“Ape shit Paul! Get me a drink you rat bastard!”
It was 3:30 in the afternoon and Dr. Everett Tanner was sitting on a barstool alone with his loose button down shirt draped over his back pockets. His grey suit jacket balled up on the bar counter. Swaying in a drunken fervor, his torso and upper body rotated, imitating a hula-hoop motion with the hips locked solidly on the stool. Dr. Everett Tanner was an anthropologist. However, somewhere along the twenty years of his tenure in the profession, he became troublingly unhappy about the morals of the job. The job being the research of “lesser developed” cultures. His superior and editor instructed him countless times saying,
“Find the Orientals hidden deep in the bush”.
The “bush” meant anywhere exotic like South America, Indonesia, India, Africa, and Pueblo, New Mexico in this particular assignment’s case. “Orientals” meant,
“anyone not of Western European descent and white. You know this Tanner, so why do you keep asking me what oriental refers to? Stay off the damn liquor will you? You do great work and I’d hate to lose you.”
The “great work” his superior and editor referred to, is researching and documenting different cultural traditions for text books. The only catch to this line of work is that the editor and the book company don’t care how factual this information is, as long as their company has exclusive information on these cultures.
“Say, I’m supposed to be meeting a friend here, Paul would you let me know when he gets here?”
Paul the bartender poured Dr. Tanner a bourbon whiskey slowly, focusing on the dark colored liquid. He held is tongue as he always did with Dr. Tanner. This was achieved easier by not looking at Everett’s swollen, unshaven and reddened face. Paul raised his chin and directed Everett to a man standing in the doorway of the bar.
“The man you looking for Indian?”
“Native American Paul, we call them Native Americans now.”
Grey hair and a sterile gaze was the object of Dr. Tanner’s attention. The man walking towards him stood upright with dark skin stretched tight over his face and hands. His shirt was a faded plaid and covered his arms. A vest of bones covered his chest and stomach. As the man came closer to the bar, Dr. Tanner became nervous. The man’s eyes penetrated Tanner’s, they were steady, unmoving, confident and searching.
“Hello sir, my name is Dr. Everett Tanner. You are the Shaman by the name of Philip Looking Bird aren’t you?”
“Shaman? That is a word and label created by white people using the English language.”
“Well I’m sorry then-“
“Ha, I’m just fucking with you, of course I’m a shaman. Isn’t that why you wanted to meet me to discuss my culture and ceremonies?”
“Yes of course, I work for the textbook company-“
“I don’t give a shit who you work for. As long as you have the hundred-fifty dollars we are all in the clear.”
Tanner confusedly scratched his neck and took a drink of bourbon. The shaman lacked pride for his trade, for his culture. Tanner wondered if he was just looking for money, no regard for the cultural image to be portrayed in textbooks. Tanner cleared his throat.
“Ah, you do understand this is a prestigious opportunity to share your heritage with the rest of the world.”
“Fuck your statement, you’re going to rape any information I give you so why try to look prestigious. I know how your textbooks work. The information is ambiguous and altered. The white man has raped everything from our culture, including the facts about them.”
Tanner was caught off guard. The Shaman spoke multitudes of relevance. He ordered another drink. The Shaman’s words struck chords on Tanner’s emotions. He had to get them straight. He had to remove himself from this Shaman who spoke eternal truths.
“Then why are you here Mr. Looking Bird?”
“I’m here for you, to gaze into your soul, to alter your perceptions, to change your life. I could care less about what you write though.”
“What? I’m confused.”
“Look if you want to learn about my culture, about my magic, then meet me at the back of the blue bus.”
The Shaman turned and headed for the door.
“What? That’s insane, how do I find this blue bus? Those are the most ambiguous directions ever.”
Phillip Looking Bird stopped and faced Everett.
“That is the point. You have fear and regret in your eyes. This is a spiritual journey for you. You must journey where your soul takes you to find this bus.”
With those words he walked out the door and disappeared into the crowd of people on the street. Everett stumble-rushed out into the blinding light on the street of Pueblo.
The next day hung over and slightly sober, Dr. Tanner boarded a plane for his home in Vancouver. In the air, Dr. Tanner was disturbed when he caught sight of a flight attendant’s hands. She had massive hands, fingers masculine and thick, much bigger than Everett’s hands. The way she handled canned cola made him jump.
“Ahhuhh! Those are quite the set of hands you’ve got there.”
“Would you like anything to drink sir?
“Hmm? Yes yes, make it a tequila and gentle please. Gentle.”
She took offense to his squeamish behavior. He thought her hands were unnervingly powerful. He whispered to his seat neighbor.
“Those powerful hands frighten the best and bravest you know.”
Her fingers were long, meaty, with stout hairs covering the knuckles. The entire flight Dr. Tanner made terrified faces when the flight attendant passed by. She realized this. She was extremely self-conscious of her hands. When the plane landed in Vancouver, she phoned her male lover who drives a taxi. Time to exact revenge. The taxi driver kept an eye out for Tanner, a conspicuous drunk in a wrinkled grey suit. Tanner walked out of the terminal with a bag tucked under his arm walking as if he was crossing a balance beam in aerobics.
Very little coercion was needed to get Everett into the man’s taxi. The driver invited him in for a ride. Everett figured this was part of his spiritual journey the Shaman had destined upon him.
“So you’re afraid of big hands huh?”
“Wha? Oh yes, terribly frightening, especially on a female. So do you know where any blue busses are located around here?”
“Funny you should say that, I’m taking you to one right now.”
With those words, the small faded yellow taxi jerked to a stop and the driver whipped around with brass knuckles in hand. A blow. Another. A third. Painful unconsciousness that dares you to wake up.
Dr. Tanner resurfaced sitting in the driver’s seat of a rusted red Ford in a grassy field where moisture beaded off of the grass blades. The sky hung low with impenetrable clouds. Sitting in front of him was a blue painted school bus. Blue the color of the ocean. Blue that is deep, dark, full of echoes. Dr. Tanner babied his face. His cheek was throbbing. His teeth hurt to close his mouth and his jaw felt dislocated.
“God damn these people with large hands.”
He wondered if this was the location the Shaman had told him to meet, if this was the location for his spiritual journey.
Out of the car and inside the bus was a different realm. The bus was a decaying petri dish.
“Experiments have gone on here, I’m sure of it.”
No longer a transport for children, this bus was blue and rotting, not likely to be driven off the field. The ceiling of the interior was shedding cream flakes and blue flakes. Holes created a permeable layer which dew drops took advantage of and entered the vessel. Big black bold letters in uppercase yelled, “WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW”. They slanted up, vertical, horizontal, slope down. The words followed any and every direction. The ragged seats smelled of mildew and gave the appearance of a snake molting. Old rotten blankets dug in and formed mounds on the floor. The checkered and faded quilt patterns dissolved and conglomerated together.
Everett stood inside the bus apprehensively. He waited for the Shaman to step inside or at least show a sign. Twenty minutes went by and nothing happened, another twenty minutes and still no signs. Tanner thought to himself,
“Shaman’s are intermediaries between the gods and humans. So why did he dupe me into searching for a bus that I somehow was knocked unconscious and placed at? Fuck this.”
Dr. Tanner jumped down from the back door of the bus out into the field. He wondered about transportation back into the city. He wondered if he was still in Vancouver limits.
“Fuck this! Intermediary to God?”
The bottle was his God. He was a firm believer in the powers and mysticism of alcohol: the power to dull his brain past recollection of his job. The mysticism? The mysticism was that drank every day despite pained headaches and nausea that followed like clockwork. Alcohol can be cruel and disorienting. He thought those two things to be the most constant characteristics of God, the best intermediary to God.He saw no sign of a Shaman and disappointedly walked down a dirt road that led to an interstate highway.
Arriving at his loft in the Vancouver city limits, he rewarded himself with a glass of bourbon for his fruitful efforts in learning Shamanistic culture. He learned that Looking Bird’s culture didn’t want to be identified with western white culture. But how would he put this in his information report? His editor wanted progress. Everett gave the company and editor what they wanted. He understood that the public wouldn’t understand the truth. A culture wouldn’t want to be recognized or understood by American and Western European empires. Everett gave the company and editor what they desired. A ten page write up was turned in with false contents of the interview along with false rituals. There was no mention of the blue bus.
“Good work, this is exactly what the company was looking for.”
“You know it’s far from the truth.”
“What are you talking about? Look you’ve had a rough research trip. You were hit in the face for Christ-sakes. Why don’t take the rest of the day off. Where is that bar that you’re a regular at? Why don’t you head down there and celebrate this great research?”
He was told that his efforts would penetrate a new textbook in the form of three sentences. Inexact and indignant with bloody rape read by five hundred students of a community college’s anthropology class.
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