The Stoning Of Albert

By Mark Wilson

Montreal 1968. Four friends, no longer teenagers, becoming adults. How did they embrace life and make the changes? If you were there, of course you don't remember this. If you weren't, you can visit now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Wilson
• Release date: Oct 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301512133

Book preview

The Stoning Of Albert

by

Mark Wilson

Copyright 2012 by Mark Wilson.

Smashwords Edition

A Quaint tale from the sixties

The characters and events in this novel are products of the writer’s imagination, and any similarity to real people, or events, is entirely coincidental.

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*

God Appears and God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night.

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in realms of day.

-William Blake

-Auguries Of Innocence

Chapter One

HAS ALBERT EVER turned on? Mary Lou enquired earnestly, and there was a gentle, maternal interest in her voice. She continued silently: And if he hasn’t - shall we do it? Do we dare? Will he have a good time? What if he doesn’t have a good time? We shall have spoiled it for him.

To Mary Lou’s pretty mind these were the serious questions of the day, as she placed a record on the turntable.

He is very lonely you know, love, she said, thinking out loud again, He lives in his one room all on his lonesome, and rarely sees anyone. Most of the time he reads, and paints, and plays his guitar and listens to music, or sits and thinks.

Well that’s just it. Who even knows where he lives any more? Ronnie’s eyes were glittering across at his pixie faced lover, as if he was peeking through the stage curtains of his long dark hair: Steve told me he heard Albert was out west in the summer. Couldn’t find him anywhere, but Bev said she heard from the two Kathies that he was talking about going overland to India before that.

India!? Far out! whispered Mary Lou and then returned to her previous thought: Yeah we should turn him on, though - not just to grass but to food and ... sex. You just know he’s never given a girl an orgasm, never sucked a nipple, never licked a clit. If we can find him.

She smiled across the dark room.

Ronnie felt it, Yeah, we could get him really wasted, and make sure we’ve got some fruit and jam and cookies around and cigarettes and music, give him a really good time. It’s time we turned someone on.

It would be so beautiful. It would blow his mind... ooooh... Mary Lou exploded softly.

In the line of duty?

Sir! Yes, Sir!

I want a Harvey’s milkshake...I’M DYING FOR A HARVEY’S MILKSHAKE!

Oh honey, all you think about is your stomach, said Mary Lou reproachfully, Look at the candle---it’s nearly out--- when the candle goes out we’ll go down to the street and get something to eat. I want to hear this first - Sad Eyed Lady - it’s... …soooo beautiful...

The room became quiet and all that could be heard was the crackle of the needle as it scratched its way to the beginning of the song. The whole of side four of Blonde on Blonde. Mary Lou put her head on the sparkling pink cushion beside the speaker on the floor...short jet black hair splashed the edges of her small white face, her red lips looked dark in the low light, her blue eyelids slid closed.

The candle flame jumped and bounced as if struggling to launch itself from its wick. In doing so, it illuminated a small trembling circle of wooden floor showing bits of dust and breadcrumbs, a cockroach pastureland. Spaces between the wooden floor tiles were filled with ancient anonymous dirt...but it made the rest of the room look beautiful in its soft light where the shadows danced.

Ronnie was a silhouette against the window, the street light glowing behind him gave him a halo, his hair now hanging in thick wisps over his right eye, over his ears and on down to his shoulders, sitting on the end of the bed, quiet, wondering about Albert, wondering about out west, and Far East. The music had already run for three bars, slowly lilting its way into Mary Lou’s head. By the time the slow, wasted voice began to sing, her cranium was wide open and it began right inside her mind... five musicians two standing, three sitting on couches, all amidst wires and microphones, with candles and trails of incense drifting, deepening into perspective---The bass player stood out as his notes became a singular melody--- the rolling slow rhythm carried her far away until she completely forgot herself, the wooden floor, the candle... daylight shone in her head, and pictures from the song developed there, a beautiful feeling – if heaven was better, it could only be eternal.

Organ notes appeared on the edge of the picture gradually integrating until even the voice was accompaniment for the rolling rhythm...mer cu ry mo u thh...

Chapter Two

HIGH ON THE SIDE of a mountain, Albert stood looking to his right, watching a cloud of hailstones approaching...sweeping up through the valley…it was fascinating to watch the weather approach like this, to be outside the weather and thereby to witness the phenomenon of it.

Soon he could hear its seething noise and then came the clickclick click of hailstones bouncing off his yellow hard hat, and smacking into his black rubber rain gear. He crouched beneath the roots of a huge black tree stump which had been blasted out of the ground (((((((())))))) a week ago. Squinting into the whirling hard driving ice pellets he felt more than saw that he was encased within a frenzied moving snowball, as if he was tumbling backwards down the mountain. For a minute it hissed and screamed around him, forcing him to withdraw deeply into his protective clothing, and reduce his world to a tumultuous sphere of whirling atoms, no more than a few feet in diameter, but stretching to infinity in its intensity.

In a couple of minutes he looked to his left, stood up again, and the cloud of hail was passing on down the valley. Already, little piles of clean white ice pellets were melting in the crevices beside his rubber boots, and the sunlight was strong enough to cause a shadow. Dan came over and offered a menthol cigarette, appropriate in these conditions. It was time for a smoke anyway, so they found a log, sat down and lit up with Dan’s shielded silver Zippo lighter.

Like sucking on air, said Albert holding the slim white stick upright by its filter where his thumb met the tips of his index and middle finger. Dan had heard it all before, but he was trying to quit - hence the menthols. They looked out across the valley, silently; smoking was a shared activity which precluded the need for talk - and they scrutinized the black and twisted, stunted forest of crazy tree stumps and many boulders, some solidly embedded, some impending. Waiting to roll. A man-made fire had caused this blackness, charring the ground, and the tree stumps, and burning up the occasional log left by the lumberjacks. A fire set to get rid of the undergrowth so that people like Albert and Dan could come in and plant their canvass bags full of little stringy trees, no more than a foot high, and reforest the area, hacking a hole with a mattock, pressing in the little tree with its hair like roots and delicate branches, and smoothing the soil back into place. The more wild and independent greenery had already re-established itself in its undeniable tenacity.

Albert could feel it happening now, as he clunked and planted his way down to the river, which was running as beautifully as it had the day before, but somehow more distantly over those clear coloured stones. He could feel that he’d be leaving soon. Someone, or some thing, had caught up with him at last, and was calling him back East. He didn’t yet know who or what it was but he woke up in the night, down in the dark hold of the ship where they bunked, with a hot electric aura all about him when everyone else was asleep. It was like an incubus had climbed upon him, and everything about his situation bore down on him, and everything really was exactly the way that it seemed, for several electric minutes. When that happened, Albert tended to want to move on, be it from a room, a town, or a job like this. He knew he’d have to stop and face it some time, but for now he figured his business lay in escaping. He had the right to pick the time and the place didn’t he?

* * *

Hitch hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge, eight days later, leaving Dan at Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and after spending a week sampling the wide majestic reaches of Oregon’s Pacific beaches and the hospitality of various crash pads, riding with some guys in an old Buick, and glad of the two hundred dollars he had earned planting those trees, fortune had smiled upon Albert in the pert, nubile compactness of a lovely nurse named Eleanor, who was pensively singing along to Marcie with Joni Mitchell whilst guiding her orange Volkswagen towards the famous bridge one early evening, heading home from San Francisco to Berkeley California, as it was known at the time.

In Berkeley, Dan had told him, you could walk down Telegraph Avenue and hear the laid back offers of cheap kilos and acid and end up sitting in on a philosophy class at the university, and find a different crash pad with a different chick every night.

Eleanor’s small white hand, slim fingered with shapely, unpainted nails, and sharply defined half moon quicks, the knuckles still faintly dimpled and childlike on the gear shift, attracted Albert’s attention as she gently quizzed him across the bridge. This was a hand, thought Albert, which, with its perfect twin, at that moment resting upon the beige steering wheel, could manipulate needles and stethoscopes, hold your wrist and take your pulse, and firmly cushion your head; a hand which, with its twin, could expertly massage knots out of your back, and handle all manner of life and death by day and by night.

He didn’t know it, but Eleanor had already made up her mind to be his introduction to the long and winding road which would lead him, with umpteen unexpected twists and turns, contractions and distractions, through the dark red passageways and blinding blissful ethers, to his soul.

Eleanor had a boyfriend, and his glance told Albert that he knew (indeed, he considered that he owned) the amazing pliability, and hungry, persuasive caress of Eleanor’s magnetic, alert body, as the three of them, and Eleanor’s room mate, Pauline - who had been detailed to distract the boyfriend - dined on brown rice, fish, and vegetables that evening, while dipping chunks of crystallized sugar into their tea.

Now, lying alone on the back seat of the Eastbound Greyhound bus flying along in the night, having at last admitted to himself that it was pointless to resist the pull of the spirits waiting for him back East, Albert felt the image of Eleanor rising up inside his private cave of darkness; and the astringent taste of fatal pain, a taste which makes certain types of sorrow so sensuously real, started inside his mouth and descended all the way through mysterious nervous channels like silken twine which transformed that taste into a dozen arrows passing through his heart on their way to become a pool of emptiness in his solar plexus, he realized, in the dim cones of light by which people were reading further up the thundering coach, with his head propped on his rolled up jacket, his battered shoes off, and his knees bent, just what it was that Eleanor actually, and so simply, had wanted of him, and indeed had picked him out for. And, for an instant, he rolled his tired eyes and glanced at the opaque window which was sliding him safely (as he would have it) away from her, beside this lonely night, and towards his next one, at the price of a hundred and five dollars.

He shut his eyes again and turned back inside. His breathing became more calm and slow now as he etched, with his mind’s eye, Eleanor’s beautiful body with burning bright lines upon the dark slate of his consciousness. Perhaps it was because she was a nurse that he’d sensed a maturity and a generosity far beyond her years, but he had not been ready to understand her; and this was an important realization.

That very morning which, coincidentally, turned out to be the complete and absolute end of an era for the world in general, as the FM announcer had noted – Can you feel it? The heavy vibe? It’s changing, man. - Eleanor had taken him back across that same bridge into San Francisco, to the sound of The Band singing The Weight and dropped him off at Golden Gate Park where he’d ambled among the giant redwood trees all morning. He hadn’t kissed her goodbye, but had taken hold of those gentle hands, which she had let him do, and which spoke in such simple language, and he tried to find the words with which to thank her for giving him shelter.

While he was doing this in his crippled manner, Eleanor with calm sad eyes reached into her bag and brought out a wrapped gift and handed it to him. He took it in his right hand with a delighted smile, squeezing her right hand with his left now, and he could feel that he had come into the possession of some slim volume. Eleanor’s gift gave him the opportunity to say Thank you, and very fortunately this utterance drew into his voice a good deal of another kind of gratitude which otherwise lay too deep and formless within him. Gratitude he did not really know he possessed.

The book had a matt black cover, in the centre of which was a golden disc. Inside the golden disc there was a shapely hand viewed from the side, so that only the thumb and first two fingers could be seen clearly, and which, to Albert’s eye also looked like the mouth of a smiling snake. From this hand rose liberated souls, who sprang upwards against the golden sun like dancing flames, as if they had been fingers. Engraved in the blackness were the words: The Prophet and the book now lay where Albert had lately placed it for safe keeping, between his left side and the back of his seat on the pounding bus, should he fall asleep, as he wished to do. Inside the cover, Eleanor had written a simple fact, from Herman Hesse’s Journey To The East.

And although he knew not why, it was these words which he would come to treasure the most from all of the pages of this book. In the ensuing months her words would sink deeper and deeper into Albert’s consciousness, like a skilfully administered medicine, which, although we might not comprehend its workings, we take in faith and trust from the sisters of mercy, and thereby live to appreciate the effect, and the attentions of our healers.

At last, the pounding, brutal movement