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    World Without Pain: The Story of a Search
    World Without Pain: The Story of a Search
    World Without Pain: The Story of a Search
    Ebook171 pages3 hours

    World Without Pain: The Story of a Search

    By John Walters

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    About this ebook

    In the 1970s, after the Altamont Rock Festival, the Manson Family cult murders, and the fiasco of the Vietnam War many young people, disillusioned by the hippy movement, began to leave their homelands and travel to the far places of the world. Hoping to find drugs, sex, freedom and excitement, they more often were confronted with destitution, despair, disease, loneliness, and culture shock.

    As a young writer wishing to break out of the familiar rut in which he was stagnating, Walters hit the road during this time, first to Europe, then onward to the Indian Subcontinent. He sampled Buddhism and radical Christianity; he wandered alone in the Himalayas; he listened to strange gurus spouting stranger doctrines; he watched the people around him deteriorating and dying in the lands of the East. As he traveled onward he became fascinated with the road itself, and determined to discover its secrets. He wondered what it was that gave the road its alluring power, and he forsook everything else to find out.

    His story will appeal to those who lived through the turmoil of the 60s and 70s, to those who are hungering after spiritual fulfillment, to writers and other artists in search of their voice and their inspiration, and to anyone who loves a true story of adventure and excitement in strange lands.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Walters
    Release dateMay 15, 2011
    ISBN9781458070067
    World Without Pain: The Story of a Search
    Author

    John Walters

    John Walters recently returned to the United States after thirty-five years abroad. He lives in Seattle, Washington. He attended the 1973 Clarion West science fiction writing workshop and is a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. He writes mainstream fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs of his wanderings around the world.

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      Book preview

      World Without Pain - John Walters

      World Without Pain: The Story of a Search

      A Memoir

      By

      John Walters

      Published by Astaria Books

      Copyright 2011 by John Walters

      All rights reserved. No portion may be copied, other than brief passages for review purposes, without permission of the author.

      .All of the events described in this memoir really happened; however, names have been changed at the author's discretion.

      Contents

      1. Traveling Hopefully

      2. Drifting

      3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Sadhu

      4. The Descent

      5. At the Edge of the West

      6. Hitching Up the Alaskan Highway in the Dead of Winter

      7. The Return

      8. End Notes

      Chapter 1

      Traveling Hopefully

      To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

      --Walt Whitman

      Song of the Open Road

      It was Christmas Eve 1976 on Calangute Beach in Goa, India. The last edges of the bright red sun dissolved beyond the sea. Sitting cross-legged on the sand, I finished the joint I'd been smoking. Around me, but distant from each other, like stars that appear close in the night sky but are actually millions of miles apart, sat groups of hippies and other travelers, and some singles like myself, smoking chillums of hashish, talking quietly, chanting mantras, or just spacing out. In the golden-orange mist of the sunset's afterglow, I arose to leave. As I began to walk, I became aware of a presence beside me.

      * * *

      It had been a long trip. After spending the summer hitchhiking around Europe, I heard of more and more young travelers heading east, to India, as autumn approached. Since I was almost broke, I returned to Holland and stayed with a friend's brother while I worked in factories.

      That friend, Frederick, I had met at the very beginning of my travels, when I’d set off alone, the epitome of naiveté. A companion at the right moment he was indeed. He always smiled that Dutch grin, with a big gap between his two front teeth. Call me Freddie, he’d said, laughing deep back in his throat like a hyena. He laughed like that constantly, whatever we were discussing. He told me about his travels around the United States, and the odd jobs he’d taken along the way; he told me about Holland and his life there, though he took pains to explain to me that he was not really from Holland but from Freisland which was a province of Holland but which he spoke of as if it were a separate country; he spoke of his motorcycle and motorcycle racing; but whatever the initial subject, the conversation always came around to women. He was obsessed with sex. He had an Indonesian girlfriend in Groningen, his hometown, but the way he described it he picked up extras wherever he could. You can never get enough, he’d say, and laugh his hyena laugh. He could turn anything into a sex testimony. Once while observing a girl with particularly hairy unshaved armpits he soliloquized thusly: There’s nothing like that soft fur, man. She grabs your dick under her arm and moves it like this, and he pressed his arm against his side and began to move it back and forth slowly. It feels great, just great. And he rolled his eyes and smiled his big gap-toothed grin and cackled like a hyena.

      You’ve really had a girl do that to you?

      What do you think? And another grin and cackle, followed by an even more outlandish story. Anyway, we traveled together, coarse jokes and bawdy tales and all, through Oregon and California to Calexico. Then we crossed into Mexicali, Mexico, from there took a bus to Guadalajara, and from there plunged further southeast. We would eat spicy beef and chicken and beans and huevos rancheros; we would drink coffee and Coca-Cola and mescal. We would sit on straw chairs near the market places sipping some drink or another, while beggar kids continually hit us up for coins, and Freddie would make a game of seeing how many of the lazy flies buzzing slowly around us he could grab out of the air and crush in his hand. He would pause in whatever he was saying, become still as a jaguar lying in wait in jungle underbrush, lunge suddenly, then, grinning and cackling, would clench his fist as hard as he could, rubbing rhythmically as he reduced the flies to bloody pulp.

      He was a clown, there was no doubt about that, but he was an amiable buffoon, and I needed a companion, and he stuck with me on that first journey of mine. Once early on, in Guadalajara, he got fed up with traveling and decided to head back up to the States and then home to Freisland, and he arranged with an elderly couple, also travel-weary, to drive their camper north for them while they flew on ahead. He tried to talk me into returning with him, but I had not had sufficient taste of adventure, and with trepidation and a lonely feeling in my gut I boarded a bus to go onward. At the last minute he hopped on and sat down next to me and said, I can’t do it; I’m going on with you, man, and laughed like a hyena.

      We made it all the way down to Guatemala City; I figured that was a respectable-enough distance for my first foray into the unknown. On our way back through Mexico we tried the local marijuana in a hotel room thick with paranoia and roiling blue clouds of smoke; we bought hammocks and ponchos; we visited a missionary outpost out in the Yucatan jungle where the nun in charge roped us into painting the outside of the mission hospital. We never did manage to get it on with any of the local girls, though. The closest we came was an attempt at a city market on a teenager Freddie met. She was a dark-eyed, dark-haired Mexican beauty with a low, sensuous voice, and she obviously enjoyed the flirting as much as we did, but she made it clear that flirting without touching was as far as it would go, that for anything else she had to ask her father and her brothers, and for them to give permission she would have to get engaged to be married, and even then there were formalities to observe, and so on. I think Freddie would have told her anything to get her to come with us, but she was adamant that the conversation was the end of the affair. God knows how Freddie embellished it when he told the story back in Holland. Perhaps by that time in his imagination she had offered him her armpits as well as her lips and her groin and every other bodily part. Perhaps they had quite an x-rated rendezvous, Freddie and the Mexican girl, by the time he had it properly scripted and choreographed and edited and projected on the little screen in his mind’s eye.

      Anyway, Freddie finally did head northeast towards wherever he was going to catch a plane back to Holland, and I headed up Baja California to Tijuana, San Diego, and then Los Angeles.

      One night I went to a bar with some old writing cronies. It was a place of mixed clientele, a something-for-everyone type of establishment where they had male as well as female strippers. I was aware that one of my companions, a man, preferred the guys, and I kept my eyes on the girls, and I don’t know who the others were watching, but mainly we were swilling pitchers of beer and pretty much oblivious to the other customers around us. When I staggered out of the bar on my way to the car a crowd of red-neck kids followed me, and I don’t know what the hell had got their goat but they were pissed off for some reason, and they’d punched me across the face and opened a cut above my eye before one of my friends rescued me. He wasn’t particularly tall but he was heavy and brawny and he must have had a reputation in the area because when they saw him coming they took off terrified. The cut was deep and at first bled profusely but in the end we just shoved the two sides of skin together and slapped a Band-aid over it.

      All my life I’d despised that kind of senseless violence, but that was what it was like living in America: you could go on and on for what seemed like forever with your head in the rosy clouds of the American dream, only to be slapped down when you least expected it by the violence that was always there, just under the surface, eating away at the flesh but out of sight until the covers were pulled away to expose the horrible greenish rotting skin and the overwhelming putrid stench. You never knew where it might come from, that was the problem. Nothing was predictable. Everything could be middle-class mediocrity for the longest time, all smiles and politeness and no dust in the corners, but then you found out that the seemingly-innocuous geeky little brother had weapons hidden under his bed and when you least expected it he’d do in his parents and the school principal and a few hundred of the students and especially whoever was his particular school-yard nemesis.

      After LA I headed north to Seattle, but everything was out of synch, nothing clicked, and so it wasn’t long before I headed back down to LA with my typewriter and unemployment checks to try my hand at scriptwriting.

      I rented a one-bedroom apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. There the loneliness got to me so much that I couldn’t write a thing. I remember one night I was looking out my window and I spied the moon, just peeking over the tops of the buildings and the electric wires. At last something natural and not concrete or asphalt! I stared at it for what seemed like eternity, but then I began to get suspicious. It never moved; it always stayed in exactly the same position, as if it were stuck between dimensions in a still-shot of the moment. Finally I went outside and took a closer look, and I realized I’d been staring at a streetlight.

      It wasn’t just the loneliness, though. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that that one little trip into Mexico hadn’t really shown me what life was like. It had been like a tourist excursion; I always knew that I’d be coming back. That wasn’t what I had to do. I had to cut loose from everything somehow: from home and family and friends and unemployment benefits and Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken and the American dream and my own constricted plans and ambitions. I was a prisoner who had to bust out. But I wasn’t quite ready.

      I survived there, that’s about all I can say. All around me in the miles and miles of houses and apartments were would-be actors and actresses and scriptwriters and God knows what else. I’d go for a few job interviews each month, carefully choosing jobs for which I wasn’t qualified, just to impress the unemployment office enough by my efforts so they would keep sending me the checks. I’d sit and stare at the blank page in the typewriter sometimes, and sometimes I’d take walks. I got to know a Vietnam War vet who was a drug dealer, so I scored some dope and had a smoke now and then. I was frustrated, stymied, at a dead-end. Something had to give.

      The shove came from an unexpected direction. I can’t remember who I went to the movies with that evening; I don’t think I was alone, anyway; I didn’t go to the cinema by myself in those days. Anyway, we saw Taxi Driver: the epitome of American paranoia and violence, at least at that time. And that’s what made me decide: after I saw it I was determined to get out of the hellhole America had become. My unemployment allowance was drying up anyway; if I stayed I would have to get a job. So I gave my notice and cashed my last check; I stored my books and typewriter and lent out my TV. In my green duffle bag I packed what I figured I needed and could easily carry: sleeping bag, change of clothes, toiletry kit, writing materials, book to read (one at a time was the weight limit); and when I was ready I set off across the United States, heading for New York.

      Back then Icelandic Airlines was the way to go: $100 for a round-trip ticket from New York to Luxembourg and back. The plane was a sardine can with no legroom, packed full of hippies and student travelers. The atmosphere, though, was jovial. Everyone shared a sense of anticipation, and a false feeling of charity and camaraderie that came from everyone having a pocketful of money at the beginning of a trip and nobody needing to make demands on anyone else, and an absence of danger, conflict, and uncertainty. We were all naïve on that plane, the novices as well as the experienced travelers; it seemed that then, at the beginning of the summer, the world was Disneyland and nothing more. Poverty was a bad dream all but forgotten by the conscious mind, as was war. Such things did not exist in Disneyland. I don’t think there was one passenger on board over the age of twenty-five. Many of them had gotten the money to travel from their parents; others had taken temporary jobs, in restaurants as waiters, perhaps, or in gas stations or car washes or paper routes or factories; some had sold drugs; some had possibly even stolen the money they’d needed. But none, at that moment, were desperate. No trepidation in that group, no angst, no despair. Lambs for the slaughter, oblivious to their doom, whether their doom was to return eventually to the gray obscurity of life in the American system, never having opened up and tasted anything else, or to come face-to-face with the vast unknown,

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