Brion Gysin - The Process

Are you feeling the Borbor , at all? Or do you go on smoking your keef as an antidote, Hassan? Nothing will help you now, Hassan … you simply have to listen to the rest of my tale. Don’t yawn! Don’t you ever take off those dark glasses of yours?

Well, right after graduation, PP and I got very quietly married in Saskatoon … under the not quite legally correct names of Peter S. Blood and Mary B. Foote. I added that “e” to be fancy and it cost me a lot of legal pain later … when we came to divorce. I didn’t know a damn thing about PP, really , when I married him. After the mushroom-event I had an even later menstrual period than usual so I guess I mumbled something dark to him about marriage and PP just said: “Sure. OK. Why not?” I didn’t know, then, that his father had chopped up his mother with an ax in the shower of a motel near Medicine Hat and been mowed down by the Mounties. He said both his parents were dead, “in an accident,” so I guessed from that and some things he did that he must have some money … but I had no idea how much! In all the time I’d known him I’d never seen PP pull one single penny out of his pocket … never , under any circumstances did he touch money. We didn’t go Dutch: I paid for everything … everything! … out of my scholarship money or money from working weekends and nights. At the mere mention of money , Peter Paul used to pull out a switchblade he always carried on him, mumbling about how he was “going to take care of his guardians” … so naturally, I thought someone was keeping him short. That “someone,” I soon realized after I married him, was PP himself … and, after all, I didn’t really know who he was!

That came out when we went to apply for our passports and were told by some little local official in the capital city, Regina, that Blood Indians and their spouses were not eligible for passports at all! We were members … and in Peter Paul’s case the very last one … of an independent but unrecognized nation which had never signed treaties of reciprocity with the Canadian government. We had no status at all . “Are you trying to tell me I don’t exist!” I menaced the man. “Oh, no, Madame,” he protested. “You can have bank accounts, driving licenses, dog and hunting licenses but no liquor license, nor even a permit to drink liquor at any time; neither vanilla extract for cooking nor after-shave lotion are you permitted to buy or consume, nor wood alcohol nor anti-freeze may be sold to a Bounty Indian but you can get onto public relief at a pinch, since you’re residents, or so I think. Here, let me just look that up in the book a minute. In any case — and I’m quite sure of that — passports, no!” Peter Paul was so cowed, he didn’t even want to go to the papers with this. He was ready to call off the whole trip to Basel … my post-graduate year of fellowship study with Dr. Forbach, imagine! … not me! I simply sailed into the offices of the Saskatoon Sketch with the story and it hit the front page. It hit the front page not only locally but all over the world as the wire services got hold of it. Peter Paul Strangleblood, the Richest Little Boy in the World Denied Passport. Deny Passport to Red Indian Oil Heir … and on and on … ever since.

At least I knew who I was married to … at last! It’s sort of funny … now that I come to think about it.… I’ve often enough in my life found myself in quite deep with a man before I even found out who he was … really. The next one … a little over a year later … was Thay. I’ve told you how that happened: I simply flew over to New York to look into GRAMMA after I’d knocked poor PP flat on the floor with it … him and his lack of “ havingness! ” … and I swooped back with Thay Himmer to get him to “ grammatize ” my husband into some money sense . I felt at the time that he had to be cured even if it meant taking all of his money off of him. … It wasn’t doing him … or anybody else … any good … and I told Thay as much. Thay, as you know by now, loves to come on as a magician and … I must admit … he does pretty well. Can’t you just hear him saying: “A magician? I am! ” He took hold of our household in Basel … but quick! Thay was “running” PP four to six hours a day on his “havingness” and he “ran” everybody else in the house: Rolf Ritterolf, my Swiss lawyer running Fundamental Funds; Fraulein Freulich, my Swiss tri-lingual typist: even the cook. When he got to me, he soon turned up the fact that I wasn’t in contact with Dr. Forbach … badly out of communication, in fact. Thay Himmer got Dr. Forbach to come over to tea and … like a good Swiss grandfather, come to make peace.… The professor brought along his unfortunate granddaughter whom Peter Paul had once slapped around in a rage … for making fun of his money, he thought.

Well, it couldn’t have turned out better … or worse . This time, the child got burnt! We were all having tea in our fabulous house on the Rhine and I had some nice things including a big silver samovar which Peter Paul somehow managed to overturn over the child. It got her one arm from the wrist to her shoulder.… The howling child was very badly burned. Thay jumped on her right away … slapping her face to get her attention. “ Good! ” he shouted at her to get her into communication: “Does it hurt here? ” The surprised and suffering child shook her ringlets: “No.” Then Thay slapped her hand … passing right over the burn. “ Good! Does it hurt here? ” Again, she had to say “No.” Thay went on like that with her relentlessly … passing back and forth over the burn; making her , each time, negate the pain, you see. I hope you won’t ever have the occasion to try it but … I swear to you I’ve seen Thay do it … and it works! In the end, we sent the little girl home quite exhausted but with only a little redness on her arm.… Faith Healing! … It took Thay nearly an hour of utterly intense work to do it … but we’d all thought that poor child was going to be disfigured for life!

After that, Thay could do anything with Peter Paul that he liked. We were all driving to Freiburg im Breisgau one day, I remember, with PP at the wheel of our Mercedes-Benz. “Where do I turn?” PP asked vaguely and Thay, who meant a perfectly visible crossroads a few yards ahead, said: “Right here.” Instinctively and without one second’s reflection, Peter Paul swung over the wheel, turning us all over into a ditch. Luckily, we weren’t going very fast so no one was hurt but … it just goes to show you how blindly PP was following Thay. That night, Thay brought out of his luggage a Ouija Board which he and I had picked up at Hammacher Schlemmer’s in New York as we tore through buying silly Christmas presents on the way to the airport. I knew how it worked so … when Thay and I both put our forefingers on the planchette, the first thing it spelled out was SCRAM! “Do you mean we should all leave Basel, dear Ouija Board?” That was Thay talking to it. The planchette shot off under my reluctant forefinger to “YES.” “And where should we go , dear Ouija?” asked Thay. TAMANRASSET. The board painfully and laboriously spelled it out — and that’s your “Tam,” isn’t it? We all were ready to swear that none of us, Thay included, had ever even heard of the place. “And when, dear Ouija Board, when?” Thay insisted. ANTEXMAS, the ouija board said. That happened just three days before Christmas and … in three hours … we were off! Thay found where the place was on the atlas and Thay it was who simply dragged us out to the airport in Basel where he simply made PP Strangleblood write out a check for our own private plane.… We were off!