Rey-Rey was at the house when I got back, for real, not floating orb hallucination Rey-Rey. He was sitting at the close picnic table in the back yard, the one in the front of the yard, not the one way back by the woods. (One can never have too many scattered picnic tables in their life.) I was surprised to see him, not just in what seemed to be real human physical form in a way even my neighbors would see, but also why was he here?
He walked over as I parked my truck, and before I could say things, was like “I know, ‘What am I doing here?’ Maybe even ‘how?’ But I figured out how to get here. More importantly, I figured out where he is – the he I seen as old me and you seen as old you. I know where he is.”
I asked where. “Not far. But we ain’t ready for this, at least I’m not ready for this. I need to get high.”
Rey-Rey as potentially hallucinatory vision of parallel universe me who remained true to teenage hesher roots was one thing, kind of easy to accept, but actual existing parallel me Rey-Rey, shaggy haired and ready to smoke a bowl in my back yard, was different. I’d been sober many years, and even though nobody was home, the ol’ lady and kids might come home any moment. The ol’ lady would shrug it off, another that’s so Raven moment, but I’d worked hard to minimize the inherited effects of self-medication on my children, in the hopes their psychic health is not as clogged up by crazies as mine is. So I hedged.
“Bro,” Rey-Rey said, “I appreciate your situation, trust me, I really do. But we about to embark on epic journey of unexplainable level, also with mysterious consequences. That future me and future you is one and the same. And I had a sort of vision about a place I used to go, underneath Willis Mountain in Buckingham, so I checked my vision out in my real life, and the tunnel was there, and it connected to everything else, and I came out the tunnel to here. Straight here. This is your real life, not mine, but it seems to be built the same, and it’s kinda fucking me up to think about. So I’m gonna get high. I’m gonna get really fucking high.”
Willis Mountain is a single mountain in Buckingham County, Southside Virginia, which has the largest proven reserve of kyanite on earth. New age people consider it precious, and industry uses it to coat spark plugs or counter tops – all kinds of weird industrious shit that us human monkeys dream up for a profit. Over the decades the mountain has slowly been blasted and scraped away, and there are no other mountains around it to hide this fact. It’s just a giant brown earth scar staring at you as you drive past on U.S. 15 between Dillwyn and Farmville. Every time I drive back to my mom’s house where I grew up, I pass it, and it makes me sad. But I hadn’t ever gone underneath it. We did some off-roading up there as tripping (literally) teenagers, but no secret world cave explorations. So I imagined my sadness must’ve been how Rey-Rey felt, except he’d been in the guts of the mountain.
Thus, I ended up relenting, and Rey-Rey had a last carouse of marijuana intoxication as he explained the tunnels underneath Willis Mountain, sitting down in the field by my rock altar (like always), and though I didn’t smoke any, it felt like I got high too, just absorbing all his energy.
The ol’ lady and kids got home, and I introduced Rey-Rey as a dude I knew from high school (which was sort of true), and said I had to go somewhere for a little while, I’d be back later. My wife followed me out for more details, not nagging, just on a needs-to-know basis as is common in any mutually respectful relationship. “I’m going into some mountain caves that apparently lead to astral planes that connect various realms.”
“How long you gonna be gone?” she asked.
“I don’t know, seems like the space-time continuum’s unpredictable. Maybe like an hour? Or forever?”
She laughed at the forever part and asked that I get some butter and chocolate chips on the way home, the good kind of chocolate chips, 72% cacao.
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