Chapter 1 – The Universals is Free.
In the days of ludes and lilacs, Utopia was bat-smashed, falling into the unforgiving chasm of the same dream. New Age healers called these episodic affairs, “his mind’s true life.” His doctor fucked this pain away with post-pubescent pills that reeked of teen spirit.
In these celluloid affairs, God Himself was enjoying a light snack, before the black clouds of the heavens rolled into snakes for the evening. His, being God’s, fatherly face knitted ouch when he bit into a cracker caked with peanut butter. An army of ants had invaded his plate, stealing protein for their queen.
Utopia saw himself as an ant on the outskirts of the last bite, heading for cover that wasn’t there. God’s fingers began to flick. With magical sleight-of-hand, ants ejected off George Washington Carver’s meal ticket like cannon fire. Utopia looked up and saw he was close to His almighty masticating mouth, so close that he could smell the halitosis of the heavens. But before Utopia was inserted into God’s apparent stench of a piehole, he too was flicked away, falling through the kingdom of such pillowy heaven, where the light torched like a lake of fire, in a hybrid of cloud and flame. He fell through the cold parts of the billows - a hopeless Icarus - then through the vapor that cooked the land. The land he thought himself finished with and vice versa.
Utopia fell down like a cooked feather.
down
down
down
down
down
Down into to the consciousness of a new model bone-shell in the process of exiting his mother’s womb like a slow-motion horizon, jettisoned by shots of bloody pink into the warm water of the porcelain bath. The mother screamed the days out of her. Screaming the nights out too. Until the babe fleshed out of the biological cavern, a novice to new life. The Israelian doula scooped him out of the water, cut the umbilical, and raised him above her head as if to show the peanut butter eating Almighty the angel he flicked away. “Oy vey, es mir, Sveet Utopia, Icks a voy,” she announced, passing the bloody newborn over to the father.
Crimson Guillory (yes, that Crimson Guillory), held out his arms and crapped out a smile when she passed his baby boy over like a fleshy-pink football. “Sveet Utopia,” he repeated, the word resonating for a reason. Crimmy held his son with awkward inexperience, examining the child’s newness. New fingers. New toes. New penis. New breath. New noises. Newness that overwhelmed Crimmy’s Amyl high. Chasing dragons was one thing. Fatherhood was the opposite.
The pink football hushed that day, strangely. His breath became more fluid and routine, through nose, out mouth. Utopia watched his father cry not realizing his punk rock mother was no more. Empty, naked limbs dead in the pink water.
The doctors called it trading—one life born, the other at a simultaneous end. Utopia became Crimmy’s solo project from that day forward.
The memory was lost on the syntax of the dream, and the point of view shifted to the young Guillory, as the memory of his birth evaporated into the storage unit of the supposed dreams of his mind. Then light of the scene encapsulated, drawing backwards through the cerebral tunnel on the mind’s eye. The tunnel was caked with pewter mud and smelled of the white rabbit’s locker room. The sound of water dripping echoed through the walls of his mind, and then Utopia opened his eyes. This too was familiar.
Consciousness vibrated and buzzed, his head full of familiar confusion. Waking up from this lucid recurring dream was a reboot, every atom rematerialized in new places, back in the porcelain white of that first birthday.
Presently, Utopia was covered in his own emerald green vomit, a subtle shift from the glistening amniotic fluid that lubed him upon exiting the crown of his dying mother’s pelvis. Memory began to crash into his brain like rip currents, pounding against the rocks, as if to sculpt the earth to the devil’s choosing. That crushing tide of abandonment, pulling against its own will creating bubbly white water that crashed on the fat sands of the shore, pulling the sand crabs to hell. The puzzle pieces of the past fell in line, showing their relevancy to one another. Fragments of vast universal nothingness were filled in with bottles of bootleg absinthe, silvery warriors clashing upon gridiron terra firma and idyllic summer days in the ‘Reef, the coastal hinterland that ate his youth like God ate crackers with chunky peanut butter frosted on top.
His reflection in the golden mirror told a sinful story: the lime-splattered Beach Boys shirt, the absence of pants, sandy-beach locks covering his eyes, patchy whiskers, golden brown skin the sun kissed daily. He slipped around in his bile ooze, his slimy feet finding the Kashmir rug. He staggered out into the endless hall of mirrors, past the suit of armor named Ghentry, past the paintings of medieval death, past the stuffed Peregrine falcon that floated in mid-flight; eye in the sky, looking at you. I can read your mind.
His steps weighed drunkenly up the stairs, gripping the oak banister tightly. Music poured from the floor above. Blur’s “The Universal” suddenly familiarizing itself in his musical wheelhouse of a brain, slow on the uptake in an addled state.
This is the next century
Where the Universal is free
You can find it anywhere
Yes the future’s been sold
Barely able to walk without the world losing its balance around him, Utopia dropped to all fours and crawled the rest of the way. His spine fluttered with a series of icy trembles, crawling past the door to his diseased father’s old writing quarters. A plaque on the door read, “This is the darkest ride.” The locals swore Crimmy’s ghost haunted the haunt, but Utopia had never seen it. If the ghost of the elder Guillory wraithly inhabited Guillory Manor, then Utopia's oft drunken skull denied its existence all the way. Ghosts inherit their human counterpart’s penchant for playing hard to get.
Utopia pushed open the door to his room, hitting his best friend, Guillermo “Memo” Jimenez, in the numb skull. He moaned and rolled over onto Randi Nelso, half naked and all drunk on the floor beside him. The room smelled of chimney smoke incense and sinister sex, a fog of Hawaiian truth arranged itself in the empty spaces. Beer bottles lined the many surfaces of furniture, gathered with CD and cases—relics of the party that broke up today? Yesterday? The day prior?
The beautiful intro of Bowie’s “Heroes” filled the audio landscape of the palatial estate. He fell back on his California King and took a couple hits off his hash pipe that was shaped like a musician’s quarter note. He puffed truth billows out his soup-cooler like factory clouds. The rich textures of electric guitar made him float out the window and onto the Ipé deck of the adjacent gazebo. When he looked in his right hand, he saw that he was carrying the olivewood guit-box Sol made him for his 19th birthday.
The autumn breeze was blowing in, the sun boiling in the oceanic west. The shore thundered into rock and sea lions screamed into near night. Utopia perched up like the Peregrine, surveying the scene below.
Locals gathered on to the beaches below, for the annual Noche De Diablo celebration, his mind became nostalgic for youthful experimentations with nitrous and stilettos. The Noche was a time for locals to relax and unwind with their favorite chemical, get dressed up for the season and at the end of the rave-up, light up a myriad of bonfires and proceed with the autumnal harvest orgy.
Boys kissing boys kissing girls who hate the boys kissing the boys but kissed them anyways, best summed up the Ecstasy-fueled fetes on the beach below. Utopia strummed his guitar with angular timing. His mind patch-worked scenes from past celebrations together: the orgy of pyre reflected in the shore, the drugged out debauchery that progressed during the Halloween eve ritual when smoke kisses the blue night like two star-crossed lovers with unfathomable lusts in loins, across the seven mile stretch of shared shore between Mansion World/Exeter Academy and the industrial, hard-working town of Woodreef, simply called the ‘Reef by local yokels.
Youthly shadows flickered up those rocks to that sprawling Mediterranean Gothic monstrosity that was Manor Guillory, the strange hedonists dressed like nuclear fallout victims and Nazi officers in gasmasks, out of their skulls on chemicals purchased in the street or stolen from parental medicine cabinets.
Utopia hit the quarter note again, sharing time with swigs of jesus juice in between, not really motivated to join in the debauchery. He felt too old, too advanced in his pre-adulthood programming to join the party. Part of himself was angry that he felt this way, wanting to stay young and rebellious, part of him wanted to grow up. The easy solution, albeit temporary, was over-indulgence in isolation.
He floated back into his room, returning to the Cali King. Memo and Nelso disappeared. Wire was on the radio, dispensing “40 Versions.”
Utopia picked up a can of orange spray paint that was lying in the super-stereophonic egg chair, then sauntered towards a bald mannequin torso wearing an eye patch, resting on a dresser. The pirate mannequin donned his old Exeter Preparatory jacket, an avocado-green velour blazer with the Exeter crest sewn into the chest yoke. The crest pictured two billy goats gruff with strawberries polka-dotting their white fur, in prelude to barnyard fisticuffs. A medieval shield with the slanted picture of a demonic lion separated the two brutish goats. Championing out the top of the shield were two muscular arms holding a bright halo atop the coat-of-arms, with the Academy's chief axiom written in Latin below, demanding "Servo Quod Pareo.” Serve and obey was the English translation, and a maxim for life in general on Urantia, after one sorted through all the bullshit. Utopia shook the can in proper time with every riff of “40 Versions.”
I never know which version I'm going to be
I get the feeling my mind is deceiving me
Like a militant fur protestor, Utopia painted an orange X over the crest of conformity. He outlined a W on the opposing yoke pocket, a testament to his devotion to Woodreef High, his current institute of mediocre education.
He stood back to admire his defiant piece of art, a mocking statement of masterpiece against the school that supposed him as just another two comma kid with a prestigious surname. Utopia had graced their ivory halls of the adolescent upper crust and it sucked. He saw through the silky veil of fascist hammering of the youthful minds of old money. Keeping the ranks of Free Masonry consistent was the lord's work.
Utopia felt contempt for the bastards at Planet Exeter. He felt as if he needed to bury the skool in the apathy of its own creation. Football was the perfect vehicle for this, even though he could care less. Hell, the Woodreef team beat the Souls last year in the biggest upset in their 37 year rivalry. The blazer defilement was the exclamation on such a stance.
It was also part of his Halloween costume, by coincidence. Senioritis infected his actions, it was the last bad year, as far as Utopia was concerned. His true life would begin in Berkeley next year.
"Sexeter Predatory. Home of V.D. and those bloodsucking Voths" he mentally masturbated. He sprayed paint into the hardware store bag from which it was purchased. Inhaling quickly is the trick, before one passes out mid-huff. He fell to the hardwood like any mock Icarus. His eyes smiled and dilated.
The pain is never fully fucked away.
