Ra - Portrait of a Freak
My first encounter with him was at school, back when it was simply called Mary’s school, after the woman who started it. I think I was fifteen. Now they call it Morna Valley School, partly to appear more professional, partly because Mary doesn’t run it anymore. It’s a converted farm house and most of the class rooms are corales, as they say in Spanish, or animal pens.
When I first met Ra, my class room was the sheep shed. The feeding troughs were still in the whitewashed stone walls and the cracks in the corners had old sheep droppings. He made an impression on us because he was such a freak. We were used to freaks, most of our parents were hippies, but Ra wasn’t a hippie. He walked in with a turban on his head and spoke to us in an American accent. His teeth were black and his face moved with quick intelligence that caught our attention.
“He’s an Arab,” my friend whispered to me.
“No he’s not. He’s Canadian. He left his family to come here,” somebody else whispered back.
He said he was teaching us history, but it wasn’t like any history class we knew. He told us not to bother with books, they were mostly wrong or boring, and spent the class telling us about his experience in the Israeli army. We were meant to be doing W.W.II, but he said this was much more interesting. It was. He made us laugh.
“So you know, they put us in this game where we had to get the flag of the other team. We had to find it and it was somewhere on the other side of Israel. No, really this stuff was serious. War games. They don’t screw around with that. You mess up and boom, into the shed, or ten weeks of toilet duty. So you know what we did, me and my friends, one night when we were stoned out of our heads? A helicopter. We stole it! No, really! We did. We stole it right from the base. Never mind nobody had a license to fly it. But we got that flag and that’s what matters. Sure they were angry, but we got the flag, you know. What else did they want from us.”
The next class he told us about W.W.II. Somehow he was involved in the war, despite the fact that he could only have been about three at the time. We didn’t care.
One day I came early to school. I sat in the arched entrance, the part that was the farmer’s house, and watched the steam rise from the sheep in the field in front. I was alone in the morning stillness and I heard his mobilette puttering from far away. I could hear him as he slowed down to maneuver a puddle and then rev the little bike back up to gain speed again. His bike was an old 49cc and it rattled. He drove it up to where I was sitting, adjusted his turban and coughed wretchedly. The air was damp.
“I’ve had this cough two weeks now,” he said. He sat beside me and took out his cigarettes. He took one and broke the tobacco into his palm. With his lighter he heated a chunk of hash and sprinkled generous bits into his hand. He mixed it together and rolled it into a joint.
“Ah, I love the morning. Up on the mountain I watch the sun rise from my tree. Yea, I sleep in a tree. In a school chair. Well you know you can’t beat living in a tree…” he took a drag from the joint and coughed violently, “…it’s tied in so it’s safe. There’s nothing like it.”
He took another drag. There was something about his smoking that I liked. I was used to joints, most grownups I knew smoked them. Most of them even dealt in pot. We sat in the early morning quiet, when things are dreamy and unreal, and he coughed and smoked, like a ritual. His chest sounded deep, a rich gargly sound, almost pleasant in it’s surrealness.
He talked a lot. He talked about his mobilette, about his tree, about the music that came rolling down from the house above him on the hill. He said it was Wagner and belonged to a German called Reinhold, married to an American heiress of the Duke family.
“I like the Wagner. It’s heavy and dramatic, heralding the coming of the sun. Epic. Very dramatic, man. No really. You should come by and visit some time. See for yourself. You can’t beat Wagner in the morning. It’s heavy shit.”
I never got the chance. My mother left the island shortly after and took me with her. She was wanted by Interpol for some small time terrorist stuff she did back in the early 70’s in Berkeley. Anti-Vietnam movement. That was partly why we had gone to the little Mediterranean island in the first place. We went to Amsterdam for a few months until things cooled off, and while I was gone Ra got a bit crazy.
He stopped going to school and spent most of the time on the hill taking drugs. My brother Celli, who was twelve at the time, went up with some friends and took acid with him. They had a great time. Ra sat in his school chair in the tree and sang while Celli and his friends sat around it laughing. But then Ra got even crazier. He started taking this drug called Ketamin, or K, an elephant tranquilizer. They sold it in the local pharmacy for farmers who needed to operate on their livestock.
Celli told me later that it was around this time he became too crazy to deal with. Ra began talking about how Haley’s comet was sending him messages and how the world was going to end. He set a date and told everyone. When the date came nothing happened. The next morning he and his lanky dog came walking down from the hill into the village.
“Sure the world ended. No really, I’m serious. Didn’t you feel it, man. It ended for me. I died. This is not me! I was reborn! Sure I died, man. I was sleeping in the tree up there, last night, and all of a sudden I’m lying face down on the ground and Carlos is licking my face. Smacked right out of the tree by them. Them? I don’t know, whoever kills people. Them. But I was reborn and that’s who I found when I woke up face down. I found a reborn me. Died then reborn! Wild shit. I’m really serious! That comet is really something! Can you hear it? I can hear it even now. Bzzzzzzz in my ear, “ he pointed with a straight finger to his ear, his elbow held high.
He had lost a lot of weight from lack of food and the daily injections of K, but his energy was manic and he moved his arms nervously. People laughed, shaking their heads, and gave him some Pesetas to buy himself and his dog some food.
When I came back from Amsterdam a year later I ran into him at Can Curune, the local café. I was sitting at a table with my stepfather. The café was on the corner of the road, nestled in a little valley of olive trees and small plots of land. He came running up to me, more hyper than ever.
“Hey Gennaro, it’s good to see you. I almost didn’t recognize you, man,” he still wore a turban, although it was much rattier. His cheeks were gaunt. He had a scruffy beard. His clothes were old and looked like hippie hand-me-downs - you can’t get more scruffy than that.
My step father continued reading the Herald Tribune and I felt awkward, but I was still glad to see him.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m writing a book. It’s a new system, man. Really amazing stuff. Things are really taking off. I’m doing great, people are receptive. This system is going to change the world. I should have the book done soon. But hey, I have to go, you know,” he rushed off down the road, hitch-hiking as he walked.
“Oh, man, he has really lost it,” I said.
“Yep,” my step father said from behind his paper.
“People say to me ‘Wow!’ and I look at them and say, ‘I didn’t do anything, man. What did I do? I survived. I didn’t do anything. I’ve been living my life, I have no control over all this. All these silly things I’ve been through, stories I’ve told, all this stuff. What control did I have over any of that? I’m just a human being like every body else caught in a wave, you know. And what I have now is the will of gods, you know, this is what I get. It’s very nice, you know, but I didn’t earn it. I didn’t make up all this stuff, even I’m not smart enough for that, that I know…” Ra trailed off with a smile.
He stood before us in knee high black boots with tucked in black Arabian riding pants and a black shirt. His turban had been replaced by a Turkish round hat, also black. This was five years after I had seen him in Can Curune. We sat on comfortable cushions in a seminar room that a rich German woman on the island rented out. Outside, singing cicadas sunned themselves in almond trees. Except for me, everyone there was paying vast quantities of money to attend his seminar. He had written his book that explained the universe as he saw it.
“So one night I’m walking back from the bar and it’s dark. It’s really dark. It’s new moon and the rain clouds are out. But I’m walking along the camino anyway because I know the road really well. I’m with Carlos, my trusty mutt. And I’m enjoying the evening air, you know, just after rain. Fresh. I get to the ruin I’m living in and Carlos starts growling. Strange. Carlos never growls. He’s a coward. But he’s growling. Yet I don’t hear anything. I tell him to shut up and I walk into the living room of the house, which is now a courtyard since all the walls are down, you know. And I take out the key to my room. A big black cast iron key, heavy, the size of my hand, one of those nice old Ibisenco keys, you know,” he pauses to take a drag from his joint.
“So I approach my door, a dark wooden door, old as the house, and I see a light coming from under it! Strange. I didn’t remember leaving the oil lamp on. But I’ve got the only key to the door, and it’s locked, so nobody could be in there. Carlos had stopped growling and was now shaking. Shivering so hard he could barely stand. And I start shaking too! I’m not usually scared, but I started shaking uncontrollably. It’s not that I’m scared even. It’s something else. I’m just shaking. It put the key in the door and open the door,” he pauses, thinking.
“The door opens and Carlos falls to the ground with a yelp. I piss myself. There’s nothing in the room, but there is! There’s a strange glowing light coming from nowhere! An energy just hits me and I piss all over myself. A few minutes earlier down the road I taken a shit, but if I hadn’t I would have crapped myself too. And then this voice comes, clear, perfectly clear. All the other noise in my head disappears and it’s just this one voice.
‘Time to work,’ it says. Like a command. Like my grandmother or Darth Vader from Star Wars. ‘Time to work.’ I’m standing there in a puddle of piss and sweat. Yea, all of a sudden I’m sweating torrents and torrents. I lost twenty pounds in a few days, and I was already pretty fucking skinny, as you know. That’s how it started. For eight days The Voice spoke to me and it was the most painful experience in my life. It entered my body and realigned my very cells so that I could take in all the information. The Voice told me where we come from and where we are going. And It taught me the Human Design System. For eight days Carlos slept under my bed, not moving. And I stayed in that room without leaving, taking it all in. I had no choice, man. I couldn’t leave! You don’t fuck with the gods, man.”
The people in the conference room listened and took notes.
“Genius to freak, man,” he said to me a little while ago.
We were at his new house, sitting beside the pool. He wore swimming trunks but still had his Turkish had on. “They come from the same place, geniuses and freaks. I’m a freak, but sometime I can trick people and they think I’m a genius. I’m rich now,” he waves his hand around his property, “not only in material gains. You know, you wait long enough and the gods give you your rewards. I went years without sex, without any friends. The only people who I could talk to were the kids, man. The grownups wanted nothing to do with me. Of course I was fucking crazy! But genius to freak. That’s the way it goes,” he laughed.
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