BROWN RICE
I was escorted out of the building and was handed back a portfolio of water colors I had given the school for safe keeping upon my arrival. I had also hoped for input on the project since the school bragged about its industry connections. The 16×20 paintings I had paid an artist and animator Andrea Gomez to paint years earlier as a storyboard for TAKE A BITE OF THE APPLE, a song and short film promoting literacy, was just one more thing that Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts was not really interested in—literacy.
Though I had been warned I felt that I had never gotten the opportunity to confront my accusers for all I was being accused. I felt that I was being persecuted for my work, especially the last screen play I had written and passed around, DARK STAR, where Christ came back as a black woman and befriended a cab driver everyone thought was the Anti-Christ. It was a comedy. I remained isolated and drove to the house in Oviedo where it became obvious to me that the situation was one of desperation. I wanted to stay–I wanted revenge—I wanted. I spoke with Betty, Black Paul and Eight Ball Brian from the class and though sympathetic there was no support for a fight to help me stay in the school. “We all have problems,” they said, “it could happen to any of us.”
“What happened?” I asked. I just didn’t get it. I wrote letters to all of the instructors and administrators recanting the charges and asking for a hearing, but I was ignored. I had very little cash and a truck that wasn’t very kind with fuel consumption so I traveled everywhere by bicycle, leaving Iris in the garage to cut down on my visibility.
That last month in Florida was an exercise in fasting and bike riding, quitting smoking and getting in touch with the reality that life goes on and on. The bombing in Oklahoma City happened and I contemplated what a great way to get even. “Even for What?” I thought. An American Value. How often I had heard the cliché, “Don’t get mad—get even.” Let it go! Let it go! Let it go! I reread Joseph Campbell and pretended this was the beginning of another journey and my road of trials.
The modern myth of man confronted me in full force while I sipped coffee at a cafe in a shopping mall one evening. A man, claiming to have been abducted and returned to earth by Aliens, gave a talk about the FEDERATION, an army of Aliens planning to come and take the chosen several hundred thousand to a new life in the outer reaches of the universe, leaving the rest of humanity to wallow. The speaker said that Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek had been abducted and returned by the same group of Aliens. I decided it was time to leave Florida but I didn’t know where to go.
I was down to eating a bowl of brown rice soup a day, and had enough for three bowls in my rice stash. I had lost thirty pounds in a month. I had a festering wound on my right wrist, infected by the environment of central Florida and the child I had held in the taxi. Toots the cat, my companion of 14 years, was catching and eating lizards. I cooked the day’s rations while rummaging in the cupboard to see if there was anything to liven up the earthiness of the feast. I found a plastic tube of barbecue spice and poured it freely into the pan of simmering soup. When I placed the tube on the counter next to the stove, some of the spice spilled. It began to move. Reddish brown granules with legs vibrated across the countertop. They were curious little devils. How they had managed to evolve from spice in a tightly closed plastic tube was beyond me. New life had emerged on the planet in the darkness of a kitchen cabinet, and some of it was being cooked with my daily ration of rice. I marveled at the revelation for a moment, easily pleased by any activity. I emptied the contents of the tube and brushed the vermin on the counter into the sink drain and switched on the disposal unit listening to the music of the intruders into my world crackle before I turned on the faucet. I ate the cooked rice and vermin protein with satisfaction as though I were a cannibal after the hunt enjoying remnants of Elvis and Ben and Jerry and the one Emmy Award winning Fake Jew at Full Sail Center for the Recording Arts. That night I called my younger brother in Baltimore for gas money for the truck and my escape. I also called Fish in Carolina Beach and he said it was okay to camp out there for awhile.