Ill Wits and the Iranian Connection

One funny thing about this whole "luck" phenomenon is that it always seems to stick around until you actually count on it being there. Take the following example: a network of now irrelevant factors led me to change out the normal travel gear of backpack, sleeping bag, clothes, etc. for a bicycle and an acoustic bass. The destination was San Francisco, and I'll be goddamned if it ever took the Fates more than six hours to get me there. No need for all the burdensome gear; I'd be strolling down Stanyan by sunset. I was counting on it.

By sunset I was posted up at the south end of Willits with my thumb out, observing with an ironic frown the hopeless demographics passing me by. Old people. Lots of old, vaguely rich people in cars like Scions and PT Cruisers. Lots of bald rednecks, too. Obviously ganja farmers or run-about wanna-bes in lifted Dodge Rams with camoflauge trim. Lastly, an anomolous bulk of Mendocino gangsters looking dim and restless in tricked out Civics with underaged floozie girlfriends in the passenger seat roared by at regular intervals. Why all these assholes decided to clog up the streets with their tripe when a simple hippy van blasting the Dead and passing a doob would have suited my needs just fine, well, I'll never know. It's likely incredibly cosmic.

Regardless, I biked back into downtown Willits just as the bar lights came sputtering to life in anticipation of another wild Mendo Monday. I poked my head into a few of them: JP's, Johns, the Red Room - but they all seemed a little off. Maybe it was just me, but the notion arose pretty quickly that the majority of the people around me were quietly plotting to either take my wallet or give me the clap. The rest would just as soon have me incarcerated on priciple alone. Admitting some sort of defeat, I headed toward Burrito Exquisito to gather my agenda, but somehow missed the doorway and ended up strolling down an ivy-walled alley-way into the pavilion of an Irish pub.

Well, what the hell? I grabbed a Racer 5 ale and rolled a smoke, finding a seat on the patio. The atmosphere was mild, even classy. A gaggle of obvious pot-trimmers-on-leave drank and conversed enthusiastically at a table nearby, and before I knew it I was exchanging small talk with a couple of locals. "This is the only bar in Willits worth a shit," a tie-dyed native informed me. I was inclined to believe him. "Wednesday nights are karaoke," the other added approvingly. We drank and shot the shit for some time before they went in to play darts.

A woman, older but not elderly in shocked white hair sat down next to me. "Faith Walker," she said, wise traces of wrinkles forming around the mouth as she smiled. I introduced myself and smiled back. Faith Walker carried a shallow box of leather goods - tobacco pouches, lighter holders, wrist wraps, and braceletts. She handed me samples of each, talking about the materials used and demonstrating where to put the papers in the pouches.
"How much for this one?" I asked, holding a deerskin pouch.
"Oh, however much you want!" She said delightedly. "You see, for eighteen years now I've sold my crafts all over the west coast for donations. I wake up every morning and replace what I've sold the day before. Eighteen years and I've always made enough for a motel room and meals. The Fates have taken care of me each and every day so far. Faith Walker, see?"
I did see, and I also saw then why the Fates had seen it fit to maroon me in po-dunk Willits for the night with only a guitar case for a blanket. I bought a few gifts from Faith Walker and we talked for a while longer before she left for the other bars.

I passed some time playing my bass for anyone in earshot. Someone reccomended I check out the coffee shop across the street. It was song writers night. I finished my pint and breezed over to see what it was all about. Groups of two's and three's hunkered on couches mulling over sheets of lyrics and scrawled chords as a true songbird of a girl sang a Joni Mitchell-esque heartbreaker from the piano. I introduced myself to a murmuring couple, trying to figure out what this thing was all about. "You look like a bunch of Communists," I said half-jokingly, "who's in charge here?" "Nobody," said a girl in her young twenties. "That's the problem," chimed her boyfriend, who also toted a bass. "We've met up every week for over a month now, but still nobody has come up with anything." A look around the room revealed the culprit. Everyone was looking busy working on their own tunes, trying to involve each other by not really knowing how. No common denominator amongst these bright-eyed ambassadors.

What you need, my friends, is a swanky Stalin - keep the moustache, fine - but get hep! Unite these yearning souls! Snap your fingers and incite a barbershop quartet! Kim Jong-il hitting the hash pipe in a tutu on a neon cequinned chariot! Marx in the matrix burbling psychedelic non-sense, with saxophones! Muff-munching Mao on MDMA! Hegel making love in a hailstorm, on top the haberdaschery! Lenin in linens, making lemonade! Titillated Trotsky with no trousers, and how!

A song, like every other artform (poetry, painting, really good sex, violent outbursts, spontaneous combustion, etc.) can't be faked and can never be forced. It's like taking a shit - you allow time for the thing to build-up inside of you until the time is right and then let that fucker fly. There is no shitting on an empty stomach. Let's not be rediculous.

Woah. What the fuck?

Oh right. So I went back to the pub for more juice.

This story is really getting long. Are you truly prepared for it all to amount to naught?
Ok, fast forward.

The next morning I decided to bike to Ukiah, a mere twenty or so miles down the mighty 101. A few miles deep the hangover struck with a vengence and the sun oppressed me like a poor Cantoneese sharecropper from Kansas. Enter the thumb. In not time quick I was passing a bowl of high-grade hashish with two brothers from Laytonville as we zoomed on down the Good Lord's hiway.

(Fast forward and shift into present tense for no good reason)

Blam! I materialize anomalously in San Fran at sunset, radiating pure sex and vast possibilities. Fortunately, there is no time for either. I bike up and down several times before arriving at Le Tim & Dustin estate north of Golden Gate park. My beloved friends and I reacquaint, speak of bikes and Humboldt circa harvest season, then hit the streets for some of the hard Thai stuff. Pho sho!

After a bitchin' meal we smoke cigarettes from their lofty abode. Dustin inquires about the impending trip to San Diego. How was I getting there? A good question. Due to an incident involving an aborted call to my mother, a malicious bumble bee, and a spilt cup of coffee, I no longer had a functional cell phone and had therefore made no recent contact with prospective rideshares. Utilizing le phone de Dustin, I find three urgent voicemails from Saeid, who boasts a limo van, a bike rack, and certain jammage with his accompanying friend, who has a Spainish guitar.

We blast out of the city at 7 the next morning. Saeid is a middle-aged gentlemen from Iran. His friend, Francis from France, is slightly older in sweatpants and huge gloves and at first I think he's a hobo. "Oh shit," I realize, "we're all hobos!" Men without a country, opinionated naybobs with no podium, brimming with ripened idealism and hard-to-pinpoint malcontents, die-alone types who took books instead of wives and mescaline instead of Christ, glorified perverts without an alibi, over-educated and under-showered would-be disillusioned college professors, if only we gave a damn! Pop-gun revolutionaries who can only run...

Jesus.

Anyhow, Jeff also jumps aboard - a fellow craigslist rideshare recruit. He's headed home to Poway. Saeid rigs my bass up to the van's sound system and sets Jeff up with a drum machine on his laptop run through an Ipod dock and before you can say "who broke the lock on the henhouse door" we're sailing down Interstate 5 cutting loose with hackneyed covers of Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, and beyond. Somewhere in the Central Valley the jam falls apart and Francis tells me his story. He's been in the US for twenty-some years teaching French at various high schools and taking odd jobs when he can. He's been married three times, detests pornography, and yearns for the touch of woman once more. France, he says, loves American culture. Especially tabloids. We exchange political babble and, upon his request, I correct his English ruthlessly for an hour or so.

We're in the depths of Orange County when Saeid finally breaks down.
"You smoke?"
"Yeah, you want a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke cigarettes."
"Ah."
We get slightly toasty as the sun sets and the Obama/McCain debate fires up on the radio. Nobody says anything until the debate is over and by then we are pulling of the Interstate to drop off Jeff. The van makes a wide right turn into a Shell station but misses the driveway completely and we plow into a bush.
"Out of gas," Saeid says matter-o-factly.
We are lodged there, halfway in the scenery and halfway in a busy intersection until we collectively lash together a funnel from a slushee cup, a guitar slide, and a length of string and pour 58 cents of gasoline into the tank in order to coax our vessel the remaining 10 meters distance to the pump. Jeff goes on his way and we go on ours.
Back on the highway, Saeid takes on a new vitality. Perhaps it was the reefer, perhaps the politics - he was a man empowered and on a mission.
"Jeff is a good boy," he begins sagely, "he understands the path."
I don't follow, really, but I think Francis may have heard this one before. He rolls down his window and seems to stick his head out as far as possible.
"We all have a path, you see. There is a point you must get to, and your path will take you there." His tone is preachy but well intentioned. It sounds like generic psuedo-spiritual prattle, but I sense he's doing his best to convey something vast in his second language.
"Tell me," he continues, "what is the definition of brotherhood?"
I'm not sure if it's a test or if he truly is unclear on the meaning.
"Well, it's like treating people as if they are your brother, even though they are not. Brother from another mother, ya know?"
He doesn't register my response, and I realize I've probably failed. Nobody speaks for a while and we pull up at my house. My mom comes out to greet us. I give her a hug and begin unloading my bike from the rack.
"You've got a good boy here," Saeid tells my mother. "Either you create your heaven or you create your hell. He understands this."

We say farewell, then.

My mother and I walk back to the house and she asks, "so, what did you guys find to talk about?"

I didn't really know how to answer.