FIGWINE

the figwine conspiracy

This is how the story begins.It began one night, once upon a time, once, somewhere in time, when the music spoke and the mystery was enough for all of us.Enough to keep us sitting still, silent, motionless, awaiting the next instruction from the bodiless captain.I know it began long before that, before I came here, before my memory begins, when warmth was all there was, or before that, when there was simply an urge, not yet a desire, an impulse guided by a vague yet undoubtable knowing that it would come to this.And it is the mystery, the inscrutable mystery that was known by some, known beyond understanding, that brings us here, to the conspiracy, the figwine conspiracy and the role I have played in it, as it turns around me and many others, as we are axles in the myriad cogs of the world clock, we all know undoubtedly that the whole machine revolves around us and without us time, the time in which we find ourselves, would cease to hold its meaning, hold us to the earth, so we play our parts, our parts in the figwine conspiracy of which you will hear, to believe or not, to wonder if you too are not involved, are not, in fact, integral to the whole show, farce, fantasy or the only real thing.

Back in the early days, before anyone knew anything about the conspiracy, we did what we did because it seemed to be the only thing to do with the world in the place it was. It is true, we were young, idealistic and stoned, but we also had an uncanny will to work. The only thing to do was create and destroy, both within ourselves and in the world in which we found ourselves. We would build things out of discarded items and smash televisions with sledge hammers or set furniture aflame- we would prepare and eat fine vegan cuisine and indulge in alcoholic binges and psychedelic experiments. It was truly a constant building up and breaking down, anabolism and catabolism in search of anything that was lasting, that was outside of the conspiracy, that was substantial and true. This we found in our friendship and in that which we created, in the music, the paintings, the words and theatre, the spaceships and skyscrapers of cardboard and duct tape and tempura paint, the fury and the laughter. All else could fall away, or we would attempt to destroy it, as if all existence was a test- viability based on the world’s ability to resist our physical forces of inquiry and remain. Our love and friendship remain the truest testaments to those experiments, while the forces outside of us continue to spin their webs, we caught within. The band was performing at a former Masonic temple turned Irish bar called the Blarney Stone. There was a large beautiful stage, more for ritual and theater than psychedelic rock n roll. There was a backstage and a parking lot out back where the vans could park and fill with smoke and laughter in between sets. I sat at the bar, listening to the music, composing new poetry to share and dreaming up ways it could be more than just poetry, something that could be performed and lived, shown in costume and prop and set, brought to life out of the realm of the word, into the animate, as the logos brought forth life, planets, metals, suns and humans. The first line I wrote for the book, for the official memoir, was, “The music was so sad in those days…” It was. And I was writing it in those days. While the surroundings squealed with laughter and shrieks, the beer and whiskey flowed, contented smiles filled the room, on stage the music was relaying a reality far more concerned with the sadness of life, with the potential for loss, with the great longing in all hearts for something more, for a union which may never be realized until one sits on the very verge of death and breathes a last gasp and whispers, “oh… so this is what they mean…” The sad knowing that there was something continually rooting against you, while simultaneously demanding your very existence and striving. The tale always starts this way, but how to tell the story from there? We were just young artists trying to make something happen- the story could be told a million times by a million people all over the country, this young country full of dreamers. But there was something different with us, something not seen every day. It has to do with our generation, the generation that wasn’t raised on the computer, with email and cellphones and texting and digital social media- we are the generation that grew into it. We were raised by baby-boomers, hippies or beatniks. We read On The Road and Tolkien but we were the children of MTV and we gave you grunge. And we’re still at it, though you wouldn’t recognize us, or know what we’ve seen or done. We could be in the cubicle next to you, or in the three-piece suit managing your hedge fund, or hollering down oil rigs with Greenpeace, or building your house, or teaching your children- but there is something else, something that scares you slightly, about us. Because we didn’t believe the stories you told us, we didn’t necessarily agree with the paradigm into which we were supposed to fit, but we didn’t leave either, didn’t drop out or back out- we stepped in. We stepped into it because it was the only game in town worth playing, even if we had to rewrite the rules, we knew we had to play the game to change it. So here we are, look around, we’re all around you, still plotting, still working, still hoping that those ideals, the ones we poured out on stage at the Blarney Stone and so many other stages and coffee shops and dinner tables with concerned family members, and living rooms and littered ashtrays and classrooms, start to take hold. For it is only with our hearts and the truth we know to be the only thing keeping us tethered to the earth that keeps us playing. And we, in figwine, we were bringing something different, asking something different, and someone took notice, and led us here, to this place from which I write, wondering if anyone will actually see this, actually get to hear the truth, the truth about what is now, more clearly than ever, a conspiracy. Here’s a few definitions of conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful; an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot. It’s hard to say if what they set out to do was unlawful or harmful or evil- but there was obviously secrecy, and they have me here now so… They certainly did not want us to succeed in what we were doing, and perhaps this is where the harmful part comes in. But who’s to say what we were doing was the good thing, the right thing. Can anyone interested in change ever be sure what they are doing is truly for the good of all? How does one assure oneself they are not another selfish orphan seeking attention? It is a conspiracy to us because it was harmful to that which we were trying to accomplish. But where were we? How did I get here? Where do I start? It was a cold January, just after New Years Eve, 1996, when I first left the old east coast to head west. I loaded my 1988 Volvo 740 with all of my belongings, and my cousin Pete and I loaded the only room left in the two front seats. The car was completely full to the brim and the rear wheels were barely visible. I had recently peeled off the large dancing bear sticker that had previously rested next to the license plate to try to avoid any more entanglements with the law, but the silhouette caused by the sticky residue remained clear as could be. We were not an inconspicuous duo. His ounce of Mexican shwag weed and my eighth of good homegrown Vermont bud would carry us across the country while allowing us plenty of opportunities for paranoia and close calls. I was twenty years old and it was all really just beginning. As we set out, just past the East Lyme exit, we lit our first bowl. For confidence and to ward off paranoia I had an imagination of a giant Rastafarian man sitting on the roof of the Volvo as I drove, protecting us and guiding the way, his dreadlocks blowing in the wind. This just gives you a small glimpse into the consciousness of my twenty year old self, still completely in the thralls of the high, the high that was spoken of in true reggae music, the high that Jerry Garcia speaks of in his 1972 Rolling Stone interview, which didn’t necessarily have to do with drugs, though it was often accompanied by them, or introduced by them. figwine was born on that ideal, that we had to stay high, meaning not to stay wasted on substances, but to keep above anything that might dull thinking into standard reactions and mass, individualized vagueness, to stay high above a way of living lacking in creativity, lacking in the constant willingness to make, think, or do something new. Of course, in those days, it did mean to me that I had to stay high on something, generally marijuana. This was what my Rastafarian giant riding on top of the Volvo meant to me then, a protector that would always allow me to stay high and completely in tune with exactly where I needed to be going. I don’t know where he was when I ended up in jail eight months later, on my twenty-first birthday.

We were living in Santa Cruz, California- 335 Gault St.During the days, I was a lifeguard at a little pool in the redwood trees up highway nine, in Boulder Creek, and at night, on the weekends, I washed dishes at Pizza My Heart.My fellow figwine conspirator (wait, who’s side were we on?) Sandy, was a delivery driver.Summer in Santa Cruz, my first year living on the west coast, what a dream.We decided to head to the Phish show for my birthday- the Phish show at Redrocks in Colorado, a long drive from California.We set out loaded down with a large stash and glass pipes and party clothes and beads and stickers on the Volvo- once again quite conspicuous.I drove the first shift through the day and into the night.Sandy soon took over and brought us into Utah.I fell asleep in the back seat.Somewhere around sunrise, Sandy’s girlfriend took over.It was 8:30am on my birthday, August 4th when I awoke to the sound of knuckles rapping upon glass.I saw desert and water and a police officer standing at the driver’s door of my car.The next few moments are vague, but I do remember standing on the side of the road in my socks and tank-top, blue polyester track pants with yellow stripes down the sides, mardi gras beads rolling against my chest, the warm desert wind feeling strangely comforting as it picked up small whitecaps in the ripples of the water on the other side of the highway, the Great Salt Lake.There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and I felt truly at peace there, on the side of the highway in Toelle County Utah- until I was hand-cuffed and placed in the rear of the squad car.The grip of the cuffs on my wrists behind my back was quite an unpleasant sensation.I had just turned twenty-one years old.
Soon, Sandy was in the back of the cruiser next to me, two police officers up front.He started a conversation with one of the officers through the steel grating that separates the rear from the front of the squad car. 
“I’m from California,” I heard Sandy saying through the fog of my angrier perception.Then something from the police officer driving.Then Sandy, “No way! I’m from Lafayette!”
The officer driving the car was from the same hills in the San Francisco bay area.Those mythic hills whose shadowy oak trees whisper secrets into the hillsides and into the ears of young people roaming late at night.The cop was from Benicia, just north of Sandy’s childhood home.Though he was born in Hawaii, Sandy was one-hundred percent California.Ate too much acid too early in his teenage years, or perhaps just the right amount, and could never again be fooled by the untruthfulness around him, and it would often drive him right to the brink of madness.But in these situations, when I could hardly keep myself from a fit of rage, Sandy could discuss childhood and California with a police officer in Toelle County, Utah, cool as could be, as if he was a bro in an East Bay dive bar.
California brethren or not, we soon found ourselves in a holding cell measuring ten feet by ten feet, including the toilet in one part of the room.Our cell mate was a local methampethamine dirty blond missing teeth and smelling of a putrid combination of vomit, urine, feces and that bitter odor of someone who has been up for days and whose body has begun to burn muscle for energy.He who told us he had meth in the milk carton from which he drank for many hours while he told us stories about the cops, the way they caught him and how he planned to return a kill the mother-fukcer cops as soon as he was released and his mother came to pick him up.He stood up in front of Andy and me as we sat, perched tentatively on the stainless steel bench, “AND THEY FUCK YOU IN THE ASS!” speaking of the manner with which the police in the area treat those they find to be in violation of the law.
He was soon released while we remained for another eight hours without being booked or having our rights read to us because the computers were down in the Toelle county police station.Finally, when they did read us our rights and gave us a trial in the very same room that held the holding cell, the judge called us up one at a time and asked, “Are you a doper?”“Well, I don’t believe so sir, I am a good college student, hold a steady job-“ “Then why do ya smoke the stuff?!”That was our trial.We received a $565 fine or three months in jail.Sandy's girlfriend, who was driving the car, received a fine of nearly $1200.We all received our sky blue jump suits, white sneakers and tighty-whitey underpants and were sent to our cells.I began my hunger strike and called the father of my lifelong childhood friend to see what I should do.Luckily, he called my parents and they began the process of getting me the money to get out of jail.But not before a night in the cell, a few walks around the yard and the company of convicts the nature of whose crimes I did not know.I wouldn’t eat, nor talk, nor use the bathroom, I don’t even know if I made my bed.I was prepared to disengage completely.This is where I truly began to become unhinged.When I was eighteen and watched the morning dew dancing of the lawn of the Howard Johnson’s at sunrise and when I spent my twenty-first birthday in jail in Toelle County, Utah.This is where the cracks, the chinks in the armor first appeared, and this is where they were able to gain access to a formerly locked part of my consciousness and this whole process could truly begin to unfold, the conspiracy write itself with a faceless Iago and I the maddened Othello.
We were all released after giving over a few thousand dollars, about 40 hours and each a small piece of our selves, our idealism.However, what we didn’t leave behind was three-quarters of an ounce of marijuana that was hidden in the trunk of the car.This we preserved until we made it up into the canyon of Little Cottonwood, and it was smoked.Much of it.We never made it to see Phish at Redrocks.We smoked out of an apple the whole way back to California, prepared to eat both the apple and the weed if we were pulled over again.With all of its somewhat comic absurdity and stereotypical immaturity and recklessness, this episode certainly changed us all forever.The reality that the power exists that can lock you away, determine the length and contents of your detention and keep you hidden from the world- this is truly a shocking realization, one that never quite allows you to trust in anything that reeks of authority and established and shallow rite and ritual again.

Four years later, I am living in the back yard of a very small house.I had once lived inside the house, in a small bedroom where I slept on a pallet with a egg crate foam and a thirty year old sleeping bag.Now, though, I live in the back yard, in a shack.There I have a plywood platform for a bed with the same egg crate foam for a mattress and the same sleeping bag.Here is where I start to fight back.This conspiracy has finally come to the fore.The reality has become blindingly obvious after the attempt on my life and the deposit of the microchip in my forehead for which I bear the scar to this day.Shall I tell that story or continue with the fight back?I really didn’t know I needed to fight until they took the first punch, a mighty blow that left me unconscious and bleeding in the middle of the street in the darkness of the hours before sunrise.
But now, I am living in the shed behind the small house, sleeping on aplywood platform that a former tenant has left for me and painting and building things.I am currently committed to discovering their plan, why they want us, what they want from us, why they made the world look as it does.I am invested in the mystery of the value of π.I make paintings at night and in the late mornings of spirals, mixed media embedded with a logarithmic spiral based on the Fibonacci series.I also begin to develop my poetry into performance art and create sets and props, spaceships and sailboats.This is the only way to fight back.To go further into the truth the only way there is, to approach truth through art is the only way in, and nothing can defeat the truth.The conversations are so forgetful at this time.It is a completely self-absorbed time.Me and characters in my play.It’s my play.
His name is the Infinite Sailing Jester.His story is a bit like mine or yours.He started out a middle class kid, working at Quiznos after school, smoking grass in the school parking lot.He made it through school and went to a local college, graduated without a clue of where to go, or what to do with himself.One day, while walking along the beach of his hometown, a wintery beach, vacant and snowy, wind blowing off the ocean and carving the winter white beach into frozen dunes shifting and disappearing, he came across a old, small sailboat, in fine condition, sail flapping in the wind, and not a person to be seen.There were no footprints in the snowy beach landscape, no movement on the horizon, so he leaned over the vessel and peered into the small cockpit. Empty.As he lifted his head back from where he had been leaning, a gust brought the boom around and directly in to the back of his skull, sending him lurching into the boat, unconscious.When he awoke, he was floating in the sea aboard this strange vessel, not being tossed about but tacking quite strongly, sails drawn and main sheet taut.Though he had no idea where he was or where he was going, it seemed as if the vessel had a mind of its own and knew exactly where it wanted to go and it was heading directly for an island, quite quickly.Before he knew what to do, the man and vessel slammed into the sandy beach of said island, throwing the man to the fore of the boat, sails flapping indolently in the still stern breeze and vessel leaning to the side, depositing the man upon the sandy shore, face down in watery sand.However, it was no longer winter. The water was warm and the breeze that blew across his face was tropical and smelled of salt and seaweed.As he drew his face, grainy and moist from the sand, he found that he was peering into the face of a man that looked remarkably like himself, yet seemed to be buried beneath the sand.This indeed gave the man quite a shock, and, as he leaped to his feet with a thundering heart, he realized it was indeed he who was peering at him from the sand, he reflected in a mirror that was buried there on this seemingly remote island beach.The man reached down and pulled the mirror from the sand, looking at himself, noticing the two inch gash just below his hairline on the left side of his forehead and the bump that had been forming around it, turning blueish black.However, as he lowered the mirror so that he could survey his surroundings, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that his image did not disappear from the mirror.As he looked down at the mirror dangling idly in his hand, his image did indeed remain there, still mirroring his expressions (this he tested by making an array of faces, eye-brow lifts, frowns and smiles, winks and nostril flarings.This mirror he had found in the sand seemed to be his mirror and no one else’s.But he was not quite sure that the image in the mirror was indeed he, so he decided to have a conversation with the man in the mirror…
The first time he tried this conversation, he fell right into the mirror. It was like being deep underwater and trying to come up for air but not quite making it, realizing you will have to gasp for air before it is available and finding, at the very last minute, that it is indeed available, just not where you had been looking.When he finally emerged from this experience of drowning in his own image, he thought he would try another method of conversing with himself in the mirror.He decided to listen. So, he sat down on a rock at the edge of the beach where the sand meets the crowding jungle and he placed the mirror beside him, upon a smaller, flat rock and listened. He listened to the waves crashing, he listened to them rolling back in their froth to the sea; he listened to the sand and shells and pebbles rolling and tumbling to and fro caught in the will of the sea, the pulse and rhythm of waves.He listened to the gulls’ plaintive cry as they floated await in the wind.He listened to the sand fleas and ghost crabs arranging flecks of silica beneath his feet.He listened to the trees creak and their leaves hushing in the breezes that blew.He listened to the grit of his own breath and to his heartbeat and to the sun.And he listened to the mirror.
After some time the man noticed that the sun was working its way deliberately toward the horizon, growing red as though angry and a breeze was stirring the waters into restless chop.The man also noticed that his head was throbbing from his interaction with the sailboat’s boom and the interior of his mouth seemed to him to hold less moisture than the stone upon which he was sitting.Finally he noticed the mirror there next to him.For the past however long he had been lost in listening he had not glanced down at the mirror, but now he saw images appearing there, like individual frames in a movie reel moving slowly and choppily backward in time.It also seemed as though the images were moving toward him out of the depth of mirror.He recognized these images, like they were from his own life, but a life that had not yet happened.There were faces he recognized yet knew he had not yet met, interactions for which he had been waiting without knowing they existed.The final image was the sailboat upon which he had arrived on this island hurriedly moving backwards toward him, toward the island until the stern of the boat hit him squarely on the knees.As he sat on this rock lost in indiscernible revels, the tide had risen and along with it, the boat.It seemed to be beckoning him.He knew he really did not have a choice in this matter.He must board again and set sail.
When he did reach land again, he was not the man who unwittingly set sail from that wintery beach.He had utterly changed, or so he said.I first met the Infinite Sailing Jester, or Jes as he was known around town, in a small bar in aging fishing and whaling community gone tourist trap on the coast of Connecticut.Near where his vessel brought him, dumped him and disappeared.

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