The Teachings of Don Wow: A Gringo Way of Knowledge

As I recall, on the day I turned my brother's enemy into an armadillo I met Don Wow, the legendary medicine man of Los Angeles. Up until then I had been a normal Yaqui Indian sorcerer in the hot country of Arizona, making the desert tremble, taking "peyote" and working everyday miracles along the Mexican border. Under the tutelage of Don Wow, new worlds were opened to me and my accepted notions about the world and its workings were utterly and permanently changed.

What follows are excerpts from all three pages of my voluminous field notes, taken over a period of several years while Don Wow was my benefactor.

March 54, 1960 Sunderday 1700 hours: Don Wow had taken me for a long ride on what he called his "Harley-Davidson," showing me the incredible beauty and wonders of the world he lived in. We had traveled east all day and were turning back when an ambulance went by with its siren on and its lights flashing.

"That's an ambulance," he said without emotion.

I immediately demanded an explanation. He just looked at me, but I continued to press him for information. Finally, he said, "An ambulance carries sick and/or injured people from the place where they are to a doctor. It's a kind of car."

I found my head reeling with the impossibility of this concept. His world was so clear and precise that I could not make heads or tails of what he was saying. I asked him if an ambulance was the same thing as a crow. He explained to me that an ambulance was, in fact, nothing at all like a crow. "A crow, for example, has feathers," he said in a way that made me think that an ambulance was, in fact, a crow, as real and black and hollow-boned as any crow I'd ever seen. It was the look in his eye that I noticed. I offered him my handkerchief and he removed it from his eye, continuing to deline the differences between a crow and an ambulance: An ambulance has overhead cams; a crow eats corn; an ambulance has steel-belted radial tires; a crow doesn't have running lights. . . .

April 32, 1960, Saturday, 4:17 pm: I was sitting at a point due east by southeast from Don Wow. Over and over again that day I had noticed that the heel of his right shoe had a tack in it, obviously picked up while he was walking. I was certain Don Wow was actually aware of the tack, but for some strange reason I could not bring myself to ask him about it. Finally, I undid the handcuffs from behind my back and managed to peel off the adhesive tape he'd placed over my mouth as part of my studies.

"Do you know there's a tack in your shoe, Don Wow?" I asked, my voice shaking with suspense.

"No," he said in a way that convinced me he knew he had a tack in his shoe and wasn't telling. Lying to me was an essential part of his teachings and I caught him red-handed this time. I demanded an explanation. He said he really didn't know and assumed such an air of total innocence that I laughed out loud. The last thing I remember was seeing him pick up his totem baseball bat and raise it above my head. When I awoke I was being held by the collar while Don Wow poured ice-cold water on my face and told me, "Get your shit together or I'll send you back to Sonora, where you can eat water rats for the rest of your life."

Februday 24.3 o'clock, Friday! I had finally convinced Don Wow to teach me about an important gringo practice I'd heard of that he called "money."

We went to a large building called Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Wow. The ritual was already in progress when we arrived. Several men about the same color and shape as Don Wow sat in chairs watching pictures of numbers and letters that (continued on page 116)Teachings of Don Wow(continued from page 111) moved on boxes in the walls. The men didn't say anything. Neither did we. The we left.

"What was the meaning of my experience?" I asked as we got into his powder-blue Excalibur.

"There is no meaning of your experience. The numbers represent prices of various stocks. If the prices are up in the right stocks, we are happy. Sometimes, if they're up enough, we sell and make a profit. If they're down, either we buy or we are unhappy. It's very difficult to explain to someone who knows nothing. If you want to learn about money, you must have an unbending credit rating."

Suddenly I understood. On many vigils in the mountains of Chihuahua, I had met with the shadows of spirits that inhabit those hills. In the valley of water I had called them. If none came, I sometimes had to sit for days with no food to sustain me. If they came, we communicated and I went home to store the power they had given me.

"If I give you a dollar, for example," Don Wow continued, "you could leave it in the bank for a year and then have a dollar and four cents." My mind raced back to a time when I was a small child. Without my mind it was impossible to continue taking notes on what Don Wow was telling me. With a sharp blow of his baseball bat, however, Don Wow snapped me out of my trance.

I asked him what a dollar was and he pulled out his wallet. He told me that within his wallet were powers I could not imagine. I could, he said, if I had his wallet, go out and acquire incredible things: a lube job, push-button telephones, lunch at French restaurants, 90-day renewable notes on personal loans for money that I could take to the place of the money rituals and invest in certain stocks that were bound to give me a better return than any bank could ever hope for. . . .

I became dizzy and absent-minded. My mind held onto very confusing images both of having the power in his wallet and of acquiring incredible things, neither of which was clear to me. Suddenly the two images merged for a moment and I had a clear vision of each separate power in his wallet, suffused with a brilliant iridescent green light. The light undulated and fused into distinct lines, which radiated from each power to the incredible things it could acquire. I immediately saw that I could speed along the American Express line toward major hotels in downtown Los Angeles. At the end of the line were long tables overflowing with foods of every description, and opportunities for extended vacations to Detroit and Pittsburgh, power places Don Wow had described to me. All along the Bank Americard path were the great halls of clothing and vaulted rooms of major appliances, as well as a miniaturized calculator for keeping track. As I tried to hold the image and follow other lines radiating from his wallet, I faltered, became distracted by a small photo of his first wife and lost the image completely. My perception returned to one of Don Wow sitting there with a strange look on his face, asking if I was feeling all right.

"Maybe you ought to put your head between your knees," he said with a perplexed look.

He then gave me a dollar and I wept.

2 Thursday March 3456 times pm: I sat on the floor with my feet 14 centimeters apart. Don Wow was sitting on the couch with his legs crossed at a 34-degree angle. He tapped his fingers on the marble tabletop in six-four time, at about 120 beats per minute. The tapping had a strange mesmerizing effect and I knew he was doing it to induce a special State of Ordinary Boredom in me.

Then he got up and went to the organ. He had explained to me earlier that he sent away for a course of instruction from Berkeley School of Music and that I could take lessons with him if I liked. When he depressed the first key, the sound seemed to be coming from my right, a low-pitched humming like a baritone cricket. Suddenly the note was inside my head and I was carried off on it as if I were being pulled along in the current of a stream.

I traveled along this note for hundreds of miles, soaring through the air and observing the landscape in awe. I could hardly believe my eyes. Soon there was a loud buzzing and to my left I saw three fighter planes peeling off in formation toward the southeast, their silver underbellies winking at me in the slanting rays of sunlight. I knew that what I saw was the wink of my death advising me and that I would die in a fire storm at an altitude of 3100 feet over Magazine, Arizona, in the next Indian uprising. That thought caused a tremendous surge of self-pity and I passed out.

I awoke lying in the gutter in front of Don Wow's house. I found it incredible that I could have gotten back so quickly and gradually made my way to his front porch by using my abdominal muscles to slither across his lawn like a snake. I finally arrived at about ten in the morning.

"What's that crap all over the front of your shirt?" he asked as I approached.

In an unexpected moment of anger, I accidentally turned Don Wow into a live 400-pound hog. I immediately realized my mistake and we spent the next few sessions restoring him to his natural State of Ordinary Usualness. As a punishment for this impulsive act, Don Wow took away my dollar. A profound feeling that I would never learn his way of life overwhelmed me.

Once Upon A Time: Don Wow had instructed me in the use of a special mixture that he referred to as "booze." He also called it "Cutty Sark." It was his mechanism for coming in contact and communicating with a spirit he referred to as "Little Hooch," which appeared to me after my first three days of training with "booze." When I awoke on the third morning, I felt an overwhelming nausea and a pain in my head, as if enormous pressure had built up in there. When I opened my eyes, to my amazement, I saw small pink coyotes traversing the corridor between one room and the next. As if in a trance, I watched them roaming around for what seemed like several hours before I fell asleep again.

"What is the meaning of my experience?" I asked when Don Wow returned.

"The booze's been working, that's all."

"You mean those were real coyotes?"

"No, they weren't real. You just saw them."

"But if they weren't real, how did I see them?"

"That's what a little hooch can do." His explanations were always terse and to the point. The "booze" training continued throughout the next few months.

January 1964: As usual, he gave me the usual dose of Cutty Sark. As usual, I vomited, with the usual results. But this was an unusual State of Ordinary Usualness. I found that by doing the usual thing and making certain unusual alterations in the basic pattern I could actually experience an unusually usual state that was almost like looking at television. Don Wow's face was made up of little colored dots that moved faster than the eye could follow. It was extremely unpleasant.

He explained to me that the people in the television were not really in the television.

"Do you mean that we are seeing people who aren't there?"

"Well, they are there, but they aren't there," he said, indicating the television.

"You mean that they can be both there and not there at the same time?"

My mind, unaccustomed to such states, refused to believe that a thing could be as Don Wow said it was. Understanding that a man could become a crow and fly hundreds of miles was difficult enough without--

"Wait a minute," Don Wow interrupted my note taking, attempting again to explain. "See Howard Cosell there, the one with the orange suit?" I saw the man attempting to eat some sort of large metallic-looking fruit while talking very rapidly. His physical agility amazed me.

"Yes." I said. "Is he also a legendary medicine man?"

"No, he's a sports announcer."

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"What's a sports announcer, Don Wow?"

"He tells everybody what's going on at some kind of sports event, like football."

"Like the lizards that answer my questions when I sew up their eyelids and rub them against my temples?"

"No, it's different. Cosell is not here, but you can see him. He's not at the foot-ball game, either, but he can see it just like you can see him." He then went on to explain that the fruit Cosell was trying to eat was what allowed us to hear him. It was called a "microphone."

His explanation was so far from my way of viewing the world that my mind rushed to the nearest cliff and jumped off.

34,00 N by 118.15 W: For a long time I'd been asking Don Wow to teach me how to work his stereo set. I first became interested in it when he played a Rod McKuen record one day while I was sleeping in the fireplace. I awoke to the sound of McKuen's voice and was astounded. Then Don Wow explained to me that Rod McKuen was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th Century, that his power was enormous and unfathomable. My training at that point, however, was so rudimentary that I couldn't even recognize this power. All I heard was a lot of words that seemed to make no sense. But my interest in learning didn't flag. When a new Rod McKuen record called Parking Meter Mind Arrived, I was dying to hear it. However, each time I asked to be taught this technique, I was rebuffed.

Finally, we were sitting around preparing to meet with Little Hooch when Don Wow said, "Here," and handed me the record. "Wow," I thought. My entire perception changed from normal hallucinating to a complete and unmitigated sense that what I was seeing was actually there: Don Wow's tie, his nine-iron tie tack, the little 14K engraved on the tie tack, the tiny scratch to the left of the 14K, an out-of-place molecule of einsteinium with a faulty third electron shell right behind that. My whole mode of seeing was as clear as the bright eyes of the white crow on the day of one's death.

Don Wow went through the arduous task of teaching me to use the stereo. It took days for me to master it, putting the record on, pushing the Power button, adjusting the Volume and starting the turntable rolling. Finally, on the third day, I got in right. Everything somehow fell into place and the actual sound of Rod's masculine voice came through. He said, "I like your brown hair and the moon." My whole perception changed. I felt a momentary nausea that immediately went away and turned into a sickening feeling in my stomach. Then that went away and I threw up all over the stereo set. The next thing I remember is Don Wow telling me I had a lot to learn. I was incredibly proud of my achievements with the stereo.

The Usual Information: As time passed, I came closer and closer to following Don Wow's rigorous path. I exchanged my native dress for Brooks Brothers suits and learned to walk in Gucci shoes on concrete sidewalks. I had begun dreaming strange and wondrous dreams. Tech-Sym stock soared into the 40s on the American in one dream. But the demands of this life style began to take their toll. One night I dreamed of dancing the funky chicken with a beautiful girl in what I believe Don Wow called a "night box." I noticed her moving farther and farther away as we danced faster and faster. In the end I awoke screaming at the thought that my Right Guard had failed to work. I told Don Wow about it and he said I was making great progress.

In spite of his encouragement, throughout this period I had a continuing feeling that something was vaguely wrong with me. I experienced brief flashes of disassociation, or shallow States of Ordinary Usualness, not unlike the states in which I met Little Hooch. Some mornings I would wake up with a nagging backache, nervous tension and that headachy feeling that required drastic measures, sometimes even Excedrin, one of Don Wow's power foods. As a result. I suffered moments of profound discomfort and anxiety. I felt I had reached a personal threshold, but Don Wow dismissed the whole thing, saying it was of no importance, that I was only beginning to feel like a gringo.

Finally, he explained to me that it was necessary, if I wished to continue on this path, to learn another technique, that of driving a car. I insisted that I was not ready for it, that my nature was not strong enough, but he insisted I drive his car, saying he would sit with me and explain what to do.

By the time we got to his car it was almost "rush hour." Even before that hour, I'd begun feeling a big rush from the red pills he gave me to calm my nerves.

"This is the most dangerous time to drive," he said. "Many accidents can happen. People can be hurt or even killed. So be careful. We don't want to go home in a crow--uh, I mean an ambulance." His words increased my apprehension to the point that my hands were shaking.

Eventually I calmed myself enough to start the engine. We got onto the freeway and were immediately jammed in among literally thousands of cars. The scene was so magnificent and yet so terrifying that I couldn't hold the wheel and several times Don Wow had to grab it to avoid our being squashed like bugs. All I could see was the blinding glare of baked enamel in every imaginable color of the rainbow, mixed with the silver winking and glinting of the chrome in the running sunlight of late afternoon. It was at the same time a great beauty and a deadly threat, like brilliant diamonds on the glossy back of a gigantic rattlesnake, stretched out across the middle of Los Angeles, sunning itself in the last rays of light before the chill of evening drove it underground.

All of a sudden a space opened up in the left lane and Don Wow shouted at me. "In there, step on it or we'll be caught for another hall an hour!" Taking him literally. I jammed my foot to the floor, certain that my life on earth would end if I failed to follow his instructions. Suddenly we were moving down the long band of concrete at 80 miles an hour. Then something happened so fast that I would have missed it had there not been such an incredible jolt and sound. I ran over an ally, obviously one of the spirits that had followed me from Mexico. It had disguised itself as a roadblock with a policeman in front holding a sign that read Stop. The next thing I can remember is being chased by one of the highway spirits, which came after us in the form of a blue flashing light emitting an inhuman wail. Don Wow tried to calm me as we speeded on to outrun it, but my fear had grown to such proportions that I couldn't control myself. As we left the city, going over 100 miles an hour. I ran off the road and into a field, where the highway spirit caught us. Before it reached the car, I passed out.

I awoke at Don Wow's house. He told me to be calm, that everything was all right. He then put his hand on my shoulder and informed me that we had to take the Cutty Sark again, claiming I needed it right away if I were to continue. I was paralyzed at the prospect of meeting with Little Hooch, especially so soon after being chased. But Don Wow insisted and we drank.

As I feared, the experience was a terrible one. By the next day my anxiety had grown so great that I was unable to dial the telephone to speak to the Time Spirit as Don Wow had taught me to do when I became frightened. Again and again that day I attempted to get her on the phone but continued to run into adverse powers. "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected," one of them said and I nearly fainted from fright. As the day progressed. I became so agitated that my writing became shaky and some of my notes, consequently, are illegible.

I remember Don Wow saying at one point. "I'd better take you to The Bathroom." All the muscles in my back tensed involuntarily at the thought. I had heard of this place and, after my terrifying experiences, did not feel I was ready to visit The Bathroom. According to Don Wow, this was where people went to cleanse themselves. I had no idea what to expect but, being too weak to resist, allowed Don Wow to push me along the floor. I couldn't get over his agility. I had the distinct sensation that he had me up on a. . . . (Here my notes become unclear and then pick up in The Bathroom.)

. . . Was suffused with a brilliant white glow (word crossed out) . . . three basins of varying shapes, fashioned out of an incredibly shiny white material, not unlike cumulo-nimbus clouds sometimes seen over Happy Jack. Arizona, on a spring day (splotch of Don Corleone Pizza obscures passage) . . . one to sit on, one to sit in, one in which to stick hands or other appendages (in this case my head, which was reeling with absurd and, finally, profoundly unusual-bizarre distractions revealed to me at the wave of Don Wow's hand--which opened the door) . . . each with its own supply of hot and or cold running streams (but not alive with trout or other visible forms of life) . . . emissions produced from matching silver ornamental spouts (the likes of which I'd never seen in my normal accepted notion of the world) . . . mirrors on all available wall space showed me with my suitcoat on inside out, dripping wet, and my Sta-Prest slacks bagged around my ankles (luckily I had remembered to wear the black-satin shorts with the white whales on them) . . . and after what seemed an interminable length of time. I fell prey to an extended moment of hysterical laughter and a general good time with the plastic duck Don Wow gave me in the tub. . . . (Last passage cleansed away with beauty bar.)

I remained in a state of profound distress for several hours afterward. Don Wow explained that it was a common reaction and that I was only experiencing the normal terror of losing my dirt.

• • •

That experience was the last of Don Wow's teachings. He had been complaining about my fainting spells and attacks of disorientation and suggested I go see his doctor. Since then I have sought no more of his lessons and, though Don Wow has not changed his benefactor's attitude toward me--continuing through thick and thin to allow me to accompany him to the Starlite Lounge on Sunday afternoons while he meets with Little Hooch and watches the men who are not there play games in the box--I do believe, according to his doctor's report, that I have succumbed to the first enemies of a Man of Ignorance: bleeding ulcers, chronic depression and bad breath.