."

"Here's the money," he said, sliding a briefcase across the table, "count it."

"Oh, I'm sure it's all there."

"I said count it."

I opened the suitcase and looked the money over. My mind spun whirlwind daydreams of the places Sally and I would go. I flipped through several stacks, pretending I was counting, closed the briefcase.

"Well, it's all there. Thanks. Mind if I stay for lunch?"

"That will be all. Good-day."

I started to protest, but he looked up from his magazine again, this time with fatigued patience. I returned to the limousine.

The two large men drove me back to the airport, right back to the front door of the 'Enrico Sleek'.

"Bye-bye, flyboy," said the driver, and was gone.

I was free!

I unlocked the 'Enrico Sleek', removed the suitcase, walked through the airport looking for Sally. She was nowhere to be found. I left a message at airport information and took a cab to a hotel.

In the hotel room I opened the suitcase. My shaving kit was in their, containing extra ammunition and my tooth brush and toothpaste. This was not unusual. What was unusual was the lack of any of Sally's wardrobe, beauty aids, etcetra.

There was a note.

Dear Enrico,

Uncle Remo came into my bedroom while I was getting ready to go.

Uncle Remo says I can't go. He says I am sick.

Uncle Remo says if you don't want to go see 'the Surgeon' you'd better come back pronto.

Sally

'The Surgeon', of course, was Johnny 'the Surgeon' Mateo.

Johnny was long since a corpse by then.

$ $ ?

I sat on the bed in the hotel room with my head in my hands.

"What the hell was I thinking ?" I screamed to the walls. "Oh, good Christ what have I done? I stood up and paced the room.

I went to the liquor store for a bottle of tequila.

I returned to the hotel room, masturbated out of frustration, sat by the open window feeling the wind coming in off Lake Michigan and drinking far more than I was accustomed to. The wind soothed, the tequila numbed and soon I lay cradled in a state of temporary bliss, my mind nuzzled up to my mothers breast in a warm hovel in Sao Paulo.

Actually, I was taking shelter in a cardboard box, all the while listening the roar of the impending typhoon.

$ ? *

I woke the next morning with an immediate urge to vomit and return to Florida.

This would not be the case, as I have said, though I felt desperately about going back to Sally, returning once again to the playground.

The price for entry to the playground, were I to return "pronto," would probably be only two fingers and a broken arm.

I thought, at that time, that this was a fair and minimal compared to that of the cost of becoming a corpse.

I see it differently today.

In the hotel room that morning, however, Florida seemed the only place to live, live as close a possible to the woman I loved and the man I worked for.

Fool.

I departed the hotel with the briefcase containing an amount of money just short of 1.5 million. I paid for the room, the limousine and the tequila with money from the briefcase. I held my own currency, of course; but I took cash from the brief case at that time out of cockiness and spite.

"Expensive cockiness and spite," I remember thinking on my walk back to the airport.

The 'Enrico Sleek' was there, like a faithful hound, just as I had left her. I patted the wing as I climbed inside and thought about learning to fly with fewer fingers, felt I could learn, started the engine.

The day fared foul weather, the overcast sky was there, orchestrating the event like an aunt who caught you smoking cigarettes in the attic when you were young.

I felt humbled, ashamed.

As the 'Enrico Sleek' carried the not-so-sleek Enrico back to his Florida playground, he, rather, I drank coffee kept warm all night by a nondescript gray thermos. The thermos, like a gangster, remained inconspicuous and did its job with ruthless efficiency.

I felt close to the coffee, reminiscent of my former occupation. It lifted my spirits, brought me back to reality -- to the planet Earth, bestowed upon me new courage.

Caffeine is truly an amazing drug. Thanks coffee bean!

I reconsidered my position, became reticent. "Why should I go back?" I said aloud to the 'Enrico Sleek', my only friend, "why should I return and loose fingers and break bones out of wont for love? Fuck that. I'm a peasant. I'm supposed to want love! I will not be tortured for a natural impulse. I will not because I happened to fall in love with a spoiled brat!"

Thanks to coffee, I convinced myself to flee rather than fight.

Sometimes flight is better than fight, so to speak.

I had not refueled in Chicago so I would have to stop in Atlanta, Georgia. I decided, then, to head not south, but west. I knew then, still in the air, that my life was changing more than I ever imagined in Sao' Paulo, ever dreamed of on the estate of the mighty 'Remo'.

I had no clue of just how great that change would be.

I thought of running off to Japan, to hide among the treasures and religion of the orient.

Ha.

I had no clue.

$ $ $

Jackpot!

? * ∆

About my meeting with Scarface and my killing of Edwin Bishop:

They both happened in Atlanta, Georgia, both took place within one hour of each other.

I harbored no contraband, so I could come and go like any other pilot. No need to sneak around. I landed the 'Enrico Sleek', left it for refueling, and went to a fine restaurant in downtown Atlanta.

I removed more cash from the briefcase, prepared to feast.

I drank an entire carafe of wine before the meal came, felt independent and strong-minded.

This was the wine, of course.

I went into the restroom to urinate and found a man laying out a large line of cocaine on the vanity. His complexion was Brazilian, like mine, I still wore my nondescript black suit, like his, and he assumed correctly that we were brothers in the same fraternity at bay in the restroom. He opted for friendship rather than violence.

"You want a line?" he asked.

The wine spoke: "Sure."

He laid out two long lines of cocaine, did one, handed me a glass tube. "Compliments of Scarface," he said.

And for maybe the sixth time in eight years I inhaled cocaine into my nostrils.

Again, "Agh!" and I held my nose up, plugged my nostrils with my thumbs, sucked in and in and in again.

It is important to break the narrative here to say that I cannot claim for sure that this man was the infamous "Scarface." He had a long scar goring his Brazilian countenance, to be sure; black hair and eyes like rampant jackals, yet he could have been one of a thousand "Scarfaces."

There is no way to know for sure.

In any case, when I returned to the table to find my meal there, I was in no state whatsoever to devour so much as the kelp beneath the steak. I paid for the meal, left the restaurant, headed into the streets of Atlanta with an amazingly potent cocaine buzz.

He may have not truly been Scarface, but he sure did snort good cocaine.

Cocaine, when it gets right down to the hub of it all, is a pretty stupid drug. You may as well hit yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer.

What might the smart drugs be?

More benign plants and fungi's like Marijuana and mushrooms.

As I walked the street the cocaine turned the world into a blur. Cars, cats, dogs, people, lights, sounds, furies all crashed into me at once. My life on the estate had been so serene that all this new noise coupled with a sizable amount of cocaine in my bloodstream sent my senses whirling like the prop of a Piper Cub.

Now I was not humbled and ashamed. Now I was lost and aggravated, extremely over-confident, though still cutting a swath through the streets of Atlanta.

I made out a group of people standing in a broken circle in front of a building. I walked over to the group thinking it might be street musicians. It turned out to be, I gathered, an anti-abortion near-riot rally -- women standing in from of the building near-to-blows with the predominantly male crowd opposing them.

Most of the women on the male crowd side kept their mouths closed.

A pity.

I remember being angry at Sally though more so at Remo because he was the one who made it impossible for us to be together. So be it. And as I watched the near-imminent explosion of violence I saw a man dressed in a black suit strike a pregnant woman, chanting: "Unborn babies have a right-to-life! Unborn babies have a right-to-life!" and striking her with the completion of each sentence. Other men kept the surrounding women at bay.

I kept a silencer on the end of my Luger, were I ever have to use it at least I wouldn't make a racket. I now slowly pulled the Luger from my holster inside my coat, keeping it out of view of the crowd, and proceeded to blow two holes in the head of Edwin Bishop.

Two holes: one tiny entry hole and one massive exit hole.

Edwin crumpled instantly.

I walked away, nonchalantly, leaving the crowd to wonder.

To this day I don't know if anyone identified me or noticed me or if the police are looking for me or what. However, if they do catch me, I can tell this story and claim, truthfully, that I shot Edwin Bishop out of defense for another human being, and because I'd just quit my job and lost my girlfriend.

I hope the judge will understand.

Adrenalin now took over and beyond where the cocaine left off. I felt like Superman, felt like God. Not only had I saved the woman's life, I'd stopped the riot.

Rioting didn't seem like such a keen idea when Edwin's head suddenly, out of nowhere, exploded.

I walked down the street a few blocks, whistling a little nonsense tune and very, very lost, and decided to end the whole experience of Absolute Freedom by hailing a taxi cab to take me to the airport.

"Enrico Calderoun," I thought to myself, "you are now a bonafide member of what some hapless humans call the 'lunatic fringe'.

Again, ha.

I held no clue.

? ?

10

"Pull the cable tighter, Seamus!" Johan screamed. "It rings with the bleat of a dismembered sheep!"

Seamus pulled on the thick cable for all he was worth.

"Ah! there we are. Much better."

Seamus and Johan had worked on the strings for a year-and-a- half, were becoming increasingly impatient with each other.

"Why don't you go work with Ignatius for a time, Johan. You know that bass peddle is causing him grief."

"The peddle can wait. The strings are vital to the overall sound. They must be perfect. Lock that one into place and let's move along."

At this time the stringed instrument, resembled something, no doubt, between a massive harp and an elongated sitar.

They had only ten strings, the thicker cables, remaining to install and tune.

Throughout the course of their composition years Seamus would change only the smaller strings. Once.

Johan struck the particular line of cables they worked on. To Seamus' ears the resonant tone was perfect. Johan gasped with despair. "That D-string has come out of tune. We must tune it before we move on."

Seamus impatiently sighed and backed up to tighten the troublesome string.

Were Johan here now, were he to strike the strings to absorb their aural resonance, I'll bet he'd yank out his hair in frustration. The strings, while I've kept them clean and polished, have become horribly out of tune without use.

Though I doubt the probability of Johan's return. Said Seamus of this probability: "Aye, laddie, Johan is gone and ner' again the twain shall meet."

The second part of the 'twain' in this case, Seamus said, was not himself; rather, the instrument.

And, as the Donegals related it to me, while Seamus' instrument took the least time to assemble (a total of four years), it was the most difficult to conceive and produce. Lonnie and Ignatius had merely to assemble their respective pieces while Seamus needed to create his.

As I said, the finally finished the whole she-bang on July 4, 1945, the day that Seamus named his instrument the Mantra-Lynn.

And I think, though Seamus would never admit it, that had Johan not been there to aid with the tuning of the strings, Seamus wouldn't be nearly the master he was the day he left.

And Ignatius would have no bass peddle.

And Lonnie wouldn't have near the wind power for his pipe organ.

As I said of Seamus, none of them would have openly admitted to this out of foolish Irish pride, something all their Buddhist training could never quite quell.

When they spoke of Johan, however, there was a certain amount of subtly implied gratitude.

"I kind of miss Johan."

"Yes, of course, it's so quiet around here with no one nagging all the time."

"I know, I know, but I can't get my strings quite right."

"Stop whining. You know them better than anyone on Earth."

"Yes, I guess so."

This conversation happened now and again, though not often.

And Johan was not only a genius with the strings, he also designed the lever mechanism that powered Lonnie's bellows for his organ; and, with slight modification of the same design, produced a bass peddle for Ignatius.

The lever action is a series of cogs linked to make stepping down on the foot pads easy, while the end result is a hard strike, or pump, respectively.

The main difference between the two is this: Ignatius' lever connects to an axle running about three meters. Ignatius has eight peddles at equal intervals running the length of his percussion creation.

I watched him play quite often. His gave the most spectacular performance because he hopped around so much. But we'll come back to this.

Lonnie's organ has two foot peddles, sunk into the floor as well. For him playing feels kind of like jogging in place.

Seamus runs around the room like a madman striking strange and beautiful chords here and there.

Kuwait, of course, had his own show to put on. He danced. Sometimes I think he flew. It was amazing.

I managed a good strut, though I never flew.

What a bunch of odd birds were we at the Donegal estate!

And only one broken-winged odd bird left to write it all down.

Cheep, cheep.

& ?

About Seamus and his instrument, the Mantra-Lynn:

He initially found difficulty playing with bare hands.

"Bloody Christ! After the third time on the strings I thought my hands were going to fall from their wrist sockets," he told me. He said that his hands were covered with welts and bruises.

Some dedication!

He forged to special gloves with scrap metal from Ignatius' drums. The left glove looks something like a Jai Lai mit, except that it's made of steel, and instead of a long, even curve, it is flat in the middle of the curve. The left glove, he said, was for bar chords and all out striking.

The right glove looks more medieval. I am looking at it right now as I describe it. It conforms more to the idea of a gnarled hand. The index finger is nearly straight, the remainder of the fingers curling in mildly to a near-fully curled pinky. The metal appears jagged and haphazard, though the lining of rabbit and the outer glove of rawhide feels quite comfortable.

The metal thumb is extra thick and sticks out perpendicular to the fingers.

No one on the estate knew much of metallurgy; working together, however, they were able to produce the gloves. They are not aesthetically pleasing -- rather, they look more like implements of torture, of pain, than pleasure.

First looks can be deceiving.

Though they are crude, Neanderthalic creations, time and time again I observed Seamus use them with more precision than Johnny 'The Surgeon' Mateo ever used when he slit someone's throat.

Pleasure. Yes, pure pleasure and no pain from the grotesque gloves of Seamus Donegal.

And it was with these archaic notions of handware that Seamus learned to play the Mantra-Lynn.

The Mantra-Lynn, of course, with the instrument built inside his house.

He called it this for two reasons: One, because the continual low vibrations from the bass end strings produced a chanting mantra-like sound; and two, Lynn was a favorite hooker of his in San Francisco.

I don't think she knows she has an instrument named after her.

This is not ipse dixit , so you can't be sure.

Men and women sure maintain strange love affairs with each other.

? ∞ Ω

"And so it is that the seed once one was split in two. One knows but half the other, one knows but half their own. Betwixt the two sustains. This is the Universal Joke," said Kuwait.

And he laughed and laughed.

I didn't get it.

& *

About Ignatius and his percussion 'playpen':

As I said, he was the most fun to watch. Bounding from peddle to peddle, from drum to drum, Ignatius produced as much rhythm as two percussionists. He learned to play with four pine-wood mallets with heads rounded off into softer-striking balls. This created the impression of two percussionists, rather than one.

He had suspended all the toms and timbales at chest level, tipping slightly away from him.

He had the eight-bell carillon mounted opposite the drums.

He could play both at the same time.

He'd removed the bells from the chiming rigging some time before, Johan had used the cogs and spring and pins as fodder for foot lever mechanisms.

Johan, incidentally, was a Jerry-rigging genius.

I gather this notion upon close examination of his work. Like a critic, I've pulled these things apart, in my mind, and taken close inventory of the parts and how they were used. These two levers are intricate and durable creations disproportionately constructed of parts pulled from here or there.

Now that I think about it, the entire system is pulled from bits and pieces of this and that and put together in a way that no one had ever thought of to use them.

Scrap or sculpture, functional or futile -- who can tell?

True artists.

Johan turned out an amazing artist with bits and pieces, Ignatius discovered himself an amazing artist with bounding and beating.

And the truth is this:

He was.

But Ignatius really played them.

Hopping back and forth from peddle to peddle, carrying a fine shuffle beat, he would suddenly stop, turn, and play the carillon with more pizazz than any Sunday bell-bonging church marm ever thought possible, turn again, regain the shuffle beat having not lost one count.

He would work his way down the toms, ending up on the lowest one, and between the foot peddle and the four mallets on the tom, would send Kuwait writhing in circles of grandeur with a lively African interlude.

* # ∆

And Lonnie fingered all up and down the keyboard, jogging along, sounding something like a jolly Phantom of the Opera.

His notes sustained, pitched, swooped, climbed, held, then dove again, pulling up right before they hit the ground.

"I sometimes wonder how far I run when I play," said Lonnie, "Sometimes I feel like a gerbil running in a perpetual wheel."

"A gerbil never made those sounds," said Ignatius.

"No one has ever made sounds like these," said Kun Chi'.

* ∆

Kun Chi' left the planet like this:

Peacefully.

The Donegals found him on March 19, 1950 in his hut, upright in full lotus, dead as an ancient stone idol.

They burned him upright, on a pyre of redwood slabs and redstone pilings.

No one mourned.

"Give 'er a good go, Ralph," said Seamus.

The brothers lightly, like the wind, chuckled.

By 'giving 'er a good go', Seamus referred to Kun Chi' facing the peaceful and then the fiery Deities of death, testing him to see if he is powerful enough to leave the samsaric realm of phenomena, seeing if he was wily enough to make it off the planet.

No one, save for Donnie, ever mourned death at the Donegal estate. It wasn't that the deceased wasn't missed, just that Death was the interim between life, unless you were centered enough to pass thru the fiery Deities, lest you fail and return to this samsaric life anyway, so why be unhappy?

Death, at the Donegal estate, was nothing more than surfing after dark. One could go if one wanted, but the chance of coming back in the same one piece was slim.

"Around, around, around she goes and where she stops nobody knows!" as Jessie Devine, the crazed Outlaw of Metaphysics, said, referring to this strange roulette game termed Life, "And when all else is lost always put your money on 22 black. Twenty-two black is good for something, at least."

So true, so true.