Paradise Burning
Adventures of a High Times Journalist
by Chris Simunek
(St. Martin’s/Griffin 176 pp. $12.95)
by Thomas Christian
One morning, in the not so distant past, while riding the New York City subway en route to a teaching assignment in Queens, author Chris Simunek was confronted by a dichotomous angel hovering outside his rattling window. Waving a pair of slab placards Moses-like over its head, the spirit presented Simunek with the rustic and charred plates upon which were engraved the symbolic scriptures of life’s mysterious duality. Plaque #1 outlined the immortal rock ‘n’ roll vision – a composite of flurrious windmilling limbs banging neurotic over a sextet of Ernie Ball Super Slinkies and vibrating over a pair of humbucking pickups that powered a three-chord Ke-rangakong through stacks of Marshalls, severing the heads of a frenzied goo-goo eyed mass that was gloriating in the cacophony of his original polyrhymes.
WOMMMP!
By contrast, Stone Plaque Numero Two-o had a small TV screen carved into its core. The cathode-ray beamed a vision of his future-script – a tenured and secure educator, faceless among rows of blue collar tombstones and weedy lawns, reclining on a summer lawn chair evening, guzzling Rheingold and listening to The Mets on Power 66.
Accosted that day by a swarming invasion of The Guilt Gnats, he was shocked into taking personal inventory of his situation right there and then: “As I rode that R train home – looking out at the factories, the billboards, the clapboard houses – I felt like I’d betrayed every dream I ever had.”
Making like a spirit-spooked Jacob Marley, Simunek bails on the school teaching assignment and shoots it back right quick like Sheriff (bing-bing-binnng!) Ricochet Rabbit across the river and hitches a freelancing gig at High Times Magazine. Eager for any assignment sent his way (usually the ones too crazy, too difficult, or too dangerous for the regular staffers), he volunteers for (hell, even suggests) loony travelogue excursions: Tumbling with motorgangs at their annual Sturgis, South Dakota bikerfest; Traipsing through the treacherous shanties in the crime-sodden trenchtowns of Jamaica; Communing with hempville prophets at post-hippie Rainbow Gatherings in Taos, New Mexico, all the while riffing on his native root NYC jibble-babble and espousing from the hazy depths of an ominous weed cloud “Feeling like a psychedelic Edward R. Murrow. The Allman Brothers were playing on the radio, and as I watched the tumbleweeds blow through the New Mexico desert, I half expected to see the Roadrunner dropping an anvil on the Coyote’s head.”
Simunek’s invisible (protecting) angels serve him well, fusing his good-luck soul with the gift of a rhythmically literal diatribe. His jaunts cover the recent Sex Pistols revisionist tour, drug-sniffing searches by Canadian border guards (while stowing a trunkful of High Times gear festooned with leafy star logos), and landing in Chichen Itza where college students on Spring Break don Mickey Mouse t-shirts and make like Ugly American ingrates by dragging cases of Budweiser across the Mayan Holy Lands. Mucho offended at the sight of this, the sacred entities whirl like p.o.’d dervishes and take flight into the black-and-white sky on long strands of FelliniString. Falling back through the atmosphere, their Mayan brains get licked clean from cadaverous skulls by the pounding KO of Motörhead on a boombox, then thrust back Earthward, coffins ablaze, burning missile projectiles that pierce the piss-yellow roof of a painted hippiferous bus and land in a riot of Patchouli Perfume and torn tie-dyes. At the roadside, onlookers rush to catch the falling sparks with tennis rackets. Others roll joints and smoke out their brains, an armada of bandannas draped across their torsos and smoke rings drooping from their mouthal cavities before f-f-fading into an ashen pile of dusty cinders. Musing the smell of excess that the rich lil’ momma’s boys (tomorrow’s straight-suited stockbrokers and lawyers, boys and girls) confuse for Cool, Simunek slices their evilness with one fell swoop from his silver sword of Truth: “Dark – like somehow Satan managed to squeeze just enough puss up from the bowels of hell to penetrate the Terra-Firma.” Borrowing Rimbaud’s anvil of hope, he crowns The Uglies with the cap of Revolution, then turns on his heels, cool-style, and marches back up the Glory Hill. Hallelujah.
