captain's hat on, only it was dyed purple and had an ostrich feather sticking a foot and a half up out of the band. He had a patch over his right eye, a red bandana around his neck, a monkey on his shoulder, and a caricature yo-ho-ho on his lips. The oriental woman was nodding approval and giving him the high sign, which undoubtedly was a perfect indication of his condition. She turned as they came up. 'Hello! Glad to see you made it.' She waved to the Guru again. 'Now. Let's see. Last things first. Your cabin. By the way, the others-your friends-they fell overboard. No, that's not right. They're up in the cabin already. Virginia and the Princess took them.'
She led them into a side door below the bridge, down a hall, and up a flight of stairs.
The rails were mahogany, the floors teak, there were fabulous tile murals on the walls, there were fountains with live plants and mirrors behind them on the landings… all in all it was quite an opulent setup. 'My name is Mei Ling,' she told them. 'I am functioning… ' She giggled. 'That's a lie already. Anyhow, I am the cruise director. I'll be setting up your singing schedules, making sure you've got everything you need, and so on. The Guru's decided to have a blind stargazing tonight on the deck with beer and body-paint finishing up with a Boston Pee Party at the rail at midnight. So you won't be singing. You'll start tomorrow.' She fished a set of keys out of her pocket and unlocked a door that led off a landing three stories from the main deck. 'This section's the staff, crew, and assorted freaks and friends. We're going to keep it sealed off from the passengers, so take these keys.' She handed them around and proceeded a few steps down a long hallway to another door that was standing open. 'Here you are.'
'Hey!' John and Joanna cried in unison from inside. 'This is quite a… '
Mei Ling took Andrea aside as Sean went in. 'Just a few things. I've put some stuff in the suite that you might not have had time to think of. Extra guitar strings-all gauges-some picks, a bunch of song books in case you get requests for things you don't know… stuff like that. If you look around in there you'll find a few bottles of champagne on ice, hors d'houvres, half a pound of pot with pipes and papers, couple of sheets of blotter, an urn full of peyote buttons… well, there's no use taking the whole inventory. Also copies of the. Guru's books of poems, 'How To, Why To, and Fuck You,' 'A Guide to Cleaning Martian Coffee Pots,' 'Eulogy on the Death of the Number One,' and so on. You might try setting some of them to music. Oh! I forgot. You might have… well, what you'd call a 'back-up band' for some of your gigs. A little group the Guru's got together. Rod and the Staff. Made up of the kitchen help-or maybe the kitchen hindrance-and the engineers, the shoe-shine boy, and so on, just playing what they've got lying around. The Guru plays the Thin Air Drum. Never makes a mistake.'
There was a humungous blast on the ship's horn and the engines started up.
'Oh! We're leaving! Look-I've got to see the departure of the shore. So weird to see New York City just floating away like that. Blows my boobs every time.' She looked down at her chest. 'That's why they're so small.' She turned to go. 'Don't pop any of those peyote buttons without cleaning them. Give you a nasty tummy-ache.' She skipped away down the hall.
'What did she have to say?' Sean asked as Andrea entered a poshly decorated twenty-by-forty-foot living room to the sound of popping champagne corks.
'Just a lot of stuff about some stuff that was stuff and a lot of stuff about some stuff that wasn't.' John handed her a glass. 'Let's go out on deck and blow our boobs watching New York City float away.'
'Right.'
Andrea took a quick glance around the suite as they gathered themselves together. A dining room with an enormous glass-topped table opened off the living, room to one side through an arch with carved wooden doors. Beyond it lay a bedroom with what looked to be two king-sized water beds. Off the living room in the other direction were two more bedrooms.
'We're in the one off the dining room,' Sean told her as they made their way to the highest deck.
'I can't get over that suite,' John said as they found a break in the crowd at the rail. 'The carpets-you could drown in those things. All the furniture's solid wood, some of it antique; every bedroom has a sunken tub that amounts to a small swimming pool; would you believe there are separate stereos and, get this, strobe lights in every room?'
'I think I'd believe anything,' Andrea murmured. She looked down to where the hawsers were being cast off. The crowd that was seeing off the passengers of the True Enlightenment was small but the crowd of reporters who'd dragged themselves out of bed early to record this historical event for posteriority made up for it. There were two TV cameras on dollys panning up and down the ship's rigging and zooming into the wheel house with their football-game lenses.
'I'm not sure I believe I'm doing this,' Joanna burbled into her champagne glass. She was really stoned and really tired. She was swaying back and forth. 'Look at that.' She hung her head over the rail and peered downward as the ship, pulled by tugboats from the other side, eased gently away from the dock. 'We're splitting. We're just splitting.' She swayed some more and waxed semi consciously poetic. 'Just think. That little distance between the ship and the dock… four feet, four and a half, five… that's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. Until it's a hundred miles and then a thousand, and then two thousand or something… we're going to be out on the high seas with that maniac at the helm!'
John put his arm around her. After a few minutes, as the True Enlightenment slipped out into the condom- ridden ebb-tide of the racing Hudson and to the amazement of the entire world sailed off in the correct direction, upstream-no! that wasn't right! it made a U-turn. It was widely recognized that Joanna had fallen asleep over the rail. John carried her downstairs and Sean and Andrea lingered for over an hour beholding the miracle of their ship missing the Staten Island Ferry, the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Sandy Hook, the Ambrose Light Ship, and the 7th Avenue IRT all on the same morning. By the time they went downstairs to sleep the True Enlightenment was drawing cute little curliques with its wake in the waving swells of the open ocean. There was a gray-blue guarantee of land off to the starboard but they agreed the Guru would have to try hard to hit it.
CHAPTER NINE
'Okay! Everybody up for the blind stargazing! Clear your minds and wipe your behinds! We're gonna commune with the Big Buffoon!'
Andrea shot bolt upright in her bed. 'What the fuck's that?'
Sean rolled over and rubbed his eyes and searched the ceiling. 'Sounds like a speaker… '
'Stars are far, so's your cigar, your sex organs are under par… '
'Momma.' Sean pointed. 'Up there. Behind the curtain. A speaker. Christ, the Guru's got himself wired into our bedroom!'
'You're damned right he does,' cackled the speaker. 'It's two-way. You can turn me off, though. The switch is on the wall behind the curtain. Then I can still call you but you don't call me. I mean I can't hear you. You turn yourself off. You don't turn me off. It's kind of a world allegory. Anyhow, you are celestially invited to get your buns up to the blind stargazing. Right now. Over, under, in, around and through, and out!'
By the time they got up on deck there was barely a space to be found between the blanket-wrapped bodies strewn over it. The Guru was up in a crow's nest just forward of them with spotlights from the bridge playing on him. They found a place by the port rail and stretched out just in time to hear his welcoming speech.
'People, persons, and other various varieties and typical types of humanity! You laid out a lot of bread for this cruise, so I hope you dig it. Are the accommodations cool?'
There were affirmative cheers from the passengers.
'Funky! Okay. So the first thing we're gonna do, which is right now and also tonight and probably even today, maybe part of tomorrow, possibly… time is so damned confusing. Anyhow, what we're gonna do is called by the name of blind stargazing, which is what it is. The idea goes something like this. Hum-dee-dum-dum, Hum-dee- dum-dum. But that's just the way the idea goes. You do something else. What you do is-if you're not too tired or pissed off or horny or anything… ' There were titters from the crowd. '… now as I was braying, you go when I say go. And what go means is that you close your eyes. It's the perfect word because what you really do is stop looking. That makes it easy to remember. But what have you been looking at?
'The stars. Now everybody who isn't looking at the stars, look at the goddamned stars, because if you haven't started you can't stop. All you have to remember is that when I say 'go,' you stop. Before I say 'go'-and I didn't say it that time, I just mentioned it-I'm going to talk about some other cosmic shit.
'Now for the next three weeks we're gonna be a little cosmos here on this row boat, and every cosmos has
