Gospel & Universe ⛱ Señor Locke

The Tiny Pyramids of Ra

Day of the Oyster Shell - A Day in the Life - Amour at the Little Crazy - Et Qui Reboivent Encore

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Day of the Oyster Shell 

Here as I sit at this empty café thinking of you
I remember all those moments lost in wonder
That we'll never find again.
Though the world is my oyster
It's only a shell full of memories
And here by the Seine Notre-Dame casts a long lonely shadow.

— “A Song for Europe,” Bryan Ferry, 1973

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Here as I sit in this Mexican cafe thinking

of all those lost to drink and drug

all those lying beneath the loam and cedar plank

unable even to scent the pungent air

or see the bubbles frothing at the winking brim

I remember the suitcase, the shell full of memories

the Red Lebanese, my brother Al, and his friend Chester

who took regular trips to Amsterdam

which makes me think of my dad in Paris whistling the Jacques Brel tune 

Dans le port d’Amsterdam / Y’a des marins qui dansent

In the port of Amsterdam / There are sailors who dance

my father the lawyer, unfazed by the sailors en se frottant la panse sur la panse des femmes

rubbing their paunches on the paunches of the women

yet mutely horrified by Chester of the pink John Lennon glasses and pony tail

Wait a minute Chester of the Texan drawl and the Starship drugs 

that flew us in Hyperdrive over strawberry fields on little brown pyramids of LSD

Chester, Lord of the Hallucinatory Intoxicants,

here pictured in one of the low-lying chairs in Al’s 7th-floor den of iniquity,

his chambre de bonne marocaine, mixed with pungent Gauloises:

Voilà Chester of the Heliopolis Heavens, lighting up a hashish-laden roach for an enfant terrible with his motocross t-shirt,

innocent no doubt as the driven snow;

Chester of the tiny brown pyramids that flew us onto the Champs-Élysées

at exactly five hundred kilometres an hour

those little brown pyramids of Ancient Egypt that arced us above la belle ville,

with its SNCF workers and grungy Edith Piaf dance halls

and that at the end of the day brought us back like Timothy Leary

to the end of a day in the life of the traffic circle

from Étoile down the incandescent shops and newspaper stands of the Elysian Fields

now buzzing at a lower frequency

till we reached Rue de Berri and our friendly little Berri Bar

amid the construction sites to douse our gutted senses in the drowning stars of Artois

Dans le port d’Amsterdam / Y’a des marins qui meurent / Pleins de bière et de drames / aux premières lueurs

In the port of Amsterdam / There are sailors who die / Full of beer and drama / in the first light of day

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A Day in the Life

Like any good little canadien je me souviens bien that day in the Fall of 1975. For me, it started by climbing six flights of stairs to my brother’s room on the 7th floor. This was the same little chambre de bonne (maid’s room) where we got high and listened to Dragonfly, Déjà-Vu, L.A. Woman, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die, and Wish You Were Here. Every weekend (and some week nights) we were eight miles high, our minds blown and bubbling like the orange lava lamp on the table.

Whenever I think back on that year, I think of my brother’s chambre de bonne, which makes me think of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, especially the two-part, 26-minute song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” which begins and ends the album.

💎 Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun / Shine on you crazy diamond / Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky / Shine on you crazy diamond 💎

We believed ourselves to be very adult, yet we were in fact very young. And yet, while we perhaps reached for the secret too soon and were exposed in the light, we were also miners for truth and delusion, sincere in our exploration of whatever was out there, from the dark bars of the city to the dreary streets north of the flea market. We were being welcomed to the machine, learning to tell a green field / From a cold steel rail / A smile from a veil. We were exposing ourselves to the brightness of the sun — and to the vast empty darkness that lay behind it.

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At 9 AM I burst into my brother’s 7th floor chambre de bonne marocaine and found him in the arms of a Black woman. Was this one of les bonnes femmes from Chabrol’s 1960 film, one of those insecure, pliant creatures of a French man’s imagination? Not on your life! This was an American Woman. Like the one The Guess Who warned us about. Maybe even an L.A. Woman.

With her, we dropped three little pyramids of LSD, hallucinatory chemicals concocted in the depths of outer space, somewhere near the constellation of Pegasus. The magical formula for these chemicals was beamed down to the pyramids of Egypt, to the hoodwinking mystic Hermes Trismegistus, and to the golden pyramid tip of the obelisk in Place de la Concorde.

Our American Woman led us down the steps of the nearby Georges V metro, which was under the landing strip of the Champs-Élysées. The stairs leading down seemed to go on forever, to the other end of the Earth, but our wits were sharpened and we understood the relativity of time and space and how one pill made you larger and one pill made you small. Yet still, we were surprised to see, through our tiny irises, our Black Rabbit high-jump the turnstile and hop onto a first class train, without even a second-class ticket.

Drawn on a yellow string of iron light, we were now eight miles high as kites drawn downward from the skies, holding the strings tightly in our fists pounding through Les Halles on the #1 yellow line, and squealing to a halt at Châtelet.

Rubber wheels still rubbing our brains as we walked dazed and confused through the tunnels, we transferred to the #4 pink line and reached Saint Michel in the Latin Quarter. We scrambled up another rabbit hole, but this time we were on a mission: our pupils wide open, we took in the solar inclination of the sky as we crossed the river, and then burrowed down again, this time into Plato’s Cave in the form of a Senegalese bar. Our object: to squirrel away more drugs (apparently we didn’t have enough drugs already, at least not enough for Chester, the Flying Squirrel King of Hazelnut Dreams). But at some point I vaguely remember my brother accusing the dealer of selling us fake stringy marijuana, which later turned out to be Thai stick. I began to pick up something in the air and yet at the same time I was trying to keep the table from spinning like a kite circling somewhere above Pyramides and Sèvres-Babylone, eight miles high.

💎 You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom / Blown on the steel breeze / Come on you target for faraway laughter / Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine! 💎

I was so high that I wondered if I was ever going to come back down to earth. Or, if I did, would I hit the ground like on that rainy night back in Calgary? I was flashing back to about a year ago to the wheels of my Suzuki 90 spinning and my bike rotating slowly on one of its foot pegs in the middle of splashing traffic and streaking lights — when all of a sudden we were back on the bright Paris streets, albeit curving in ways that Haussmann never intended.

💎 Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light. Shine on you crazy diamond 💎

My brother put the little plastic bag of straggling stuff into his coat pocket, yet his hands were slightly unsteady.

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Amour at the Little Crazy

At some point I left Chester and Al and made my way across the city, led only by the vague idea of Romance. I found myself, sans frère and sans Squirrel King, beneath the American Church at an improvised cafe called The Little Crazy. I had planned on meeting this pretty girl all along.

There, under the judgment of the American Church of God, I waited for the blonde American angel of my dreams to get real and to stop pretending that she didn’t know that I was thinking of her and that we were in fact still hurtling through the space of a communal memory that we shared of the previous weekend at the Hotel Intercontinental. How could she pretend that it wasn’t relevant the way she looked at me, both of us half-drunk on champagne (while someone toasted a nebulous accomplishment) that her dad the second ambassador bought at a hundred dollars a pop?

She was pretending that she didn’t want to ride a steamer to the violence of the sun, or sail up the Nile with me from Heliopolis to where Amun and the sun god Ra became one with the God of Infinity. Didn’t she see that Thoth was beaming at us in benediction?

💎 Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, / Rode on the steel breeze / Come on you raver, you seer of visions / Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine! 💎

But she insisted she wasn’t going anywhere beyond the 7th arrondissement and the American University and the sacred heart of the daughters of what was to me someone else’s revolution.

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Et Qui Reboivent Encore

So I wandered back along the Seine, gloomy, as she said I would be (girls always predicted how hopeless I’d be without them) even in this City of Lights that were becoming duller as the chemicals retreated from my brain, scraping the lustre from Ra's falling orb and the infinite stars.

I continued my profane progress into the night and met up somehow under the street-lights with Chester the Squirrel King and my brother at our local McDonald’s for a filet-o-fish burger, fries, and beer.

💎 Pile on many more layers and I'll be joining you there / Shine on you crazy diamond / And we'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph, and sail on the steel breeze 💎

My dad's whistling came back to me (it always brought me back down to earth) to smell the beer hall and the sailors and the salt cod jusque dans le coeur des frites, after which the three of us went across the street to sit, beer glasses in hand, with Stella from Artois, the only woman we could find to keep us company. 

🍺 Dans le port d’Amsterdam / Y a des marins qui boivent / Et qui boivent et reboivent / Et qui reboivent encore 🍺

In the port of Amsterdam

There are sailors who drink / And who drink and re-drink / And who re-drink again

Drunken now, yet soberly, we recounted to each other the strangeness of our journey from Ra’s temple in the sky to our local bar (now long gone, buried in swanky hotels). One little, two little, three little North Americans on Rue de Berri.

🍺

One day amid gallons of frothy bubbles

I’ll wink at the brim of memory

and scent the Lebanese air, beneath the loam

and cedar plank of old friends lost to drink and drug

I sit here thinking in this empty cafe

💎 You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon / Shine on you crazy diamond 💎

💎 Come on you boy child / You winner and loser / Come on you miner for truth and delusion / And shine 💎

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Next: Señor Locke & the Jaguar

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