WTCELONA

"This is what you should be doing.”

I launch an exploratory laugh, a single mirthless sonar just to make sure Michael’s being ironic.

Is it possible this shaved-head Greek, my former spiritual teacher, doesn’t realize he’s repeating the exact same fucking line from 20 years ago?

But I get no bounce-back, my sonic irony probe disintegrates into the hot hills above Barcelona.

Completely straight-faced. Earnest, even.

With the exception of my jaw, cartoon-like, dropping half-mast, the outside's all 007 Euro-cool.

Inside, however, we join a disaster already in progress: a tanker of liquid nitrogen jackknifes, icing my lungs mid-breath. Across town, a time-machine’s gone haywire, racing back across the last 2 decades and all the others who’ve swooned to this tune, each of us dropping our best worldly defense panties, intoxicated by Michael’s suggestion that we could ever do what he does.

So, okay, he's repeating himself - who doesn't ? Here we are, all these years later, two or three in the morning, standing outside this strange little retreat complex in the heat-scorched Catalan hills, buzzed on good wine and jet lag.. More than anything, I'm actually flattered by his observa… ya see? He’s good.

As I admire his audacity, he slides a casual hand down just in front of me, pausing above my navel. With a tiny flourish, his index-middle-thumb tripod of fingers bloom open – poof!

“Wha…?”

But it blows by too fast, some essential key slides across smooth marble, drops down in the fluff of re-united friendship and vino Rioja, clues lost between the cushions of our comfortable, broken past.

His exploding flower of fingers has shot a tiny volt into my solar plexus - tingle-pling! – and I see sound waft up like smoke and linger mid-air, almost drowning out the alarms.

“Hmph, look at that”

“No, this isn’t possible… he can’t…”

But, yeah, something’s entered my body and fragments, spidering down in my belly, tap dancing across my chest. Chloride blows up the back of my throat, orders up a chest-full of burnt black Barcelona night air laced with summer flowers, diesel, backed-up plumbing and Spanish cigarettes.

I knock loose some strength, devise a protest, think I’ll say something heavy, like, "What the fuck're you doing?" – but can I speak to him like this now? Or ever? Is he still my teacher?

I need to focus. Using all my will, I fix my attention on four scarred dogs rooting at the edge of chicken wire down the hill below our bungalows. But I can feel Michael observe me, his handiwork, and all the components synchronize: the dangerous dogs, the exotic locale and the tinkering guru, all of us pile in the express elevator powered by a neo-euphoria that claims it can outrun fear -

"Right, I've heard that before."

- as a filament ignites white-hot, pulling it all up my brain stem -

and.

All.

Thought.

Stops.

Except: “I’m having an aneurysm. This is what it’s like to die.”

No fear, no loss. Neutral. The only interesting thing about dying is that I have no interest whatsoever.

“This is fucking awesome!”

We blow past the penthouse and up onto the floor of Heaven I've always prayed for and now, again, reject.

Exhaaaaale.

Fat, tight fear-fingers loosen up and I wash down a velvet river of melted Crayola Indigo.

"This is exactly how it’s always felt, like God feels.

Exactly.

Like.

Smack?”

Was it, after all, always the same, the dope and God? In the right sky, just on the wrong airline?

Were those visits to powdered peace actual peeks thru Heaven’s steamy kitchen window. Aren’t dope’s lip-to-ear breathy promises of freedom and power eerily similar to The Kingdom and The Power and The Glory?

It’s the light behind the golden vapors all of us are after:

The God-Fix!

But I could never control which gate in the Ancient Maze the dope unlocked: sometimes shimmering pools of love and plenty; more often, sulfurated stench and broken teeth.

And now, on this hot Spanish night, standing on a hill above the sprawl of the sexiest city on Earth, I’m relieved of my command and wonder,

“Is this it? Is this what a thousand vows of surrender buys?”

The scarred dogs have breached the fence. Chicken screams bounce off tin and brown grass, shatter the black sky with cardiac-monitor green lightning and something destructive and divine gently cups my ear:

"Yes!"

•

“God, I need a sign. I’m watching and listening.”

The question asked, today’s meditation is officially over. Out the open window, there’s a perfect New York morning in progress: Warm, clear blue sky, a microscopic tingle of fall. Reconnecting with the external, I check my legs and, like an unforgettable fuck, all it takes is this browned reminder of the Spanish sun to spread a flush of heat over my chest and lips, and start little movies swimming in my veins:

Hundred-plate dinners at midnight. Gaudi. Knots of ancient streets flowing onto elegant boulevards and honky-tonk ramblas. Picasso. Gaudi. Bitter olives and anchovy swimming in a sea of warm red wine. Gaudi. Big, hot, sexy Barcelona.

“We’re looking for someone to open a school in Stockholm.”

Michael and I are under a tree in the afternoon sun, steps from where we were last night. The proprietor tells us half a dozen chickens were killed overnight. “Perros salvajes”, she hisses. Wild dogs. Down the hill, two old men shovel dirt into a shallow trough beneath bent fence.

Now it all makes sense: Michael’s out-of-nowhere email inviting me to teach at this retreat in Spain, not allowing me to pay for my own lodging – an unheard of first. And then, of course, last night’s Grand Event: The deeply invasive Carlos Casta-fucking-nada soul rape we both pretend didn’t happen.

“You’d actually be perfect for it”, Michael adds, the coy quasi-invite hangs like an anvil frozen in the blistering air between us.

I nod and smile, eyes chained to the old men down the hill. I can feel my molecules re-arrange.

Before I left Spain, Michael finally asked outright if I was interested in opening the Stockholm school. My first thought: “That’s not going to happen.” I don’t actually say this, but, really, why would I give up the greatest life I’ve ever had? What I did say was, “I’ll take a look at it”, meaning: “I’ll meditate on it.” And that’s just what I’ve finished doing on this perfect New York morning: Meditating and asking for direction, signs, anything that would indicate a move to Sweden. Why? Well, just in case. Just in case that’s what I’m really supposed to do (can’t be). Just in case Michael’s invitation isn’t some psycho/psychic manipulation, but a Divinely inspired message I’d be insane to ignore (ridiculous). I’m not going anywhere, after all, because God obviously wants me in New York – right here, right now - downtown Manhattan, Lowtown, U.S.A.. I stretch, energized, about to swing onto the floor and get going, but the sound’s getting louder and closer, so close the loft vibrates a little and the first of two jets crash into the tall buildings 10 blocks away.

“Any sign at all, God. I’m looking and listening.”

•

I know how it sounds, me asking God for a sign. If you put this in a movie, it’d be critically brutalized, i.e., “That part where he asks God for a sign and the planes hit? Complete bullshit.” But that’s exactly what happened. Look at it this way:

Could I have been the only human being below Canal Street requesting a sign at 8:50 that morning?

•

The way sound bounces around Manhattan’s artificial mountain ranges, I’m sure I’ve heard a plane go down somewhere in midtown, say, 40 blocks north. I call the actress warehouse one floor above me. Kirsty, the Aussie, answers.

“I think a plane just crashed uptown.”

“The radio says it’s at World Trade”, she’s rasping, either crying or still asleep.

“Meet me in front.”

There’s this fantastic thing that happens in New York at times of real trouble: Strangers begin talking to each other like they’re picking up a previous conversation mid-sentence. You might have thought the group gathered at Laight and Hudson to watch a 110-story building burn had, if not shared a sofa at a party, at least temped together once:

“I guess they could’a run outta gas, right?”

“Sheila o-ways said, ‘Dem taowas is a magnet fa air-o-planes’.”

“It just doesn’t make sense, there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

Now Kirsty’s beside me, tear-streaked and silent. And – BOOM! - a Michael Bay exploding fireball blows thru the top quarter of the second tower. From our perspective, none of us able to see the second jet.

Like sheep catching the scent of wolves still miles away, the energy shifts in our huddle, scattering half of us.

“That was no plane, that was a bomb, yo”, the Afro-Latino kid announces, but instead of retreating, he starts south, toward the pyre.

Before the second tower explodes, I’m sure what I’m seeing is the number one most hallucinogenic accident in history, already stacking stats against Hindenburgs and Titanics.

But now two? No, this is no random event.

My neighbor George walks up.

“Dude, can we go up on your roof?”

“Yeah, c’mon.”

Kirsty, George and me leave the thinning herd, climb up the rickety, barely attached last staircase leading out onto the top of our building. It’s never felt safe getting up here and I generally avoid it. Once we’ve reached the summit, it gets a little weirder: The roof is covered with rows of professional grow-troughs filled with tomato and sunflower arraigned to camouflage a tall thicket of marijuana.

Standing at the edge, silent, watching what looks like the world’s largest air conditioning units burn and smoke, ten million file folders have magically emptied out and released a sparkling confetti that somehow pre-commemorates the most horrific thing that’s ever happened.

Soon, my optimism tells me, the fire department will put it out and we can do something else. Until then, there’s nowhere else to go, nothing else to look at. We’re hypnotized, held rapt by our collective mind’s inability to categorize, file away, make sense. Every so often somebody says, “It looks like a movie”, because that’s as close as we’ll come to wrapping an understanding around what we see.

The spell is broken when my neighbor, Chet, appears, on edge and a little superior.

“I just got off the subway at Chambers. You know, there’re people jumping.”

“No there’s not,” I deny, indignant. “I’ve been watching the whole time – I haven’t seen any people…”

“There’s one”, he points out. “There’s another one.”

And thru the airborne rubble, I see them now, realize I’ve been watching human beings freefall a hundred stories for what seems like hours. Not just forms of humans, I can actually tell what colors they put on this morning, before they left their apartments, their children, their bodies.

Suddenly it’s no longer abstract and far too intimate.

“I’m not watching any more,” I start down to my loft, Kirsty and George following.

Back in my place, I turn on the television. Kirsty’s looking near-catatonic.

“Are you okay?”

“Got any smoke?” she asks in tiny Australian.

I dig out a stash I keep for friends and fill a pipe for her. She’s shaking so badly it worries me and I wonder, “Am I hallucinating?”, pretty sure I’m seeing her entire skeletal structure thru her skin.

Yes, tranquilization. I open a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. George pulls hard on his glass. I do, too, and pour some more.

Out my window, the sky is still a perfect, clear blue, dotted with the occasional - what are they? Legal documents? Résumés? Employee conduct manuals for offices filled with jet fuel and melting steel?

When the first tower collapses on itself, I have the dreaming sensation of watching something on television while simultaneously feeling it’s faint shockwaves radiate into the paved earth below me, a small thunder passing thru 200-year old brick. A sadness moves into my chest as I listen to every kind of person - man, woman and child, all ages and colors, all nationalities, all classes – join in a human sound beginning at the wreckage some blocks south, trailing north, echoing up the streets, muffled yet distinct, volume rising, the chorus now around our building, up the stairwell, my living room, into all of us and out our mouths, continuing on to Vestry, Debrosses, Canal, up into SoHo, a cloth woven of human voices, a single, harmonious audile wound, a necessary verbal release, “Ooohh”, up from the gut, one shared wordless expression of painful, beaten amazement.

The sky fills with ash and plastic, dark smoke and more paper. Sharp chemicals are released that I can taste. I close all the windows.

The phone keeps ringing: L.A., Bay Area, Europe, Florida, Upper West Side. “Yes, I’m fine.” One tower still stands and already I’m feeling an awkward guilt as a rehearsed version of this morning takes form, writing itself.

“I love you, too. No, I’m okay. Really. Bye.”

Christy Whitman says our downtown air is safe to breathe. Adolph Giuliani morphs into Il Papa before our eyes. All flights are grounded, grid locking the planet, the Pentagon’s attacked and another jet’s down – maybe shot down – out in Pennsylvania. The second tower goes, it’s force breaking the seal on a Pandoric lead-lined bunker, releasing, first, a bottomless fount of lies, then sorrow and shame, war and loss, hatred and death upon death, changing all of human life on Earth forever.

•

“If the offer still stands, I’d like to come open that school in Stockholm.”

Michael lets out one of his “I’m always in amusement” chuckles, this one with just a trace of that internationally recognized audio-smirk: told you so.

“Fantastic! When’re you coming?”

addiction, barcelona, hollywood, new york, demons, god, heroin, psychic, psychic phenomena, separate reality, spiritual, delusions of grandeur