“I'm not vicious really.  I consider myself
kind-hearted.  I love my mum.”
Sid Vicious

“Jesus, I don't want to die alone.”
Johnny Cash

I used to experience sleep paralysis on a fairly regular, recurring basis.  It's horrific.  I never saw anything standing at the foot of my bed, but occasionally demons would tie me down in the spirit world and prevent my body from moving while I was lying there.  No matter how much I thrashed and raged, I couldn't move.  The feeling was always accompanied by the knowledge that if I fell asleep, I was going to immediately die and go to hell.

It's horrific.  It's like being tied to an anchor on a burning pirate ship, and the pirates are laughing as they prepare to throw you into an ocean of fire.  The pressure crushing down on your chest is real.  It's like being in the grip of a giant gorilla.  You can't move, and you feel that if you don't move, you're going to die.  You can scream, but your screams are silent.  No matter how loud you scream, you can't make any audible noise.  The only word that you can utter is "Jesus."  You can say "Jesus," and so you do.  And you say it with the desperation of someone trying to light a fire in a blizzard with a wet match. 

Fortunately, the match isn't wet.  "Jesus" is the only word that has any power over the invisible monsters hiding under your bed.

I wrote Siddhartha & Nancy after a particularly harrowing experience of sleep paralysis in 2001.  I woke up before dawn, after an endless night of fighting demons for my life at the edge of the abyss, and reached for my pen and notebook and proceeded to exorcise myself in prose.  Siddhartha & Nancy is an example of writing-as-therapy, and describes the petrified dance of the doomed on the fringes of an eternity of torment.  It's an unfiltered cigarette dipped in arsenic, smoked down to the bone, and beyond.

Siddhartha & Nancy is a blow-by-blow account of a night I spent whispering the name of God to invisible demons in the spirit world, to prevent them from dragging me to hell.  Well-adjusted people who weren't installed with demons at an early age, who weren't driven to embrace a reckless disregard for the structural integrity of their own life, will dismiss Siddhartha & Nancy as anti-literature of the worst, most harmful kind.  They will glance sideways at the neurotic, terrified syntax and drugged-out anti-grammar, and instantly dismiss it as a worthless piece of demonic pornography.

And they'd be right.

Siddhartha & Nancy is more of a police statement than a piece of creative writing.  It is a supernatural legal document that belongs in an anthology of flames.  The flames, perhaps, from whence it came.  In the furnace of pure torment, next to Freddy Krueger, and the demons who inspired it.  I'm not posting it now for posterity, to show it off, or revel in it.  I'm posting it because it's a case-in-point of how far you can get away from hell, with one desperate plea, struck like a wet match in a raging, freezing blizzard.

"Jesus."

It lit!  I saw a spark!

Say it again.  "Jesus."  And again.  "Jesus."  And again, and again, and again.  "Jesus."  "Jesus."  Jesus.  Even if your heart is stopping, beating in place, a petrified drumbeat flopping on the killing floor of your body like a rhythmic, dying fish... Say it again.  "Jesus."  The demons hate it.  Even if you can't wake yourself up right away, don't let yourself slip into the grip of the python spirit, squeezing you out like a dishrag until all the moisture and faith and life have been drained from your soul.  It might take a minute.  It will be a fight.  You will feel yourself teetering over the precipice of unconsciousness.  Don't go there.  Whatever you do, don't fall asleep.  Antagonists from assorted 80s horror franchises, demonic films not appropriate for anyone of any age, are standing at the doorway of unconsciousness, waiting for souls to torture and imprison in the boiler room of hell itself.

Crazy, yeah, I know.  If you ever find yourself there, though, remember:  Strike the match.  JESUS.  Cling to that spark.  JESUS.  He will not let you down.  You will wake up.  You may be crazed and drenched in snake venom, but you will wake up.  Write an infernal garbage poem if you have to, or make a cup of tea.  Listen to the traffic, or the time, quietly decaying like radioactive zombie flesh from the digital bones of your phone.

Or maybe Johnny Cash.  Listen to some Johnny Cash.

Siddhartha & Nancy is the statement I delivered to the angels working the night shift at the spiritual police station, a legalistic recollection of events that describes one of many times I found myself in the grip of sleep paralysis.  I don't know if I was asleep when it happened, but my memories of these events are that they happened in the grey area that exists right before you lose consciousness.  The twilight zone between night and day, when you know you're going to fall asleep, and can't do anything about it.  That is when the pythons strike.

So here it is, with all the demonic pornography edited out.  I've never had anything to do with Buddhism, but I am an avid Hermann Hesse fan.  The title was inspired by his novel Siddhartha, undoubtedly.  Nancy is like, half the chicks I've ever known.  Lol, not really.  But if you've ever known a Nancy, you know that she takes up as much space in your soul as a dozen real girls, girls who won't try to kill you with a kitchen knife in the clutches of an out-of-control heroin jones.  Nancy is the daytime version of the sleep-paralysis demon.  The fact that she inhabits the darkest regions of the world, tells you just how dark and harrowing sleep paralysis really is.

And from a linguistic (not religious) perspective, apparently "the word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language: siddha (achieved) + artha (what was searched for), which together means 'he who has found meaning (of existence)' or 'he who has attained his goals.'"  So it says on Wikipedia.

So thereya go.  But don't forget the spark.  You need the spark.  The python becomes an earthworm, squirming on the end of a fishhook, at even the slightest whimper of His name.

Keep it in mind.

Thanks for listening.

Siddhartha & Nancy

Siddhartha woke up screaming, quietly, without making any noise.  Laughing sounds emanated from the walls, which moved in and out, near and far, every time he blinked.  Siddhartha opened his eyes, and the walls would be in their normal place, he would close them, open them again and find them inches from his face, laughing louder the closer they got.  Strange gigantic housecats, housecats the size of 2 grown men and with hungry human faces, curled on the floor at the foot of the bed, purring.  The walls laughed and moved and pulsed and the giant housecats purred and Siddhartha continued to scream without making any noise.  What an atmosphere of terror, Siddhartha said to himself shaking, I am full of fear and terror and any second now I am sure I am going to die.  He tapped his chest quickly with his fingertips.

"Siddhartha!"  Nancy's voice came out of a starving lion's mouth, from everywhere and nowhere and from guts and firepits and stomachs and intestines.  Her voice was high and loud and shrill.  While the walls changed positions for Siddhartha every time he blinked, for Nancy they remained perpetually close, confining, never moving and never at a comfortable or compromising distance.  She sat up in bed in her black silk nightgown and took the kitchen knife out from under her pillow and held it out defensively like a small rabbit.  "Siddhartha!"  The giant human housecats purred loudly and made low rumbling sounds that soothed Nancy but their faces were hungry and scary, unnaturally awake, and she became frightened when she looked at them.  She held her knife out at a more aggressive angle, shaking.

Siddhartha ignored her and tapped his chest, making dull knocking sounds on his sternum with the muffled points of his fingertips.  Tap Tap Tap!  Tap Tap Tap!  He stuck his tongue out at one of the cats and shook his hairy head like a wet dog, go away go away go AWAY I'll eat you mad bad cats for SUPPER if you don't get out of my beddy-by room you great greasy mothers from HELL.  The cats regarded him with amusement and waited for him to blink, upclose, faraway, moons, stars, headlice, lunatic orbit, have you ever SEEEEN such a bloody sunrise?  Nancy?  Hooray!  Siddhartha stopt tapping his chest moment-airily in order to put his fist thru the wall of his beddy-by room just behind and above his head.  Small chunks of plaster crumbled and caved over his hand as he removed it from the wall and, for the moment at least, the cats directed all their attention on Nancy.

Siddhartha!  My fingers are aching broken black bones!  Won't you hold my knife up to these kitty-kats for I fear these kittykats will eat me and I can't hold on much longer!  A puddle of black goo appeared in the floor before them, between the bed and the cats and Siddhartha could see the millions of microscopic piranha swimming around in the puddle, eating off each others' heads.  Snap Snap Snap!  Microscopic skeletons and corpses rose to the surface of the puddle and were devoured by their as-yet-uneaten brethren, piranhas eating and fornicating and giving birth and eating baby piranhas fresh from the womb and eating each other and fornicating and giving birth and eating, a cycle of endless carnage.  Siddhartha closed his eyes. Immediately one of the giant cats at the foot of the bed leaped up, laughing.

Siddhartha!  My legs!  Nancy screamed in mortal terror as, in a slow crunchy munchy manner, her bones broke between the monstertruck jaws of the giant cat.  Siddhartha!  My legs are disappearing!  Nancy plunged the kitchen knife into the left eye of the giant human-cat and the monster fell into the puddle of black goo-blood on the floor hissing and dissolved all at once into a vat of boiling hot acid.

Nancy dropt the kitchen knife and collapsed stupid and dying on a giant wave of horror and pleasure that broke her in two and split and spilt her skull and brains in a torrent of pretty-smelling girl water, hatching baby vultures in her crakt eggbone head.   Siddhartha!   Nancy!  I'M LOSING MY MIND.  I'M LOSING MY MIND.  I'M LOSING MY MIND—they screamed in unison. 

The giant housecats with human faces that weren't eated up by the puddle of acidic black piranha-goop on the floor chose that precise moment to begin their laughter.  Lights of doom flashed before Siddhartha's glowing green eyes, gushy with brown, syrupy tears.

Thanky-be to a holey and loving BUGBOMB you ignernt STOOL pinjun, yo empty beercan skulls crumply under stainless steely wheelies, gian't truck monsters with crumbly dry skin/wall/chaff.  Inferno, happy flames of eternal doom, welcome to your new ugly-ass home, Siddhartha and Nancy, will won't you ever wake up from your fun-holey DEATH TRIP?

2001