When the humid haze of orgasmic euphoria cleared, every word the Guru had spoken stood wiggling before her flaunting its unmistakable meaning in her heretofore unpresented face. He was a phony and a cynic and as he himself had admitted, Maharanji had been right: the True Enlightenment of this cruise was the tangible enlightenment of the passengers' pocket books.
She was pissed. She was indignant. She was embarrassed because she'd been caught with her pants down, and embarrassed for everybody else who'd been caught the same way.
Baalow Nee was gazing out over the ocean dribbling Rheingold onto his toes when she came to. Sean was lying on the floor in a swamp of semen and cunt-juice. 'Perfect,' the Guru was saying. 'Just what I needed. Never had such a good one. Ho-ho-ho, I'm all set to go back out there and dish up another steaming plate of bullshit to those brainless boobies.'
Andrea leapt to her feet. 'Oh no you don't. I've figured out what kind of ritual that was. It was the kind you can only have in private-it was a truth ritual!'
The Guru turned with an expression of mild surprise at her accusatory tone. 'Of course. Look, do you think silly little Johnny Popper-which is actually my real name-can put on this mystical masquerade perpetually without blowing off some steam? For shit-sake, I'm only human. I think.'
'I think you're fucking sub-human. Three million dollars in a Swiss bank account-yachts and limousines and champagne and caviar-and all those people believing that you've got answers to questions that are important to them…'
'Look, Andrea,' the Guru said, 'calm down. Have a beer.' He motioned to Sissy who this time brought a tray of Heinekens and poured the bottles out into crystal glasses. 'Why do you think I chose you to do this whole ditty with? Because I need more assistants. Because I'm offering to cut you in. You and your friend here. $50,000 a year to start. What do you say?'
'Baloney!' she screamed. 'You're full of baloney!'
Sean did a double-take and the Guru looked like he'd been hit in the head with a rock.
'Baloney! That's what I said! Baalow nee is baloney!'
The Guru shook his head sadly.
Andrea grabbed a beer glass and knocked back a big gulp for emphasis.
Sean sipped slowly. 'So that's the secret of your name,' he mused.
'Of course. I should've thought it would be obvious to anyone, but to my knowledge you're the first one in the world to figure it out.' He drew himself up with some dignity. 'Of course I'm full of baloney. But I am also without question the greatest, most profound, and most charismatic religious leader in the world today. If I'm full of baloney, so are all the others. And as I promised, now that you've gained the ability to pronounce my name correctly, you have gained true enlightenment. You've got it in a plain brown delicatessen wrapper. Unfortunately, there is no room aboard the True Enlightenment for those who have already gained true enlightenment… '
'Why you seamy son of a bitch… '
But instead of completing her sentence Andrea fell promptly and deeply asleep, and before Sean could figure out why she'd slumped gracefully to the floor and closed her eyes, he did too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Andrea was awakened the next morning by the sharp, irregular pitching of the ship and the sound of someone slapping wet towels off their bedroom walls. She opened her eyes to find that there was a whole lot of strange junk in her bed and the walls had been replaced by a three-dimensional representation of the open ocean.
'Holy fuck! We're in a goddamned lifeboat! That son of a bitch has set us adrift! Sean! Wake up!'
Sean's head was resting on a rather unusual pillow-a case of pate foie gras with perigord truffles-and his right foot was dangling in an ash-can full of Mumm's Cordon Rouge on ice. Andrea shook him as she counted the land formations visible on the horizon and reached a total of zero. 'That maniac has set us adrift in the diametrical center of noplace!'
It didn't take Sean long to confirm that Andrea had made a correct assessment of the situation. 'Jesus Christ. I wouldn't have believed it. I don't believe it. I didn't believe it. I won't believe it. Shit!'
Andrea's guitar case and their luggage, including Sean's typewriter and all his manuscripts, lay in the bilge of the thirty foot craft, which was crowded with some of the oddest provisions ever to be provided anyone marooned at sea.
'Look at this shit,' Sean snorted in disgust when they'd taken the inventory. 'A dozen cases of champagne but no water. Tate jots gras, three kinds of caviar, smoked oysters, camembert cheese, herring in cream sauce, smoked anchovies, sardines, and fifty other kinds of appetizers. A goddamned tub of sour cream and onion dip. Radishes and celery and carrot-sticks. Triscuits and sesame crackers and melba toast, fritos… enough potato chips to stuff every teeny-bopper in Des Moines for ten years. But no real food. Five pounds of Columbian tops with pipes and papers. Acid and mescaline and every other drug known to freak-kind. But no first-aid kit.'
He opened a chest marked 'navigation aids.' He pulled out a set of charts and a sextant and a compass. 'Look at this.' He came up with a gallon can of KY jelly. 'There's a note on top. It says, Wise up and mellow out. Sex is the key to salvation. After you have fucked one hundred times you will be able to reach land safely. Have fun. Your friend, Johnny Popper.' That dirty son of a bitch!'
Sean wound up to throw the can overboard but Andrea grabbed his arm. 'That's for me, stupid, not for you, and we can't afford to start throwing things overboard for giggles.' She confiscated the can and opened it. 'Jesus, he's dyed the KY green! That loony doesn't miss a trick. Now why don't you see if you can figure out where the hell we are and how we're supposed to go about getting somewhere else.'
Three hours later it was plain-to Sean at least-that where they were was in trouble. There were painstakingly explicit directions with the sextant, and the charts were quite clear. They were sixty miles from Martinique and a slow current was carrying them straight out to sea. Ordinarily the lifeboat, equipped with sails and a powerful engine, would have carried them to Martinique in time for a late lunch, with leisure for a little sport fishing on the way. But although the rigging for the sails was there, the locker marked 'sails' contained seven dirty red bandanas. And although there was enough gasoline in 50 gallon drums to get them to Mexico City, the engine was missing its spark plugs. To add insult to injury, the standard oars had been replaced by two plastic toy paddles-one red, the other yellow. There were other alterations, subtle and not so subtle, in the boat's emergency equipment. The short-wave radio had turned into a battery-operated record player. The library consisted of the Mickey Mouse Club song and Frank Sinatra's version of I'll Be Home for Christmas.' The drawer marked 'flares' held a cap gun and two dozen rolls of caps. The chest labeled 'fishing equipment' was occupied by a bamboo pole fitted with ten feet of purple knitting yarn, a red and white bobber, and a hook not quite large enough to land a guppie.
'What the fuck are we going to do?' Sean asked in exasperation. 'I mean, to all intents and purposes we've been murdered, right?'
'Let's fuck.'
'What?'
Andrea spread some caviar on a cracker and popped it into her mouth. 'Has your command of vernacular English forsaken you? I said, Let's fuck.' She made a circle with two fingers and pushed another finger in and out of it
'Oh, I get it. You believe what the Guru wrote on top of that KY can-that after we've fucked a hundred times well reach land safely? Well as far as I know sexual intercourse has no influence at all on ocean currents, and I'm goddmaned if I'm going to fuck with you because the Guru tells me I should. It's probably some trick to keep us from figuring out anything that'll really help. Or maybe he thinks what he did will be okay if we die happy.'
'Are you not going to fuck with me just because the Guru says you should? Listen, there's not a whole lot else for us to do out here.'
'Fucking expends semen, which is very high in nutrients, which then have to be replaced… '
'Sounds like a high school biology teacher's reason why you shouldn't jerk off.'
'But we don't have a lot of nutrients around to replace them with on this goddamned floating hors d'ouvres tray.'
