Last Heard From

The Snake Charmer, Henri Rousseau, 1907

When I was a young man, having returned from a two year drug induced exile in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), I started back to school at university in San Jose, California. The year was 1969. Things were popping and people were interested in changing the world in ways fresh and new then but familiar to us all now. I began in a rooming house but soon met my friend down the street. It was not long before I moved in there when the old dining room became available as a bed room. This was the quintessential college dope house. The students were serious enough that people were going to graduate and they did, though I did not. When I left this third run at a college education behind it was not bad grades that stopped me. My friend was serious about funding his schooling and he chose to deal to do it. So did I, both on my own and also with him. He hooked up with a guy back from Viet Nam, a veteran who decided to get even more serious. That was my friend's main partner. My friend and this guy had the capital to buy a boat and started to smuggle in pot from the Mexican groups but before that we were transporting their dope up from LA.

The way to make any money in those days, you had to move volume because otherwise you would party up all the profit. Also, you had to do it with elaborate protection schemes of the kind the Vet had devised for himself. He was virtually inaccessible without an invitation and from a bar, which was a successful out of town music venue he supplied parts of the San Francisco music scene. He lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, more than fifty miles from the city. This was of course the hey day of that whole scene. Or if you did not protect yourself that way you got in and got out and then stopped for unpredictable lengths of time. When the vet was last heard from he had retired and bought his sea going sail boat. It is not true that no one succeeded at the business. His goal had been to sail the world. My friend had much less elaborate goals. He succeeded too.

Many years before him, Henri Rousseau painted scenes like the one above. Wiki says:

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a tax collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.

His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermied wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."

Last Heard From

It is my lagoon
after all, the big reward
of all those risky
times, tree top fliers
and blue gray cigarette boats
all leading to me
here, naked with flute,
black from days at sea and sun
surrounded by snakes
that have slithered out
of my apocalyptic
drug run memories.

September 18, 2011 9:30 AM

Written for Magpie Tales Mag 83 of this date Visit there and delight.