APOCALYPSO


                 John Rachel  
The guy was ubiquitous.

Recently, Billy had been seeing Apocalypso posters everywhere, some with catchy sayings,
some announcing prayer meetings and rallies.  He even spotted a small billboard in China
Town, written in Chinese characters no less.  The guy had his own Public Access TV show.  
And though Billy didn't bother to read it, he saw a feature article on him in the Village Voice,
titled "Guru To The Moral Minority".

Billy finally succumbed to what increasingly appeared to be inevitable.

He was going to go to an Apocalypso function.  

Candy was into it.  She would be - quirky as she was ninety-nine per-cent of the time.  

"This must be the place."

"So right you are."

Billy and Candy had just made the short walk from the subway station to a former bank
building in Tribeca which was rented out for performance art events, concerts and parties.

"You know, I've known about this guy for some time now.  His headquarters, the Ashram of
the Urban Night, is right near my place.  Right on First Avenue."

"I can't believe you've been keeping this from me, Billy."

"After this evening, you might wish I had."

As they approached the building, they could hear over loudspeakers what sounded like deep
male voices in a rhythmic incantation.  

YO - HAMA - HAMA - YAMA - YO
YO - HAMA - HAMA - YAMA - YO
YO - HAMA - HAMA - YAMA - YO
YO - HAMA - HAMA - YAMA - YO

They paid the admission and went inside.

The "temple" was so crowded with chanting, dancing, rapturous bodies, apparently at the
peak of spiritual merriment, it was nearly impossible for Billy to squeeze into the main hall.  
With Candy in tow, he used his scrum legs and mosh pit skills to best advantage, grunting and
hurling forward into the tumbling sea of enlightenment seekers, incurring more than once
the disdain of someone he had shoved aside with his unenlightened aggressiveness.

As they entered the cavernous main hall, they were assaulted by dazzling display of intense
multi-colored lights and a thunderous explosion of sound.

boompa - ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta  boompa - ta-ta  boompa - ta-ta
boompa - ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta  boompa - ta-ta  boompa - ta-ta

Four drummers - bare from the waste up but adorned with Chinese jute hair-ties and
necklaces of teeth, bones, shells and flowers - thrashed out a driving, infectious rhythm on
two sets of congas, prayer bells, a tabla and a djembe.  The two conga players were the dark
chocolate of the Congo, smooth and taut in their youthful muscularity.  Their shiny oiled
cornrows spawned long braids which thrashed and bounced about in sync with their
histrionic hand chops to the drums.  The djembe player was albino but he had shaved his
head and eyebrows, and applied red and black warpaint to his face and torso.  He was always
laughing at some musical joke only he could hear, and regularly made eye contact either with
the other percussionists or members of the audience, encouraging them to laugh along.  The
man on the prayer bells and tabla was actually a woman, but one who had played down her
femininity to the point where her gender was not so much of an issue as was her species.  
Her tangled, unwashed hair dragged across her snarling face, sticking to her cheeks.  She
held her mouth open wide and clicked her teeth together in time with the music, creating the
impression she was trying to snatch insects out of the air.  She was wearing huge farmers
overalls and no shirt, offering glimpses nobody wanted, of the flabby udders on her chest.  
Whenever she played the prayer bells, her eyes rolled back in her head suggesting the
urgent need for an exorcism.

Competing for the audience's eye with this malformed menagerie of musicians, were several
spontaneous dancers who either possessed by the rhythms or a need for attention, had
jumped onstage and were whirling about in a free-form frenzy of euphoria.  First there were
two, three, then finally four girls, egging one another on to greater heights of improvised
showmanship.  The floor around them was wet with their perspiration, and their
pheromones filled the air.

People watched the drummers and go-go girls, slack jawed by the visuals and riveted by the
sonics, for thirty minutes before the star of this evening's performance made his appearance.
Once Apocalypso took the stage, all eyes fixed on him.

It was no celebrity walkway entrance.  Dressed in nothing but a simple white sarong, hair
pulled back off of his face in long dreadlocks and tied into a single clump in back, no facial
hair other than thick eyebrows which set off his intense brown eyes, handsome to the point
of causing gasps from the females - and of course the gay men - in any room he entered,
medium height but muscular and thick with lean masculinity, Apocalypso stepped easily and
gracefully onto the stage.

"It is my honor to be here with you, to feel and absorb and radiate with you the energy of
our shared divinity.  We are here to begin a new beginning.  A new beginning for each of us
here.  A new beginning for the spiritually empty people of the nation which once held great
promise.  A new beginning for America.  A new beginning for the world.  Into the great void -  
the gaping chasm left by the empty pursuit of material wealth, the emptying of all value from
the human mind by modern media, into the desolate vacuum the banks and corporations
have thrust the souls of good people like ourselves to gasp and face extinction - into that
artificially-created black hole of nothingness, we send our infinite love and the boundless
energy of our shared enlightenment.  We each are one of many.  We are a many of ones.  But
our singularity is an illusion.  For all is but the Oneness of All.  Let us now commune in silence
and let the power of our Oneness flood the world with the majesty of our love."

The entire audience - there must have been over two thousand people crowded into the
building - stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped breathing.  The only sounds that could
be heard were those bleeding through the walls from the street.

After about a minute, Apocalypso raised his hands heavenwards as if to invite the approval
of invisible onlooking deities.  He then lowered his arms and let them hang at his side.  With
an impish grin, he shrugged his shoulders, smiled broadly showing the full splendor of his
white even teeth, then walked off the stage as calmly as he had come on only minutes before.

The crowd went wild, the drummers again started pounding away, and the party to celebrate
the coming spiritual revolution was underway again.

Behind all of the flowery, high-sounding phrases and painful mix of metaphors, there really
wasn't much message to Apocalypso's message.

It wasn't the words that moved people.

It was the man.

Whether he consciously knew this, or was guided by the gift of solid instincts, Apocalypso
used his effect on people to his fullest advantage.  He took them where he wanted them to go.
 He got them to do what he wanted them to do.

There were naturally a few hard-core nay-sayers and hardened skeptics who resisted him,
who walked away from his forums, lectures, prayer sessions, rallies, and group meditations,
shaking their heads and spouting the same invectives and rejectives they - without fail -  
carried with them wherever they went, whatever the occasion.

But most people who experienced Apocalypso came away convinced, infected by his passion
and hope-filled vision of personal and social perfection.  Pumped up by the collective
enthusiasm of the crowd at the events, they made firm if somewhat ephemeral commitments
to promote and spread his world view and spiritual teachings.

Tonight's crowd was no exception.  The rally which consisted of four minutes of inspiration
and four hours of celebration would carry on into the night.

Billy had a splitting headache, the source of which could have been any number of things.  
High on the list of possibilities was a new bag of dope he had just scored, which he suspected
again was laced with defoliants, compliments of the DEA's helicopters over Hawaii and
northern California.  The sweat and noise of the crowd at the rally contributed their share to
his misery.

They left early.  No one seemed to notice.

"So, Candy.  What did you think?  Are we still friends?"

"Are you rich?"

"Do I look rich?"

"No.  But it's the only hope for our continuing friendship.  And the price is way up there."

"So, you weren't impressed."

"I'm impressed by results.  I hope the guy can get the lard-asses moving.  But frankly I have
my doubts."

"What do you mean?  I didn't see any lard-asses there tonight.  I thought it was a tasteful
display of body-conscious underground chic."

"Do you write for Fashion Week?  You should."

"I try to see the good in everyone."

"Right.  I was referring to the bulk of Americans."

"Clever pun, girly."

Candy burst out laughing.  She laughed all the way to the subway station.

Then she became very quiet.

On the train, she turned to Billy.  She looked tormented.  Uncharacteristically afraid.

"I think I'm in love."

"Anybody I know."

"I don't think so."

"Oh . . . I see."

She closed the gap between them, put her nearest arm inside his, laid her other arm across
his stomach and pulled herself as close to him as she could.  She appeared anxious,
expectant.  A nun with wire-rim spectacles seated across from them peered over a Midnight
Tattler she was reading, and gave them a fleeting look of disapproval.

Over the noise of the subway car, Billy didn't hear what Candy then softly said.

"Billy, it's you."



© John Rachel


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