Neanderthal upbringing: drug addicts conquer a city

There is a word on the wall 'REFUGE' with a pointed arrow showing direction. What direction to move? Ouch, my feet are sinking as if I am a goat jumping on the moon's surface. Where was it described? In Beigbeger's “Ecstasy”. The arrow's pointing downstairs, one more step. There is still enough time left for a night. Or is it night already? 

I see this dot. It is big and black. You either come up to it or it comes up to you. It has volume, you can touch it. Dip your hands into the blackness, take a step ahead and go through it. Give me your hand, let's go together. I promise you, you'll meet him today. I've met him, he talked to me, “Come again”. I asked, “When?” He shouted, “Always”. So, I walk to the one who knows everything. I'm coming closer but the door slams behind me and everything starts over again. 

There is a sound. Can your hear it? It is like a dragonfly moving it's wings. It happened in the same way back then. I ask but only silence replies. Silence is holy. There is not enough of it, that's why I run away and hide myself in a big dark wardrobe like after my mom told me that guests were coming to my 5th birthday. The guests were: uncle George and his wife whose voice was like the screech of breaks- uunt Nina with red lips. At first she kisses me, rubs my cheek in order to remove the red spots of her lipstick then she starts squeezing me and screaming right at my ear, the most sensitive of my organs, “How old are you? How old are you? Use your fingers to show your age!” 

Fool! What fingers?! I can count to 100 and read, but to get rid of her I do as she says. She thinks I am an idiot because I don't talk, because my mother calls me an idiot and she's about to begin to complain with tears in her eyes because yesterday when she went to a store I hid myself in the wardrobe again, an old granny piece of furniture which is high time to throw away. The mother was looking and calling for me. I heard her running and slamming doors. I even heard the neighbor’s bell and steps in their hall. It was like a leopard hunting. They were quiet and slinking, all my attention was focused on them. Out of nowhere - a shout! No it wasn't, it was a toast crackling under the foot of the neighbor but it was so loud like it happened on the inner side of my tympanic membrane. The situation came to a standstill for a second. The neighbor looked in the spyhole, clanging locks, rattling safety chain, the words 'No, I haven't seen him', then again clanging, rattling and running about. 

“She's looking for her retarded son again”, his words reaching my ears. I got used to these words. My teacher calls me retarded quite often. In kindergarten when we were preparing for a matinee, she gave me a two-lined verse that I didn't manage to remember, but I could have if not for a certain Dennis besides me who screamed and screamed. It never looked like he would scream at my ears but he did, “A-A-A-A!”. Everyone laughed, including the teacher. 

Today I didn't pay attention to him, I couldn't listen to him, I didn't want to hear his voice because I was staring at a red balloon. They blew up it yesterday and forgot about it. It nestled against the ceiling with a string coming down to the floor. I thought, “It might be waiting for me? What if I grab the string and the balloon takes me out of the window and we fly towards the sky to see what there is behind the clouds in the depth of blue. There are all the children from the kindergarten beneath us, they are waving and screaming something but I'm moving off and they're all beneath me, they are going to turn into dots and later merge into one big black blob.”

I will fly, fly and meet other balloons with envelopes tied to them by the Pink Madam for Oscar launched according to my uncle's story. At that time, I didn't know what direction they flew to, but now I know. I wanted to look inside of them but they are lighter and faster than me. I am heavy, my balloon flies slower, my body is bigger, my mom makes me eat, shovels a cutlet in my mouth, 'You have to grow', she screams, 'You have to go to school soon'. I don't want to grow. If I grow up I won't fit into my granny's wardrobe where I can listen to silence. 

Somebody pushed me. It was Dennis who ran towards the balloon with the rest of boys. They compete over it, who is the first to get the string and give it to the teacher. The balloon couldn't stand that and bursted all over the room, the whole world. What a noise it was! I pressed my hands to my ears and cried in silence, they all were dying laughing. The principal came because her office was next to the room where we were preparing for the matinee. She saw laughing mouths with widely spaced milky teeth and pointing fingers at me. She looked at me long and attentively. The way she moved her lips I understood she told the teacher that she wanted to talk to my mother. Instead she talked to my father and I knew what was it about.

Mother kept running, slamming doors, taking looks in the bathroom and on the balcony. I heard her clanging the upper latch thoroughly because she thinks I'm not tall enough to get it, I can't even jump on a chair and I'm still so new at life. I know why she does it. No, she is not sacred of burglars who can get in through the attic. Once I was left alone for an hour and a half and now she fears for me because back then on her way back home she saw a crowd of neighbors outside standing still and pointing fingers at me with the balloon given to me by my uncle attempting to overcome the balcony's ledge. But my sock caught a nail and I couldn't detach it.

Somebody grabbed me and pulled me back. It was our neighbor. My mother was pale with wobbling lips, she couldn't say a word. Later she asked, “What have you done here? I've told you hundred times not to go on the balcony. All the children are normal except you...” Then she grabbed the balloon and pierced it with scissors hatefully. The balloon didn't burst, it exploded as the first one had done. I pressed my hands against my ears as hard as I could and tears ran down my checks. My mother lamented to the neighbor, “Look at him! He feels sorry for the balloon but not for me. Goodness, who does he take after?” 

I felt sorry not for the balloon but for my failure to fly away I still didn't know what the clouds held. Such opportunities don't come often. 

Father came home and she told him everything about what had happened. They sent me to bed and I was very happy. It was quiet and dark in my room, I laid down and started thinking. 

Then my father came in, he sit and asked me, “Why are you different from the others? Is there anything you need?” Your mother complains about you. Your teacher told me, that you don't play with other children, you seclude yourself, ignore people when they call for you. Your principle watched you all day and concluded that we should visit a psychiatrist. 

I was deep in thought, then asked my father a question, “Father, do people hear what is going on when they are dead?" Father kept silence, got up and replied, “You don't go to kindergarten on Monday, your mother will take you to a child psychiatrist.”

I entered the 'normal' school. The principal and the psychologist were preparing paperwork for me to go to a special one. My uncle stood up for me, he told my parents that it would be a big mistake to send me to a special school. They gave up, the best argument was that I started reading before 5. It goes without saying that I wasn't mentally disable if I could do that. I knew printed letters, but I couldn't write. 

My teacher has a hard time with me, she couldn't understand how was I able to read but not write. I couldn't trace a letter. At the moment when I started a dot and drew tails in different directions I delayed before moving on to the next letter and the thought about why the letter has this name occupied my mind. From faraway I heard the teacher's voice who was making an attempt to be heard. I was doomed to reply,“Who? Me?” All of the class laughed and a wisecracker, Tony, gave me the nickname 'Dunce'. I wasn't offended at all. I knew that I was beyond all of them like when I had held on to the red balloon and flew away . 

When I finished the first grade my uncle presented me with Britannica. My father was outraged, “He is too young to read these books”. “Let it be” - my mother objected, and I had been very grateful for them. She liked that I loved Britannica. She used to say to my questions earlier, 'Ask dad', now she told me, “Read the encyclopedia”, I read a lot, I read at nights with a flashlight under my blanket. 

Father stop resisting when I wanted another volume. “What do you read there?” My Uncle would jump in saying, “Here you are!” He gave me used books, read by hundreds of people. Fantasy. What is that?

My nocturnal ventures with a flashlight continued. I read up a storm. In the morning I woke up to the alarm's thunder and mother's screams, “Wake up! You'll be late! What a curse! Get up!! It's time to go!” 

I got up and dragged myself to the school, but was one lesson late. Everything started over again: laughing classmates and parents being called out to school. I suffered and waited when classes were over and I could go home and read a book from cover to cover on my bed and find the answers to my torturous questions,“Who am I? Where do I go? What does the world surrounding me mean? Who made it up and what's his name?” I sensed a distance from the crowd and that I was different. Sometimes I didn't understand what the teacher asked me about. I was so consumed with my thought that I couldn't even hear him. I couldn't, I didn't want to leave the state where I was alone and I didn't need anybody else. The teacher started reproaching me in front of the class up until the end of the lesson. But I had already been far away, inside of my mind, in inconceivable inner dimensions in the inner side of my tympanic membrane. 

School called parents again.

With time I learned not to hear the noise, the screams, the rattle and clatter that they uttered. I learned to be plunged into my thoughts, to be separated from the world because I couldn't bear the domestic cacophony: the fights between my parents, “You gave birth to an idiot!”, “No! You've brought him up that way! ” 

“What are you doing? What are you reading?” - my father bursted into my room, "Here you are “White Bim The Black ear”. A book about the friendship between a dog and a man! It is exactly what you need for your age! Oh, a crazy generation! The literature teacher complains, every time she asks a question to you, you reply, “What? Me?” Give those books back. What do you have? I see Plato, Sartre, Camus... what do they write about? Religion? Are you a cultist? Where did you get those books? Your uncle brought them for you? I am going to tell him to read Sartre on the toilet!"

My uncle had nothing to do with it. By that time I lost any interest with him. Since the research center had been closed he worked as a loader for the market, his wife cried at our kitchen complaining to my mother and spreading her nasty red lipstick over my cheeks. 

Yes, I read everything from Greek literature to French. I borrowed books from unknown people for a night. I rushed to search for another revelation, I read and studied every letter, I weighed up every word hoping to find the answers to my questions and to fill my void. Sometimes I felt like I was getting closer to an answer on the next page, I turn them over again and again till the last one and everything I saw there was a huge thick question mark. Nothing... 

Later I understood that people like me create an idea and follow it, they are ready to give up both their lives and the lives of other people for an answer. The idea found through agonizing searches created philosophy, religion and ideology. Idea of one crazy man at first, roused thousands of French parishioners, later the whole Roman Catholic Europe and organized the the first crusade to Jerusalem. A few came back home. Many died on the way but the idea inspired them and they were ready to sacrifice their perishable bodies to it. It is just a body: it's hungry, it suffers and gets sick. Actually it interferes with thinking, distracts them from the main thing, it doesn't have any meaning. 

I know some people who come together and speak about eternal verities and read books. They are organized by a guru who lived and found enlightenment in a monastery in Tibet. He said that he couldn't help waiting for the Lama's blessing to enter a cave and feel the energy. 

Another group practices occultism in order to 'release latent sexual energy' and plan to visit India or Altai. I visited a place where a shaman played the tambourine. It was cold and we drank the shaman's tea. I was stoned and laughed at the shaman swimming around me. What time is it now? Something was striking my eyes. Oh, I see, rostral columns lights. The air became liquid like jelly and my fingers could go through it.

At that moment I had my share and I thought that if I moved I 'd lose what fulfilled me inside. I hadn't experienced it before, “Hey, dude, I want more!”. “What's your problem, idiot? Don't you see lights? A retard lies down in traffic. Move!”

I thought to myself it is better to be flattened out on a road than lose my share. 

Then one dude told me that his father played in a band. He used to exchange records for grass. Real musicians always have the best no matter what, drugs or music.

I don't remember how I got home. I remember my state. I want to be in it again. My alarm sounded like a pick-hammer awakening the morning. I was absent. I dried out, turned into a sliver. It was easy for me not to eat at all - a full stomach reduces the effect I wanted.

Folks yelled at me. This time I reacted, perhaps I broke something.

Are drugs to addicts mean? Not if there is a dose. The dose helps us to be detached from a consuming world, the world isn't worth it. We are not interested in it. We hand over it's pleasures to you. We are the best. We don't submit to anybody. 
Hey everybody! We don't have anything in common and never will! 

You, adult idiots, who race for illusive wealth, who never understood anything, why do people search for answers all their lives knowing there are none. Don't you understand how difficult it is to live and feel increasing sunyata and the impossibility to satisfy it? We get depressed. We listen to hard rock when the volume is more important than the sound in order to deafen your damn speech and the unanswerable questions we have. Overdosing provides us with a short absence of pain in the yawning abyss of spiritual failures. 

It is cynical to say, “Hey, you, it's enough to watch how our lives collapse, why not start collapsing others and put on a needle our neighbors.”

Elder generations, after a making mess of our upbringing blame their children. What can a child talk to his father about when he doesn't have any understanding of the modern world? We speak different languages. Folks need an interpreter when they talk to me. A dialog's never existed, it was replaced with commands and orders, “Don't throw your bag in a hall! Where are you going?! Wipe off your feet, mother washed the floor! When will you start listening to your father? Turn off the computer! I am talking to you!” What could I talk to them about? The price of potatoes? Or my grandmother's family farm? Can I tell them about religious philosophy critics? 

Parents didn't hear me when I shared my problems which weren't equal to theirs. We were separated by an abyss, an expanding gap between generations. What could they offer to my generation? All their achievements from yesterday that they love to recall just irritate us. Some of us who used to live long ago could find satisfaction in poetry, philosophy and music. But for me and my peers who exist in others dimensions, experiencing totally different states, the values of poetry, music and philosophy are the debris of the past because nothing mentioned above could ever replenish our inner black holes. 

Once I was walking over a bridge to an old man named 'Beyond the Clouds'. That time session was special and I was tripping on drugs. 

Beyond the Clouds told me that he flies – just give it a try. He said, “Put your hands inside of blackness, step forward through it. Give me your hand, we'll go together. I promise, you'll meet him today. You'll understand if you can do it or not.” I walked home. I walked and thought that I need to go through that experience one more time. One more time.

And I saw it again - my red balloon. The one I wanted to fly away on. It hovered so close that I could grab it. I stepped on the edge of the balcony. This time my sock didn't catch on a nail. There was noting to catch me. The only thought that ran through my mind, stopped me on the brink of the precipice, “Why?”
 

Why?

I thought it was not too late.

....I clearly sensed the silence inside of me. I walked carefully on a lonely street. I felt something alien and new that later I named 'meaning'...