CHAPTER 20 Little Willie Sunshine And The Harbinger Of Doom

My arrival in Phoemix was not met with the welcome I had expected. Socially, I was a misfit. Things had changed. The mood was somehow the same as it had been in L.A. even though the cordiality of my welcome was certainly gracious enough. I had the feeling that I had been spoken of to the people there and that I was expected to live up to a certain standard. I had no idea that I was The Wizard Who Could Make Clouds Dissapear.

Back in the late 1950's there was an article in Parade magazine about a man who could make clouds disappear just by concentrating on them. I tried doing the same thing that day in 1957 and surmised it really worked. It really does. It takes imagination and Faith. I have done it many times since. Some lazy afternoon when there is popcorn in the sky, try this; Fix your vision and concentration on only one of those clouds you see. Visualize it shrinking, slowly. The first thing you'll notice is that any time beyond two minutes dedicated to this will make you uncomfortable. Shortly after that, you'll realize you need to be more patient. Give it ten or fifteen minutes. "Give" is the key word here. Completely erase the concept of Time from your mind.

As the cloud goes away, you'll find yourself imbued with a whole new confidence. I shared this with Bill. He had shared it at least verbally, with his friends. They stared at me in awe and some suspicion on my arrival, I did not appear to be The Messiah. I wasn't.

Bill was an incredible hit on KRUX-AM radio in Glendale, just to the west of Phoenix. He was pulling an awesome 70% ratings share in afternoon drive, under the name "Little Willie Sunshine". That had to have been Peggy's idea. It translated to fat paychecks for everyone at the station. It was inevitable that I became the Encroaching Darkness. I was hired almost immediately by KOY as a night time newsman. The graveyard shift. For such a picayune job, the interview was indecently long and boring. So was the work. After a week or so, something snapped. I had to have a girlfriend. A cuddly teddy bear, a sweet young thing to play with. Someone cute, meaningless, transitory and sexual. Now.

I ended my shift at about 7 AM and walked outside to the car. Lo and behold, there she was standing by the bus stop at KOY. There wasn't a lot said. I just picked her up, took her home and made love to her. No harm done, we never saw each other again. Thanks, God. I needed that.

My little tryst along with all the other activity around the house had not gone unnoticed on very conservative and middle class Olive Avenue in north Phoenix/Peoria. Along with my uptight feelings about being a square peg in a place where there were no holes at all, we had occasional visits from Crazy Ted, Gone John and others. Ted was a social revolutionary who loved to walk into whatever conversation was going on in the room soaking wet, fresh out of the shower and naked. John was a raging paranoid who saw cop cars everywhere when he was stoned. He was stoned most of the time. They all through Bill, presented me with an absolutely perfect, fully mature, succulent Peyote cactus on my arrival. That and some Orange Sunshine LSD just about made my day. In fact, it just about made a week of them in the space of a 24-hour period.

We were getting "hot" in the neighborhood and our personal freedoms came into question; it was time to move it or lose it. We headed east to Scottsdale. I left KOY and joined Bill at KRUX. Hank was at KTAR, which was a local news station. We were all tuned in to each other through the radio while our nation was at war. So it seemed, would we be with one another, as well. I fit into the scenario like a third left shoe, and felt it.

Along the way Bill had been joined by an old friend from the past named June. He had also picked up a squishy little dumpling named Cindy from Gone John who had picked her up from Crazy Ted. She was delicious and almost unavoidable. It didn't help my "no incest" policy towards my adopted family. I had tagged (or been tagged by) a yummy if slightly tough brown-eyed redhead named Barbara. We were playmates, but not planning a future together. She lived at home with her mom and sister. The rest of us wound up in a four-bedroom house about a mile or so from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen West masterpiece in the desert. The place was perfect for us and the times were quite intense. There were Rebirth (The local underground paper) concerts in the desert and there was magic in the air, carried by the music of the times. "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence, "Voodoo Child" by Jimi Hendrix and almost anything by Jim Morrison and The Doors had special meaning for all of us at the Scottsdale house. So did "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" by the Beatles. Barbara and I did one night just for the hell of it, right on the hot asphalt, straddling the center stripe. The song after all, was a prophecy that needed fulfillment. Us too. Doing It In The Road or at least that particular road, would be a form of suicide now, but before Scottsdale became "Scottsdale, Arizona (with an upper-scale image separate and apart from Phoenix)", it was pure-dee desert, folks. Scottsdale Road was no more than a mile long with only two major intersections and one gas station anywhere near us. If you Did It in the road, you could be sure that was the only thing going on in that road for miles, at 2AM with the possible exception of scorpions and tarantulas crossing.

I had been fighting my own personal paranoia ever since I had arrived in Phoenix and I had been handling it quite well. Gone John came to regard me as a potential Guru it seemed and possible path to Nirvana. That attachment thing again. For me, a breaking point came on a very hot July night. I arrived at the house tired and frazzled from too much heat, too much pot, not enough sleep and one or two acid trips weeks earlier, that had never really reached a conclusion. They weren't bad trips, they were just inconclusive. Loose mental ends in a world where parts of your mind could snag on most anything.

It was just after sunset. I walked into an empty and completely quiet house. I stopped in the kitchen and called out. No answer. I could feel some kind of presence, as though someone were watching me. Someone unseen was in the room. I stepped back and balled my fists, I was ready for any kind of attack. I had a feeling the house had been busted and the narcs were ready to pounce on me.

Silence. More silence. Then I saw one of the kitchen drawers move ever so slightly. There was no one to be seen. Poltergeists! Shit. These guys had stupidly invoked some kind of spiritual monster from the desert which had probably eaten all of them and left the house haunted! I was not ready for this. I began to pray. The drawer came all the way open, then shut most of the way. Then another drawer came open on the opposite side. There were scuffling sounds, and I prepared myself to meet The Entity. There was not just one Entity though, there were two of them! They began to emerge into the kitchen floor. They were slithering dark, hairy slow-moving little wisps of evil that would very soon come to their full enormity. I could see myself being torn to shreds and devoured right there in the kitchen, my foolish Soul damned to hell.

The Entities stayed small. One of them mewed and wiped its face with a furry little paw. They were June's kittens playing in the back of the cupboard, just as any kitten would do. I decided I needed to live alone.