ASTRAL PROJECTION, HUGGING TREES AND BBQ CHICKEN WINGS | PAGE 2 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2. Walking down Haight Street together, Carl beating his drum, me holding onto his shirt, afraid to let go, that if I did I'd go drink. He led me up to trees and stood there talking to them, waving his hands with this ecstatic look on his animal-like face, and nodding his head vigorously with a look of delight, as though answering questions. "What're they saying, Carl?" I'd ask. "They're saying: 'Don't drink!'" he'd reply. 3. Take astral projection trips around the world. Actually, Carl took them while I sat there and watched. Usually, we did this in the Café International on Haight and Fillmore. We sat at one of the scratched-up wooden tables embedded with hand-painted tiles, surrounded by electric paintings by young unknown geniuses, world beat music playing, and Carl would close his eyes and begin to sway from side to side. It would seem as though the colors in the room were running together with acidlike intensity. You know how a GIF looks on your computer if the server crashes, like a kind of graphic ghost? Carl turned into that. If you'd clicked on him, nothing would have happened. He was elsewhere, transported by a spiritual metasearch engine into the hard drive of the Amazon jungle, or appearing on the interactive screen of the Himalaya Mountains. He was rapping with the Dalai Lama. He was reading poetry to the king of Sweden. Once he opened his eyes and I saw two white ghost buffaloes galloping in his eyeballs. When he did this it scared me but I preferred to stay by him than take my chances with my own mind, which was detoxing with dt's and hallucinations that were trying to kill me. Each cell of my brain, my body, Carl had explained, has been perforated after years of drinking by a little hole that once I'd filled with alcohol but that now was empty, yearning, yawning, craving, desperate to be filled, an almost sexual need and that I must fill it with something else now. I must fill it with my soul. I must fill it with the Great Spirit of the Universe. I must learn to know my spirit. That we were like two calling to each other across a great gulf. But soon, we would be reunited. So I sat and watched Carl Little Crow cavort with Dakota sandpainters and Ludwig van Beethoven. Ludwig, Carl informed me, was an abused child, like me. 4. Eat barbecue chicken wings. Carl had a shameless love of barbecue chicken wings. It surprised and disappointed me. I thought someone so spiritual would want to eat, say, a bowl of brown rice and a cup of green tea. Instead he'd take me over to Chicken Charlie's on Divisadero and order up big buckets of greasy, orange barbecue chicken wings and get all messed with juices and greases and bone smatterings on his grinning mouth, ecstatically cooing, "YESSSS! OH, YESSSSSSS!" I'd take a nibble off one and smile happily despite myself. It just didn't fit the picture, him tearing at those chicken wings and slurping up a 32-ounce cherry coke. He had a bit of a belly too. But worse still, he had this ugly weal of a scar worming down the center of his chest where'd he'd had open-heart surgery during which he'd died twice and been revived. During the time he was dead, he had floated above the table smiling down at everyone and then left for a few seconds to take an astral projection trip to New York City, where he danced, he said, with a señorita in Spanish Harlem. That too shocked me. I mean, that's all one can think to do at the moment of one's death? Dance with a woman? "Not just any woman," said Carl Little Crow, "a Puerto Rican woman." He jumped up and down in his seat laughing like a happy kid with the grease all over him and I said very gravely: "That shit's real bad for your heart, Carl, and seems like you already had one heart attack ..." Carl grew still and I fought back tears but lost and sobbed out: "And what if you die, Man! What am I gonna do? How am I gonna stay sober!?" Carl's eyes grew moist and he said: "By helping another," he said. "Remember! It's always by helping another that we are healed ourselves." And I am crying even now, seven and a half years later, to remember those words. 5. Eat a whole half-gallon of peach melba ice cream. Another of Carl's peculiar weaknesses. He'd have me at night seated on the floor of my tiny room near the Hayes Street projects in the Mo', as we called the Fillmore District, with the guns of battling crack gangs going pop-pop-pop outside our windows, and squealing tires and screaming voices, and a bundle of burning sage smoking in a bowl as we sat and breathed in and out, in and out, watching our breath, calming our bodies. Then we chanted a mantra: "God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference," and then he'd have me up on my feet dancing a slow spirit dance around the room, waving my hands, moving the energy fields around, as he put it. And when we were done we then adjourned to the communal kitchen that I shared with a bunch of potheads and grunge maniacs, and took out a huge half-gallon of peach melba ice cream and two spoons! The sugar wacked Carl out for sure. His eyes would get all red and he'd feel giddy and sway and stagger as he walked and for a moment I could see 18 years ago to the back-alley drunk he must have been, a little lethal menace. And it amazed me that he could have gone so long without a drink and I'd feel hope. Then he'd leave and I'd sometimes find a 10-spot on the bed, maybe his last since he was always short of money and mostly unconcerned about it. I stretched out on the bed with my boots on, head pillowed on my hands, listening to the gunfire and the shouts and watching the fog roll over the last vestige of the San Francisco moon. I was flat broke, my Welfare General Assistance due to expire, and all that I had been, a father, a soldier, a lover, a boss, a highly touted this and a well-regarded that, all lay behind me now. I remembered the park bench where I had laid down to die in Tompkins Square on Avenue A in Alphabet City and from which I rose to live -- damned if I understand to this day how or why -- when every blood vessel in my flesh demanded booze and booze and more booze and when this disease I have, this disease of alcoholism, believed that it would continue to drink even after I had died. I found help in the rooms of recovery and, against the advice of the recovered drunks I met, boarded a bus with $67 in my pocket and a California sun rising in my addled, sleep-deprived, detoxing brain. And this is what it means to be happy: to want nothing and to sit listening to the calm beating of your own heart as big wheels carry you off into a Mystery lined with fast-food concession stands. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E: Bottoming out at Billy's Topless