↑ Vantage pt for Jay Levine at tippity top of crow's nest before he jumped.
Das Boot: the first and perhaps most profound of the Dreamscape categories in that it describes not only the day-to-day adventures of a Caribbean escape, but also a moment that was much of a fulcrum or a rubicon for everyone involved, both a gathering and a dispersal. They were all twenty-four or twenty-five years old, an age where everything in the past seems like prologue and the next turned page is where the story really begins. There was a lot of debate about what comes next: plans hatched, destinies reconsidered. And soon after: Sebastian heading for Brazil, Christoph to Argentina, Helene to New Zealand, our pal Jayson and Natalie both to New York City. And the more we studied these pages, the stronger the urge became to apply allegory and deeper significance to everything that was written. And although 'reality' strongly resists such neat and tidy structuring, nonetheless here it is.
-- Eds
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Das Boot (8/33)
December 10, 1990
Choose a different dreamscape
Oh glorious day! Oh beautiful life! Woke to the sight of a sun high overhead (9am), the smell of preparing french toast (w/nutmeg), and the itch of scabies somehow, miraculously, banished from my being!! Perhaps the anti-infection cream w/which I liberally doused my ass did the trick… clear, clean skin: nothing like!! Ah, health.
And there he stood: RASTA-MAN; Paul Bunyon of Troumaka. He came towering toward us, bare chest and crochet-wrapped head. His presence was physically + spiritually immense. He said: “Yo man. You want da gange?” I said, “No. No thanks. I don’t think…” He said, “Coke then? You want coke? Gange?” “No, really, I…” “You smoke mon?” “…well, yes, on occass–” “Here, mon.” Hand flips open revealing prodigious, cigar-butt spliff alight in his palm. “Pull on dis.” I obediently accept the smouldering log. Nattie accompanies me. 10 minutes later we sit on the cement steps of a friend of Kiki’s house, staring fixedly at a shifting forest of coconut palms and teak trees. A starving kitten mews plaintively by our feet. Rasta rhythms shake the concrete foundation of this bachelor pad, the sloping lawn, the rutted, gouged road. A barren, dingy dark + mildewed cement box of a hut, but what a sound system! Dual turntables. Mixing board. Throbbing speakers We sat beneath gathering grayness and listened to our minds fry in the heat of St. Vincent. Oppressive heat, today, lessened finally by heavy showers which I’m sure retarded the drying of the clothes which I scrubbed by hand, still stoned, in the stream which trickles + tumbles from the hills, finally into the ocean itself. The feel of gravel beneath my feet in the rapid current narrowed between rocks. Small sticks + leaves brush against my toes like crabs + fish. Kiki, myself, Dexter, Sam. Scrubbing our clothes with some sud-maker from St. Lucia which I just realized (while trying to recall the exact brand) must still sit, soggy + pasty, on deck beneath the makeshift line I fashioned to hold the damp clothes. I will get it when I pee, man.
Comments (1)
I remember this too! I know exactly those huts with amazing sound systems in the 90s. I think it’s still like that.