Hollywood on the Hudson
Beach-wrecked in Beacon, I found myself frequenting a coffeehouse called Bank Square Coffee, just up the hill from the Hudson and the Metro North train station. The first business on Main Street as one approached from the west, this fairly hip house of coffee had a large brick patio on the west side, fenced in and surrounded on two sides by the sidewalk and on a third by a parking lot. Inside were two rooms with two doors between the two rooms. Both rooms had large windows facing Main Street. The larger room had a number of tables, couches, cushioned chairs, the requisite changing art show on the walls, and a large flat screen television on one wall facing a U of couches and cushioned chairs. The entry room contained the counter and espresso machine, cream and sugar station, beer taps and an odd contraption that looked like something one might find in a chemistry laboratory that was apparently for brewing iced coffee, coffee dispensers, a few tables and another large flat screen TV. Bank Square was definitely hipster central for the Beacon area, a growing “subculture” in the area experiencing ongoing gentrification with a nice selection of cafes, a lively pop-art scene with several galleries lining main street and Dia, a touted museum and art space which had opened relatively recently just up from the river and across the track from where my boat was beached and later anchored. The Town and the Hudson were surrounded by hills and small mountains including Beacon Mountain where Revolutionaries would light a beacon to warn others up the river when the British were coming. Walking east on Main Street you almost feel as if you're in a Colorado mountain town. Those things and easy rail access to New York City made Beacon a fairly hip spot for the hipsters. A bearded friend of mine who had the habit of wearing skinny jeans called Beacon NoBro (“North Brooklyn”) on at least one occasion.
As is usually the case when I frequent a cool coffeehouse, I made friends with the baristas and a number of the regular patrons. Still intent upon publishing my first travel narrative, Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman, I would often spend my days at Bank Square with my laptop, coffee and bagel, sending queries to publishers and rereading and revising my manuscript and penning posts for my blog.
Alex was perhaps the first barista I got to know fairly well at Bank Square. Two sleeves inked top to bottom, Alex always wore a friendly smile and offered a kind welcome when I walked in the door. As I was living on a minimal fixed budget proffered by family trust-fund moneys, I was not infrequently shy of cash for a cup of coffee, so Alex and some of the other baristas would often let me fill my cup for free else allow me to pay the next day, and would often offer me day-olds, sometimes by the dozen. Alex had a pretty blue-haired girlfriend and a younger brother I later got to know, Zach, who like Alex was a musician. Both were quite excited to know I was more than acquainted with members of the Laramie born band Teenage Bottle Rocket, as both brothers were big fans. Sadly, one of the members of TBR had recently passed away at the time of this writing, one of the Carlisle twins, Brandon, leaving the punk world in mourning. Good guidance on your soul's journey to future lives and to future musical endeavors, Brandon! Namaste and much love!! Oh, and a hearty “FUCK YOU!!”
As is often as not the case when I frequent a coffeehouse, I found some of the baristas very interesting people if not fated players (else ready stand-ins) in the story I'm living, and perhaps vice-versa, and I made friends with an unusual and even striking young woman named Arianna. Tall and slender and subtly graceful, Arianna would often sit in the back corner of Bank Square, typing away on her laptop or surfing the web and occasionally reading a book, sipping coffee or tea(?) and nibbling at a pastry. I noticed her and found her attractive and rather intriguing well before we spoke, and when finally we did chance to chat she proved rather soft spoken and impressively eloquent. We would sometimes share cigarette breaks on the patio and bitch about our respective situations: me and my beach-wrecked sailboat woes and publishing endeavors, her and her less than ideal accommodations with an eccentric aunt and her want to relocate, and then we would generally recite our respective plans for finding our respective ways out of slumps and sorrows.
Arianna was from Queens, and had fairly recently been employed at NBC in Manhattan, but was currently unemployed. She was well educated and intelligent, if like me finding that falling into the tracked and plotted places proffered in our society were not always a proper or easy fit for a thoughtful or sensitive individual. I also had some rather intriguing encounters with three other women of note who happened to Bank Square Coffee in Beacon whilst I was wiling away my time as a castaway in Beacon, New York.
One afternoon after a particularly dismal morning I made my way up the hill to Bank Square Coffee, purchased a coffee and a bagel, then took a seat at the northernmost table on the patio. I can't say with certainty whether the tall and stately blond sat at the next table before or after I sat and plugged my laptop into the outlet on the string of LED lights strung around the railing that surrounded the brick patio and began to surf the internet for information on local literary agents, as I was rather distracted by psychic chatter vexing (one of the significant potential downsides to opening channels to the “beyond”). She sat somewhat reclined in her chair, long legs crossed, wearing a mid-length seventies vintage or style haute couture dress with large diagonally arranged checks of brown and orange and gold, casually sipping her coffee or latte or tea and facing directly towards me, though her gaze was well enough obscurred behind large dark lenses. She was certainly presenting all the appropriate airs for a Hollywood star and supermodel, intentionally or naturally, practice else intrinsic poise. I sipped my coffee and ate my bagel, attempted to continue my internet search for an agent to represent Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman to publishers, and only scarce attended to the fact that the woman who sat at the next table and facing me if not staring at me through large dark sunglasses was in fact Uma Thurman.
My first (seeming?) encounter with said supermodel/superstar was in North Hollywood in 2003. My erstwhile girlfriend Meghan and I were visiting my friends Pete and Melissa, a couple I knew from Laramie. I noticed a rather unusual woman walking past the Miraculous Beast Shanti Mama (my 1963 Dodge Power Wagon with happy orange sunshine painted on the passenger door and a camper atop) a couple of times when visiting the camper to retrieve something or other. By “unusual” I mean merely that I felt the woman walking by was somehow not an average pedestrian, and simililarly felt it rather odd that she seemed so interested in me/us/the Miraculous Beast Shanti Mama. Said woman wore a past-knee length dress that I thought rather “librarianish,” her blond hair in a bun, and large-framed eighties-vintage glasses sitting atop her nose. She glanced at me only somewhat surreptitiously, as if this stranger even wanted me to notice she was taking note of me/us/our rather conspicuous ride.
On the night before Meghan and I were to leave Los Angeles, we lay in bed on the lower bunk of the Beast Mama and traded complaints about the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, both anxious to wander up the coast and away from the cityscape. Though Meghan had grown up in Albuquerque, both of us were mountain people/wild people at heart and neither of us were much enamored with big cities.
The next morning we emerged from the Beast Mama, and went in to bid Pete and Melissa farewell. After a sesh smoking some SoCal dank nugs, the couple accompanied us to the truck and we stood at the door of the camper by the tailgate as Meghan and I prepared to depart. As we stood and exchanged goodbyes and hugs, the tall blond woman I had noticed noticing me/us on previous days approached.
“Are you leaving Los Angeles?” she asked innocently enough.
“Yeah, we're going to wander up the coast to San Francisco,” or some such said Meghan and or I.
“Ah. So what did you think of our city?” or some like such she queried.
Meghan and I replied with the appropriate niceties, the sort of things you say when you do not wish to lie, yet have no want to offend, to which said mysterious stranger responded with quite exactly the same exclamations of contempt for the city which Meghan and I had spoken in bed in the camper the night before, verbatim!
“Oh. Well I think . . .” she said, repeating our expressions of contempt for the City of Angels.
Meghan and I immediately looked at each other with matching surprised yet knowing looks. We climbed into the cab of the Beast Mama and briefly discussed the preceding odd encounter. By the third exit after we had entered the highway, the engine started to sputter, and we scarcely made it off the highway and onto the shoulder of the exit before the engine died. Luckily there was a mechanic only a short distance from where the truck had rolled to a stop. We stayed in the camper behind the mechanics for the next week-and-a-half while waiting for the repairs to be completed, sold a few of Meghan's semi-precious stone bead necklaces and perhaps some sage smudges, saved a little boy from drowning in a park, and mostly cooked our meals in the camper in the parking lot whilst awaiting the repair of our ride. The people we encountered were generally quite kind, one fellow even hooking us up with a blunt or two. Apparently hexed or karmically vexed for our inconsiderate and unmindful words about the big city, even as such was spoken in private, we found ourselves rather forced to acknowledge the beautiful and divine possibilities of life in Los Angeles.
Years later when wandering on the east coast, I was staying at a motel somewhere in Pennsylvania or New York, weary from the road and suffering a broken heart (from another love-lost). As I lay in bed, flipping through channels on the television, I stopped on HBO or Showtime or some such channel to watch the feature film, My Super X-Girlfriend. In one particular scene, Uma Thurman's character (the Super X-Girlfriend) is at work in an office wearing a librarianish dress and large eighties-style glasses with her hair bound atop her head. I immediately realized that the woman on the screen was in fact almost certainly the same woman Meghan and I had encountered in North Hollywood those years before!
After I finished half of my bagel on the patio at Bank Square Coffee in Beacon, NY, the distraction of psychic static became too much to bear, perhaps because of the presence of said figure seated at the next table. I gathered my effects, returned my laptop to carrying case, and started across the patio towards the exit. As I walked past the stately tall blond woman seated at the next table I felt compelled to utter (of the ill energy vexing me), “They go to Naraka-Loka!” only scarcely under my breath. Supposing that woman sitting at the next table on the patio at Bank Square Coffee in Beacon, NY was indeed who I assume (not too great a leap, as at the time Uma Thurman was touted by media reports to live just up the Hudson in Hyde Park), she might actually have know the meaning of the Sanskrit place-name to which I had referred, as Uma's father is touted a renowned Sanskrit scholar. Uma had grown up with the likes of the Dalai Lama on occasion staying at her family home, and is goddaughter to Timothy Leary, by the way, who was Uma's mother's first husband. The Sanskrit term “Naraka-Loka” translates to English as “Hell,” and was very not-unlikely a term Miss Uma Thurman understood, considering her upbringing. And if indeed Miss Thurman might (secret identity/superhero-style) by some odd twist of lila actually be the Person she is named after, Uma Himavati (which I have considered as also not so terribly unlikely), she/She knew quite well enough what I meant.
Somewhere around a week-and-a-half later I was again at Bank Square Coffee, and chose an available table on the south end of the patio. It was past sunset, and as I took my seat and retrieved my laptop from carrying case, I only scarcely noticed an attractive pair, a beautiful blond and lovely curly-haired brunette sitting at the next table. As I turned my attention to preparing my workstation, I heard the blond woman speak. I raised my head in startled surprise.
“That's Anyanka!” I thought or spoke under my breath.
In my previous sojourn in Laramie I had purchased a computer with funds which came to me upon the death of my paternal grandparents, upon which I wrote my first travel narrative, Memories and Musings of a Poat-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman, and upon which I viewed the entirety of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the internet late at night before going to sleep in the camper van in which I was abiding, “The Cat-In-The-Hat” (as said dead red and white striped camper van was named by my sister Lisa before she sold it to our dad, a retired professor of chemistry at UW who still lived in our family home on 7th Street). Anyanka, played by Emma Caulfield, is a “vengeance demon” in the series who became a mortal after a thousand years of exacting women's curses upon their misbehaving partners.
I immediately Googled “Anyanka Buffy” and carefully compared recent photos of actress Emma Caulfield with the woman who sat less than ten yards from me, and readily concluded that it was indeed said starlet sitting on the patio but a few yards away. Considering telling future accounts of this encounter, and likely skepticisms proffered (and also for my own sense of self-assurance), I decided to obtain corroborating evidence for this odd celebrity encounter, especially as I had seen Uma Thurman there just over a week before. I asked James, the barista on duty at the time, if he would be so kind as to Google “Emma Caulfield” to verify else deny my identification of my fellow patron on the patio. He later agreed that the woman who sat at the next table to me was indeed Emma Caulfield, “Same haircut and everything.” I later figured out that the other woman at the table that night was almost certainly Emma's costar and fellow vengeance demon “Halfrek” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kali Roche. Kali Roche.
Now what is a dilettante of a sadhu to think when an Uma and then a Kali, both Hollywood stars (and both bearing names attributed to the Consort of Shiva), show up at the same locale in such a manner?! And what is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan to think when two “vengeance demons” show up on the scene, and seemingly (only somewhat) surreptitiously attending to oneself?! Not to mention, when said fellow in question has an x-wife who is now named Holly Wood!! “Kali” means black, and “Roche” is now the last name of my cousin Beth, who is black and was adopted by my dad's sister and her husband. Beth was the first “Kali Ma” (literally “Black Mama”) of particular significance in my life.
I don't remember where I met Star. I do remember that I went to her apartment in the Connor Hotel to smoke a bowl with her, and that I was rather immediately enamored with her. Under five foot tall, bobbed brown hair and a style and sexy charm could turn a punk boy into a hippie, else a hippie into a punk. She is one of more than a few girls I knew in those days who by my reckoning served as an potential Avatar, else at least did play that role in what archetypally rife lila and absurd dharma did ensue in our time together as friends and sometimes lovers. Her wit was sharp and insightful, and she was well read and well traveled for a girl of 20, had spent some time chanting Hari Krishna and wandered a while between gutterpunk-style city street squatting and Rainbow Gatherings and the Deadhead scene still ubiquitous and lively across the land in those days. Star had grown up mostly in Oklahoma and possibly Texas, but her dad lived in Laramie, and so she settled in Laramie for a time and did abide at the magical and haunted Connor Hotel. Last I knew, Star is now just Jessica, single mother of three, a graduate student in chemistry and a teacher at a Christian charter school in Oklahoma.
Star had a friend named Punk Kid Pete who would often hang out at her place and occasionally crash on the couch. Punk Kid Pete was a “Techer” originally from Albany, New York who didn't have much in common with his fellow mechanic roommates. “Techers,” townies or “locals” (which sometimes includes students), students (who are sometimes also already locals, and who sometimes graduate from college to become townies), and travelers (not to be confused with tourists) are the primary standing categories in the Laramie downtown scene. “Techers” are generally the least appreciated else perhaps most under-appreciated group on the Laradise scene, as they often drive loud and/or smokey pickups (perhaps) in the process of a rebuild, and they tend to be a rather rowdy bunch, as many young men go to Wyo Tech as a way out of prison.
Punk Kid Pete wore a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt and bluejeans, spiked bleach blond hair, and would sometimes wear cat-eye contact lenses as he thought they looked like vampire eyes. Pete was quite into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and especially the character “Spike,” a very “cool” vampire played by James Marster who has a rather heated love-hate relationship with Buffy through the course of the later seasons of the series, wore spiked bleach blond hair, blue jeans and a black leather jacket he took from a slayer he killed in the 70s. Star was something of a fan of the show, as well, if not so overtly wholesale as Punk Kid Pete. Star was not much of a “Buffy,” though might have figured well enough as Buffy the Vampire Slayer character “Faith,” another “Slayer” that shows up in the course of the show. Star was quite into Ani D (Ani DiFranco), the Queen of Indie Pop, as were most of the girls payed me much mind in those days.
“Wait wait! Hold on guys, I gotta show you something!” Star said as she turned to put a tape or cd into the boombox that sat behind her and next to the wall. It was “Not A Pretty Girl” or perhaps “Little Plastic Castles.” She sang along with Ani, standing up and very animated, then shifted her hips then her knees in a trademark Ani D stage move.
“What'd you guys think? I've been working on that Ani move for a while, and I think I just about got it!” or some such she said through a proud smile beneath eyes too wise for an average twenty year old.
As I noted, most of the girls I was friends or lovers with in those days were very much into Ani DiFranco. Queen of Indie Pop in the 90's, Ani was the icon for the hippie-punk feminist movement into the early 2000s.
“Star” in Sanskrit is “Tara,” which is one of the names of Shiva's Consort, a Goddess worshiped by Buddhists as well as Hindus.
I determined some time ago that “the Universe,” or more likely specifically Goddess Lalitha or perhaps Bhairavi, has granted me (and everyone, for that matter) an abundance of slightly veiled clues within appellations, within key words and within various cultural artifacts, and between the lines of nigh any significant work of literature, movies and music, and in any number of intriguing homonyms and uncanny cognates proffered in the vernacular. Clues to one's path are never too obscured nor unduly hidden, as your True and Divine Self really wants you to find your way (supposing you've the least inclination) to discover who and Who you really are, to uncover the hidden truths of life and of being and Being and to find and enjoy the pure and righteous bliss that is in fact the real truth of reality. I believe that those clues laid for each of us individually are always clues that resonate with who we individually are, often tailor-made to fit each person and personality and mindful of everyone's quirks, directions designed to provide a delightful journey of self-discovery and Self-discovery, experiences offered for our eternal amusement as we ply the pathways of forever that are already always here and now.
The English word “God” is derived from the Sanskrit root “go,” which translates directly to English as “cow,” as in the creatures that say “Moooo.” The English word “shampoo” is clearly related to the Sanskrit “sampu1” which means “to cleanse,” and the old-timey cheer, “Hooray!! Hoorah!!” sounds rather like “Hari-Hara,” a name for God when the Maintainer and Destroyer, Vishnu and Shiva share one form. Little Sanskrit “spells,” as I would sometimes call them, are cast through nigh every language globally. The Spanish “mamasita” or “little mama” is curiously evocative of the Sanskrit name of Goddess Laksmi when She is wed to Rama, Ma Sita. Sita was touted to be a small framed woman, according to the Ramayana. These are more than curios cognates, they are spells woven subtly and somewhat surreptitiously woven into everyday speech that maintain connections with the most ancient of stories and archetypes, mantras that in fact often invoke the ancient Gods and Goddesses, Devas and Devis, intonations that tie us to the myths and meaning of our ancestors and of eternity.
To reify, it might well be said that the relationship between sound and words, vibration and meaning as woven together in language are in general, in essence, spells. The rhythm, tones and intonations of any given language creates a certain nuanced reality particular to whatever culture arises therefrom or therewith. Language is vehicle not only to meaning, but also to the manifestation of those ranges of sense vibrations that at least help to create the particular “air” of whatever culture and community, of whatever sentence or utterance. According to Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist and in fact most other religious understandings, intonations and tones and varied sounds spoken and chanted contain great power, thus the nigh ubiquitous cultural artifact of “magic words” . . . and according to quantum physics it's all about the vibrations of things, like strings. And certainly the Divine and Mind is not uninterested in poetics and the play of words, and indeed even basic physics, let alone the quantum kind, contends that vibration is the substance and medium for the manifestation of reality.
I once had a conversation with a beautiful woman named Corina (or was it Carina?) in Devargas Park in Santa Fe wherein said lovely and brilliant woman contended that if the Voyager spacecraft landed on some distant lifeless planet, the vibrations of the repetition of the recordings on the Golden Record NASA included on said spacecraft would eventually create order to the sand and rocks, minerals and molecules to create life. Imagine evolution set in time to “Johnny B. Goode!”2
Certainly a bit taken aback by the successive apparitions of Uma, Emma and Kali, I nonetheless endeavored to continue my “real world” retinue despite the rather fairy tale else mythic nuances of my scene. I continued with the endeavor to find a publisher for Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman, sending emails and seeking Hudson Valley area agents and publishers to whom I might ply my manuscript, and perhaps at moments attempted to present myself a character that fit within the bounds of normalcy in the Hudson River Valley.
One reason most mystics are disengaged from the workaday world and regular “gainful employment” is that those routines do not generally well fit the rhythms of a life always attending to the Divine, nor the contingent practices required of the full-time devotee. Many of the vagabond dread-headed wanderers mendicant-meandering the highways and byways, cityscapes and sacred and wild places of our world ought in fact not “Get a job!!” Their job is dharma full-time. Indeed these earn their keep by maintaining channels to the eternal, to the wild and free and primal when most are (and to a certain degree ought be) mostly concerned with the peripherals and the merely transitory stuff of the here and now: career, family and household affairs.3
My retinue of life as a shipwrecked mystic hippie-cum-hobo-cum-sailor was rather mostly dismal, with moments of transcendent beauty and occasional epiphany (and perhaps likely, growing infamy) in between these odd and perhaps poignant brushes with the famous and perhaps even brushes with fame. Nearly daily trips to Bank Square Coffee, regular visits to the grocery store owned by a local Muslim family, and occasional forays deeper into Beacon were what I did with five or six of my seven days of the week, else I sat aboard bhavAbdhi in meditation, contemplation and chanting and occasionally writing or watching movies, else endeavoring to repair the rudder to prepare for a further journey down the Hudson to Manhattan. On the other one or two days a week I would take the trip to New Paltz.
The Metro-North train station was only a couple hundred yards from where bhavAbdhi was beached, and trains stopped at mostly hourly intervals to convey passengers to Poughkeepsie. From the Poughkeepsie station I would catch to bus to New Paltz to acquire my weekly stash, whether weed or hash, and to hang out at the cafes, coffeehouses, Snug Harbor Bar (“Snug's”), the Oasis, and down by the Walkill River, and to hang out with friends I had made there over the course of my stays in New Paltz, New York.
A band was playing one night at Snug's when I was in town to acquire my weekly stash of hash. The bar was crowded, and the dance floor was lively. I took a seat towards the middle of the bar to order a Snug's Surprise, which is basically whatever discounted keg the distributor provides. A balding older fellow sat to my left, and he seemed rather upset about something, and so I did compassionately inquire:
“What the matter, man?” I asked in an upbeat tone.
“Somebody stole my wallet!” he replied with an angry grimace.
“Wow, that's a bummer! This is a kind bar. People here don't usually do shit like that!” I said quite sincerely.
Though it's the hangout both day and night for the train-hoppin' and home-bum gutterpunks as well as gentle hippy sorts, even the seediest seeming gutterpunks of New Paltz are generally a fair upright bunch (“Scum-Fuck Sid” being perhaps the most famous else infamous). I took my beer and walked to the other side of the dance floor to stand next to one of two bar-height tables that extended out from the wall. I started to get down to the band, wildman Nataraja trance dance-style, letting loose frustrations over sailboat and publishing woes with undulations and mudras and mad movements timed in meditative motion to the music. Dance is something I consider sadhana, “spiritual practice,” with Shiva Nataraja The Lord of Dance and the Dance of the Universe in meditative mind as I wildly weave and wiggle and wander round the floor to whatever danceable music's proffered, envisioning myself and all the dancers on the floor and the band as a microcosmic expression of the dance of solar systems and galaxies, molecules and electrons, people and planets dancing in such perfect and sweet synchrony.
By a song or two into my groove, the follow who'd lost his wallet crossed the dance floor and stood at the end of the next table extending from the wall and between me and the band, though instead of facing the band, said seemingly unhappy chap turned to face me, glaring directly at me with his eyes squinted to show just slivers of iris, pupil and white. I was not in any mood to ignore such an apparent affront, so I took four or five steps towards the stage and rather politely asked him,
“Is there a problem?” with not the least malice in my tone at all, though I was also not the least inclined to put up with any significant disrespect.
“You stole my wallet, you fucking douche-bag!” he said through his sneer.
Without a second or second's thought, I swung and hit him with a fair hard right, upon which he began to fall rather immediately back against the wall. Not sure that he wasn't reaching for a weapon as his hand went towards a pocket, I followed with another right or two, then gave way as the bouncer stepped between us.
“You gotta go, Jeffrey,” one bouncer said almost reluctantly.
“I know,” I said as I looked for my laptop and other personal effects.
I walked up the hill to the Oasis, got a beer and went out to the fenced-in patio to regain my repose. A friend and I smoked a joint, and I nearly forgot about the aforementioned incident after recounting to friends and acquaintances present on the patio, then delving into whatever philosophic dialog. As I started through the bar and towards the exit around closing time, I looked to my right to see the fellow I had previously punched at Snug's approaching the exit. He held his beer bottle close against his torso, appearing to me as if he was considering the option of using it as a weapon.
“I don't want any more problems,” I said whilst keeping a wary eye on the bottle in his right hand, ready to block it and knock it out of his hand if anything were tried.
“You won't have any,” he said, so I started out the door, still keeping an eye to make sure he didn't hit me with the bottle from behind. As he followed me out the door, he reached for his phone and immediately dialed the police, then continued following me down the hill to Main Street whilst telling the dispatcher where I was heading. I had cooled down enough that I thought better of knocking the phone out of his hand and finishing what I started, and continued down the street until met by two squad cars at the intersection of Main and South Chestnut. They had me take a seat in one of the cars, then drove to another location. The fellow I had punched was sitting in another cop car at the location the car stopped, again glaring at me with his trademark (?) squinty-eyed glare, as the officer driving the car I was in proceeded to extort what money they might before releasing me into the night.
Facebook Post:
Jeffrey Charles Archer
October 2, 2013 ·
According to da' ticket, the charge is "HARASSMOND 2nd" . . . I contest, as I did not at all harass the world, and certainly not in French!!! All I did was punch a bloke!!!
About a month to two later, I cued a made for TV Steven King movie on YouTube to watch when I got back to my boat after whiling away the afternoon at Bank Square in Beacon. I opened my laptop upon returning to my boat and watched Night Flier, a tale about a vampire that flies around in a small airplane to small airports and feeds on air traffic controllers and passengers, and starring an unscrupulous tabloid journalist who chases the Cessna flying vampire around in search of a good scoop. I reclined on the settee and smoked some hash and tobacco, only half-attending to the flick on the LCD screen. About half way through the movie, the actor playing the tabloid journalist grew very upset with the vampire, and wore a scowl with squinting eyes as he gazed at the carnage the vampire had left in a small airport, a squinty-eyed scowl that I immediately recognized as the angry stare that had been cast at me at Snug Harbor Bar in New Paltz, just before the aforementioned violent exchange! When I had access to the internet the next day, I looked up Miguel Ferrer's touted address, and Wikipedia or some other such site said that he lived in New Jersey, just downriver from and on the same side of the Hudson as Highland/New Paltz, NY. Ferrer is George Cluny's cousin and a renowned actor in his own right.
A few years earlier, upon returning from my previous perilous misadventure to Montreal and around the eastern United States, I was in a rather unhappy, or perhaps better Bhairava4 state of mind, drinking a beer at the Ranger Bar. As I sat outside on one of a number of picnic tables set up on the covered concrete patio, sipping my beer alone and smoking a cigarette with some weed mixed in, a college kid came up rather randomly and started poking me in the chest below the beard-line, accusing “my people” of blowing up the Two Towers. “Your people blew up the Two Towers!!” he claimed as he poked me in the chest with one finger extended. I at first endeavored to gently explain that I am “Hindu” and not Muslim, and that I am a Laramie local, making sure to note that were I a Muslim, he was being an asshole (if not spoken exactly so) for trying to mess with a Muslim just because said person is Muslim (not to mention, no jihadist would be drinking beer in a bar!). He returned a second and a third time, the last with his pint beer glass held back and in a threatening manner as he poked me in the chest with his left index finger and continued with his disrespectful idiot rant. Feeling finally at my fill and sensing enough threat from said provocation, I let loose with a fitting (if not very ahimsa-style) response.
With my left hand blocking the seeming would be assailant's right hand bearing the pint glass, I delivered three quick if not that ferocious of rights to his head, knocking him back across the patio and towards the door into the bar, though not quite bringing him down as he tumbled into a couple or three other fellows. A number of others converged on the slight brawl and broke it up. My nug jar shattered in the milieu, and my wallet likewise hit the pavement, cards strewn. I retrieved my wallet and some portion of the spilled cannabis before departing, and was immediately struck with the realization that this violent exchange oddly mimicked or mirrored a similar violent exchange that had transpired a few years previously in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, wherein upon first being blindsided I responded by grasping my shadowy assailant's right hand with a rather fancy left-handed wrist-lock and delivering three swift rights to his head, and shortly thereafter received another blow from another shadowy S.F.S.F. Gutterpunk assailant, the which somehow knocked back into my head the memory that I had in fact been recipient of two bullets instead of blows in that very spot, years before (Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman, Volume I, Chapter 2). Then almost if not precisely on a line extended to the east from the site of those altercations I bring two blows (and perhaps three swings) to bear on a verbal assailant who, it seems, happened to be a Hollywood star and cousin to George Cluny.
Am I mistaken in believing someone seeming “other” is penning the screenplay of my life across the span of the continental United States, else that I am perhaps but an emanation of some grand fractal scheme, a player (else perhaps a hologram?) in some twisted movie projected in the matrix of maya, and unbeknownst to me subject to the direction of some however transcendent director and the whims of whatever seeming or pseudo-divine producer. Maybe I am merely a self-aware holographic emanation of some story projected from who knows where that's already played out a thousand times or more in a thousand or more shades or hues or “takes,” one of so many apparently random persons in sundry places experiencing and playing as the actors in the same skit or play?
Do not mistake my expression of trepidation or skepticism for ingratitude or doubt. I realize that the glimpses past the veils I am thus so oft granted are in fact amazing gifts, and that to see one's life bordering on the mythic and approaching fame and the famous with such grand gestures is an honor, of sorts. Still, it's certainly potentially disconcerting to see such clearly preconceived and obviously somehow premeditated and devised schemes playing out in one's life, as if you are living an intricately plotted science fiction or fantasy novel being read and writ into the day-to-day of one's life—a screenplay played out “live?” Such revelations and realizations can take a toll on one's grasp on what most people call “reality,” especially with the intermittent chimerical cameos by supermodels and veritable Hollywood stars to reify the plot thus woven!
On another occasion in New Paltz, after having taken my breakfast at the Main Street Bistro and whiling away much of the day between smoking bowls by the Walkill and wandering the walking and biking path, or sitting at whatever coffeehouse staring however blankly at my laptop's LCD screen or at the scenery, I happened to be hanging out with some kids in front of the Bistro, smoking cigarettes and maybe smoking a bowl or a joint and shootin' the shit and such, as was my weekly habit when visiting New Paltz. Into the midst of this towny crew, bouncing and bubbly baby-faced Nicole bounded up to the center of the circle to excitedly deliver the news that Mary Louise Parker had been at the Bistro that morning,
“And you were there!” she said, pointing at me.
I recollected and reflected on my morning meal at the Main Street Bistro, rather crowded that day as I believe it was a Saturday, and considered that I might well have experienced some tingling of my spider senses or whatever extra-sensory perception it might be indicates a Hollywood star is nigh, some change of the air I often only scarce notice save in retrospect. I unequivocally believed Nicole's account, as at the time Weeds was being filmed or had just finished filming in Manhattan or Connecticut, just a short drive away, as the main character Nancy Botwin (played by M.L.P.) had ended up in prison in New York, and so the Botwin clan moved to the Big Apple to take a crack at the weed market and later relocated to Connecticut.
“Damn, I wish I woulda known! I have some good hash I coulda offered to smoke with her!” I exclaimed only scarcely in jest. I have since read that Mary Louise Parker touts that she does not use Cannabis, though she is a mother and seemingly a family lady, and thus might not wish to draw attention . . . else maybe she just doesn't like to puff. The subject changed and though I still gave some thought to my near meeting with Mary Louise before soon setting the nigh encounter aside in my thoughts—after all there are rather a plethora of celebrities in New York City and thereabouts, and New Paltz is certainly an attractive destination for a day trip away from the City.
Facebook Post:
Jeffrey Charles Archer
December 30, 2012 ·
Mary Louise Parker was apparently at the main street bistro when i was there the other day, by a couple of friends' account. Coulda asked her to play Nancy Botwin and smoke some hash with me!!
Nicole was often seen in steam-punk style, pink tutu, blond and fluorescent highlighted hair in ponytails, and feathers or a tiara or a bow to frame her lovely visage. Nicole is one part of a very colorful and beautiful pair (or perhaps cadre) of rather tiny townie girls I'd often see and at Cafeteria Coffeehouse, or else at Food-Not-Bombs or elsewhere around town. Andy was the other of the pair, a gorgeous brunette who was likewise generally arrayed in steam-punk style with multiple and facial piercings and black pants or skirts with chains dangling here or there, though not infrequently did don a flowy flowery hippie skirt and matching hippie chick blouse. The two did rather well model the general spread of counterculture genres in New Paltz, at least on the female end of it.
I'm rather inclined to believe of the two, and some others of their crew, that they might likely be fairies, if not apsarasah (transcendent winged nymphs, again, “angels” that are dealing with grownups), yaksi (tree spirit earth protectors that serve Kubera, the Lord of Wealth, and rather resemble fairies), or perhaps even veritable devis (goddesses)!
I know I seem to romanticize if not outright fantasize about seeming everyday sorts of people, attributing fantastic dimensions to their personalities and to my relationships with them. I might argue, however, that there are indeed and in truth fantastic, mystical and transcendent truths just beneath the surface of official discourse, sanctioned speech and so called reality, and that we are all indeed and in truth magical and divine beings, if indeed programmed to ignore the magic and beauty and subtleties of the Divine in our lives and experienced, and generally only given license to acknowledge those aspects of reality that the Official thinks it can control. And indeed, it is not only people of renown like Rasputin, Edgar Cayce, Shirley McClain and touted Avatars like Krishna, Buddha, Shiva and Jesus and such persons who are party to a reality that proffers miracles, visions, sidhis (“magic powers” attained through practice and devotion to the Divine) and cidacit (powers of mind/matter), nor are those touted “chosen ones” the only ones who get to see or be a vessel of the manifestation of a miracle, nor are they at all the only ones involved in the Grand Story and the extraordinary. All are players in a story that is the truly epic tale of our relationship(s) with God and Being, and ultimately with our own true Self.
It is not only Hollywood actors and actresses that are players in this grand movie, nor is it just those who attain renowned who are entitled to or cast into places of importance in the scheme of the production. Still, those iconic persons who do gain and hold our attention on screen, and to whatever degree off, are not unlike murtis, visual representations of our ideals of beauty, humor, love, power, tragedy, perseverance and transcendence, else they seem to be or at least figure as almost archetypal figures or even Avatars of same—and I ought note that some of those persons, a few amongst those shining stars, might well be Avatars by the traditional and ancient meaning of that Sanskrit term.
A week or two later I was making my way north through Poughkeepsie in the middle of the night and chanced upon the Palace Diner, located just a bit south of Marist College and just off of Highway 9 (which becomes Broadway if you follow it all the way south to Manhattan). Not in a particularly good mood, I sat at a booth and ordered coffee and an omelet. The section where I sat remained mostly empty whilst I was there, save for two people who sat at a booth across the aisle and a bit to the fore from where I sat: a large blond fellow who sat facing away from me, and a beautiful brunette who sat on the other bench at the booth and facing me.
I opened my notebook and requested the WiFi password of the waitress, and endeavored to be productive, but for some reason unbeknownst to me at the time couldn't help but attend to the woman sitting at the booth across the aisle, as there was something was very familiar about her. The woman sitting at said booth, feet propped up on the cushioned bench seat and occasionally twirling her lovely auburn locks, rather reminded me of another beautiful auburn-haired woman I last had parted company with a few years previous and just a short distance to the north at the Omega Institute, located in the picturesque hills a few miles from Rhinebeck, a village a few miles north of Poughkeepsie, and in fact reminded me so much so that I was unable to see who it really was that sat across the isle, despite having watched most episodes of Weeds. The woman sitting at the booth did so elicit thoughts of a woman I had been rather in love with and had for quite some time considered my “Beloved,” somewhat in the sense of Rumi (or perhaps in the sense of Cervantes), that I could not see that the woman who occassionally glanced my way in the Palace Diner in Poughkeepsie was in fact the actress I had watched with much interest in several seasons of the Showtime series Weeds. I carried on an imagined conversation with said lost love in my mind as I sat and wrote emails to prospective publishers and literary agents, perhaps even mouthing my imagined part of the conversation as I daydreamed the unlikely scenario of a chance encounter with erstwhile Beloved, lost to me just a few miles up the Hudson and in the hills to the east. The woman sitting at the booth across the aisle continued to make herself at home, feet upon the beige cushioned bench seat, knees bent and raised just above the level of the table. She and her companion were quite engaged in conversation, but I am rather quite sure she at least took at least some slight note of me sitting across the aisle, though I tried not to stare despite my musings and imaginings.
The pair departed, and I was eventually asked to leave as I hadn't ordered any food in well over an hour, so I departed rather disgruntled and started to the north and past Marist College. Before I had stepped off of the Palace Diner's property, however, it suddenly occurred to me that the woman who had been sitting at the booth across the aisle from me in the diner, the woman whose appearance had so evoked memories of and reveries regarding my erstwhile Beloved, was in fact none other than Mary Louise Parker. It was later suggested to me, upon recounting this story to friends in New Paltz, that the big blond fellow accompanying Mary was likely Hunter Parrish, the actor who plays her eldest son Silas on Weeds, the which did indeed fit my recollection of the fellow who sat across the table from Ms. (Mrs.) Parker and across the aisle from where I sat. For whatever reason whenever I happen to encounter Hollywood stars I tend to only realize who said person or persons are only after the fact, in the moment only scarcely somehow sensing at a subconscious level that someone of Hollywood renown is nigh, some sort of relunctantly-star-stuck E.S.P. tinged with temporary amnesia.
I was in Sheridan, Wyoming on one hot day shortly after my eighth grade year, working at the Flying U Ranch for the summer for some friends of my mom, who most the folks around Clearmont knew simply as “J” Schroeder. My sisters and mom were up from Laramie either to drop me off or to visit me and my mother's parents, who lived in Sheridan. Earlier that year, a girl from Sheridan, Wyoming had won an MTV contest to host an intimate show with Prince and the Revolution. Apparently said pop superstar and his entourage were staying at the local Holiday Inn Holidome.
I was with my mom and sisters for brunch at the Holidome one morning, and of course headed to the game room on the other end of the courtyard from the dining area, as boys in the eighties were prone to do when with a pocket full of quarters or a parent nearby with same. A rather tiny and attractive young woman with bobbed brown hair approached me and said something I don't quite recall whilst I was at a video game or pinball machine. I went back to the courtyard dining area and was soon informed by my older sister Laura that Martha Quinn, the MTV DJ, was in the house! I went back towards the game room with my sisters Laura and Lisa, and shyly approached the small crowd gathered around miss Quinn. She spoke to me and my sisters, doting on my little sister Lisa and perhaps said something more to me as I stood staring in disbelief, though I cannot recall her words.
As we returned to the table across the courtyard, I noticed two quite attractive young women sitting or leaning next to the indoor waterfall and rather unabashedly making out. Lisa and Wendy of the Revolution were very openly displaying their lesbian affections in the middle of the Sheridan, Wyoming Holidome in 1986!! Prince was nowhere to be seen, though on the way out to our car and in the parking lot, a small entourage passed us, a crew that I later figured were other members of the Revolution. My mom ribbed me after they passed, as one of the fellows seemed to give me a once-over as we walked by. “I think he likes you,” she said with a wink. “Fuck you mom!!” said I, else a somewhat more polite equivalent, still at that awkward stage of adolescence in a time when “gay” was something of an insult else at least a tease. I was in northern Wyoming to work on the Flying U Ranch, a cattle and sheep ranch that was owned and run by my mom's friend Terry and her husband Ralph, as my parents were concerned I was on my way towards trouble with the law, and so sent me off to work on the range.
Whilst sitting in my idle boat in contemplation and sometimes meditation, I would sit with my feet propped in the hatchway, reading or sometimes watching a movie I had cued on YouTube whilst at Bank Square Coffee to later enjoy before falling asleep. I considered in my beach-wrecked malaise that perhaps this was meant to be a time of somber contemplation, a time of introspective consideration and self-evaluation of my path. I often sat in a posture that reminded me of the position utilized to hold a calf down whilst it's being branded. I imagined that perhaps the tapasia (purifying fire) I was enduring in the trials of being a beachwrecked sailor was proffered to help me burn away inadvertant bad karma from earlier in my life.
As autumn approached the broken rudder was still stuck, though I'd established a fairly regular routine: rise most the time sometime after sunrise, endeavor repairs on bhavAbdhi if the weather did permit, meditate and chant, make coffee if I had some (with rum, if I had some), sit with feet propped in the hatchway (if warm enough to open the hatch) and gaze out over the water and over to the trees on shore, scanning the limbs to look for bald eagles perched to watch the waters for fish, paddle my dinghy across the water (or through the water-chestnut soup...) and chain and lock the little yellow yacht-tender to a tree, walk down the path through the park and through the train station, up the hill past my friend Kristen's (sometimes stopping to smoke a bowl with her), then on to Bank Square Coffee, sit and drink coffee and eat a bagel and attempt to either endeavor to contact publishers and agents or edit and revise my manuscript, smoke cigarettes on the patio, and download or cue movies to view before bed. Perhaps I'd then make a trip up Main street for groceries, else perhaps stop at Kristen's to puff a bowl and maybe watch a movie with Kristen or on occasion have dinner with Kristen and her mom, then continued the trip to my dinghy, then paddle out to bhavAbdhi to retire for the night. Once a week I would take the train to Poughkeepsie, take the bus to New Paltz from Poughkeepsie, buy some hash, then return on the bus and the train and dinghy to my hobbled anchored sailboat home for the night.
One rather chilly (and perhaps rainy) afternoon I settled in on a couch at Bank Square, one of a matching pair of black faux-leather modern couches parallel and facing each other in the main seating area, with two black faux-leather armchairs abutting the couches and facing a big flat screen television, thus forming a U of seating. Shortly after I arrived, ordered a coffee and a bagel and opened my laptop, a tall woman and a companion entered from the next room with whatever libations. She was wearing a black trench coat and what seemed to be a platinum-blond wig, as her hair stuck out in the back as if it were hiding a bun. Her companion was a fairly handsome young man with a well trimmed beard, probably somewhere around thirty, who wore a baja jacket and perhaps tie-dye clad, and who seemed to fit somewhere between hippie and hipster. He took a seat at the armchair adjacent and perpendicular to the couch upon which I sat, and the woman with the wig sat in the armchair to his right.
I immediately Googled “Uma Thurman” and began to compare facial features. Nose, chin, cheeks, eyes, brows and lashes, all seemed to match the photograph on my laptop screen. I had no doubt the woman sitting with her paramour(?) to my right was indeed said supermodel/superstar, for whatever reason donning a wig as a rather (intentionally?) shoddy disguise. I didn't bother to obtain a corroborating witness this time, perhaps as she and I had more “history” in play at this subtle game, at least by my reckoning. Our first vignette together, her first cameo in my life's movie, was years previous (again, supposing I'm not mistaken in my assessment of who was the woman rather randomly approached me and erstwhile girlfriend Meghan in North Hollywood). She and I never quite made eye contact, though it was apparent she was taking notice of me if not in fact overtly intent upon my person. I didn't make much of an effort to eavesdrop their conversation (not wishing to be intrusive, whether or not this was actually Uma Karuna Thurman), save for taking note of one reply she made to a query her companion proffered that I did not chance to overhear.
“I'm not attracted to him, but I'm not unattracted to him,” she said, or vice versa, perhaps subtly glancing my way.
I decided to take her somewhat left-handed compliment as a legitimate one (if indeed said statement was actually referring to me), as such ambivalent praise was spoken by a supermodel, after all. She and her companion/paramour departed before I had the chance to perhaps delve deeper into the subtleties of the skit, else before I felt inclined or had the opportunity to break the charade.
Facebook Post:
Jeffrey Charles Archer
November 2, 2013·Beacon, NY·
A'right, so Uma Thurman was just here, wearing a wig and with a fella (not her boyfriend) and sitting just adjacent to me, in Bank Square Coffeehouse. She was more than moderately obviously here to . . . play wit' my head er sumthin'!!! Cool !!!! Else was a startling doppel whose hair happened to be sticking out a bit where a bun might be hidden, were it a wig .
I have yet to fully unravel the mystery of these almost esoteric encounters with such Hollywood stars, and though I have a few theories they are perhaps even more outlandish than these accounts. As I have noted, my x-wife's name is now Holly Wood, a strange coincidence and likely clue. I have also experimented with certain sidhis (powers of mind and matter, “cidacit”) that might have drawn some attention to me in ways I shall not herein disclose. Whatever the cause of the several odd encounters with Hollywood stars have chanced to happen to me, there is certainly something to be learned of the nature of maya via these strange vignettes, some lessons to be learned of the personality of the Goddess of Play, Devi Lalitha, as I figure it.
Within a few weeks of this second encounter with Uma Thurman I once again noted Emma Caulfield and Kali Roche seated at the next table to me on the patio at Bank Square Coffee. This time I decided to be bold and said with enough volume to be well enough heard at the next table, “Emma.” Miss Caulfield turned her eyes to the left without turning her head, then turned her head to the right and away from me, poised as any well practiced famous actor when encountering perhaps unwanted attention from fans.
I believe it was either shortly before or after the aforementioned encounters, I stepped outside the front door of Cafeteria Coffeehouse in New Paltz to have a cigarette, in town to get my weekly stash of hash and biding my time sitting in front of my laptop with a cup of hot coffee. I'm somewhat inclined to believe it was early rather than late 2013, though whatever the season it was rather chilly outside, and it was some time after my experience dining across the aisle from Mary Louise Parker and her costar at the Palace Diner in Poughkeepsie.
As I stood beside the many paned window to Cafeteria Coffeehouse sucking down my smoke, a sliver or snake of hashish rolled into the midst of the tobacco stick, a dark-haired woman wearing an insulated orange jumpsuit approached from up the Main Street sidewalk and immediately asked me some random question about services in the area. I stared in disbelief as I tried to determine if I was seeing straight. I automatically answered the question, already immediately considering season 6 of Weeds wherein Nancy Botwin is in prison and clad in an orange jump suit, and searching the features of this woman's face who stood less than ten feet from me, and simultaneously scrutinizing my own perceptions of who it was had approached me that chilly afternoon in New Paltz.
We both paused in a moment of somewhat awkward silence, myself still perusing her features to determine if I was delusional or proffered some strange illusion and if this woman inquiring about social services was indeed Mary Louise Parker. The woman in the orange insulated jump suit thanked me for the information, though again, I was given plenty of cause enough to consider of her question, whether t'was in truth a line proffered in order to approach me than indicative that said passerby was genuinely in need of social services, whether what I was viewing was indeed an actress performing a skit rather than a traveler in need. I can't recall whether either of us said anything more before I bade her “Namaste,” bowing with my hands pressed together in front of my chest, as is my habit. She responded with a smile and likewise said “Namaste” with a bow, though instead of her hands pressed together as she bowed, she bowed with her left hand to her torso and her right hand performing a well executed and practiced Broadway flourish, as if to say, “You know who I am, right?”
I've forgotten whether it was she or I walked away first. Though I had recognized the woman in the orange insulate jumpsuit as almost certainly Mary Louise Parker fairly soon after she had first approached—as I had already realized said person as a character immediately at play in the play of my life—I was still too taken aback to ask her, “Um, pardon me for the asking, but are you Mary Louise Parker?!” and far too off-guard to come up with something witty. Maybe next time.
[Missing footnotes . . .]
BUY YOUR COPY OF MEMORIES AND MUSINGS OF A POST-POSTMODERN NOMADIC MYSTIC MADMAN NOW !!!
Posts
