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Ramblings & Ritings Beyond the Blog... |
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ABOUT GARY
NOVELS
& MANUSCRIPTS
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& RITINGS
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A RICH LIFE On
the Tarmac of Entebbe Airport I found the most perfect fear.
At that time it was the greatest fear I had ever known.
More accurate, the fear, like a hunting beast, found me. Walking among the execution victims, wearing their blood and
shit on my shoes, I could no longer watch the torture and death.
I walked away from my captors with their bare feet and big guns.
The smell of Kerex, burning rubber and human flesh hung in the air.
Screams echoed. I walked. I
waited for the bullet to blow out my chest.
I held in me the perfect fear. The
fear of a young boy who had seen the monster in the closet and knew it would
devour him alive, slowly. My
fear became so great that it began to constrict my vision.
My sight became a small circle of light filled with the lorries.
I walked toward the lines of trucks, waiting for my death, the fear
nearly buckling my knees and releasing my bladder.
I walked. Chased from my
hold on reality by such fear, I created my own story of invisibility.
The story must have been well told.
I
knew without knowing which lorry driver was to be my savior.
I silently gave him the two $20 greenbacks.
“Kenya.
Sow-sow?” asked the driver. Without
saying a word I climbed up and laid down in the bed of his truck.
A wooden ceremony of horror—performed without rehersal.
The Luo driver spread the greasy canvas tarp over me gently—like he
would tuck in his m’toto at night. With
his hands, he covered me with dried fish. Suffering
the leaky exhaust and the horrors of the military checkpoints and their
prodding bayonets, eyes red, snot running down my face.
There was no time. There
was nothing I knew of reality. There
was only the raging fear. I lay
there in a fetal puddle under dead husks of fish.
Thus did I make my grand entrance to the dark continent.
I
was no longer who I was before Entebbe.
This kind of fear forever changed me.
The reality of what once was, was violently erased.
In a matter of minutes, I evolved to a burnt out shell of a man
indebted with decades of nightmares. Living
through such perfect fear is a puzzle.
Scared to death. We
often say words, not conscious of their implications.
Such perfect fear had claimed me over that very long 48 hours.
To die from it seemed reasonable. Entirely reasonable. I’m
talking sobbing, crying, shivering, guts contorting, dizzy, blinding,
passing out, pissing and shitting your pants fear.
That kind of fear can kill, I’m certain. But, it appears as if I had not been . . . scared to death. Now, these many years later the
memories still burn me deeply. I
can remember that perfect fear, but always study it from a safe distance. Anymore I do not fear that fear so much as I morn the loss of
my reality. I feel I was raped
and the virtue of my reality desecrated.
Something sacred and soothing was violently taken from me by the
fear. For me, life will never
be normal and nice again. That
is a scar that will never heal. I have walked in the shadow of
perfect fear. I have seen hell
on earth. The empty eyes of
pot-bellied children and the feral eyes of their desperate mothers.
I have seen rivers flooded with dead, bloated bodies a vomited gorge
of man’s darkness. I have
tossed coins to the faceless lepers who danced for beer. I have seen the
politicos crucified on billboards, their scrotums stretched to breaking by
buckets of stones tossed by passers by. And I have had my hand in it, as
well. I took the life of a
small child—a compassionate euthanasia.
Still, the mewing of a burning infant sometimes fills my sleep. Perhaps I could have done something other than kill her.
Maybe if I had not lost my reality, I could have done something
better. But there was no
reality that I knew of in that hell of a shanty town and her deliverance
from that life seemed like a miracle of hope.
I had delivered her from . . . evil. Rarely can a man look at a photo of
his own corpse. I do about
every evening. Seems as if God
wanted me to experience everything, and so He playfully killed me on Mount
Kenya’s North Face. Pulmonary
and cerebral edema. After a
nightmare series of rappels, I crawled for over a day through boulder
fields. Do you have any idea
what it’s like to crawl for more than a day, sick, spitting blood and lung
tissue…dying? I never quit.
I was in a storm of unreality—coming in and out of consciousness.
Drowning in my own blood. Down
to high camp, I walked between my partner and the British doctor.
I stumbled. Couldn’t
take care of my own bodily functions. I died in among the tussocks of elephant grass at Shipton’s
Caves at a little over 13,000 feet. Facing
the prospects of creating my own reality—to paint an entire life’s
picture on a blank canvas—I created my own reality and took in a breath
and willed the muscle to pump. Today, I have difficulty watching
movies and events where people win through facing great adversity.
For example, I cannot watch Rocky movies, Karate Kid movies or even
The Bad News Bears without it deeply affecting me.
While they are only digital images for others, for me, it turns into
a scene of me fighting for my very life, crawling over the boulders of Mount
Kenya and willing back my life at Shipton’s Caves. I have gone too far from reality and normal.
I have seen too much, done too much and have a strange embarrassment
at having to lip sync normal life. Alone, during the quiet of late
nights I just wonder at it all. I
would not believe it if I had not lived it.
I wander into my library, full of the oddities and treasures of an
impossible life. I gently touch
each memory. These things are
beyond value. They are
touchstones of wonderment, fear, horror, triumph and almost painful beauty.
Each treasure has a history and paints its image on my soul. So, late at night the clock ticks and tocks and chimes the hour and the half. Most others are long asleep. I am witness to a thousand memories of life as it really is with all its squalor and grandeur, horror and hope. ******* |
