Nowadays when I get stoned, I have death fantasies. They're very vivid, they're vivid daydreams that repeat over and over again. If they're really good, they repeat over and over and over.
Well, mutilation, other people's mutilation, how quick it is. Not a paranoia -- I just see it happening. I see murders. I am murdered in my dreams. I confront murderers in my dreams. I rarely get killed, but they're right there. And rarely am I a killer. Someone is always trying to kill me. There's the wife-beater, a huge, massive guy with black hair and a belt. He's going to take off the belt. I hated it because of the way he beat his wife. He has a beautiful wife.
No. Well, they probably have aspects of people I really know. I do know people like that. And he was going to kill me.
I met a killer, also in a dream, who was an artist. There was a guy, a really short, shy guy, kind of balding on top, balding too young. And he was an artist; Meaning, when he killed his victims, he didn't kill them immediately. He would anaesthetize them and weave them into baskets, with their guts still working in the baskets. He'd keep them alive, and then take pictures of them.
This was a dream.
No, no, I saw what he did, and I could see that the eyes of the person were still alive.
And there was the time I was sentenced to death. This [artist] guy was great -- he was down on his work. There were lines of easels, and on each side of the easel there was a photo. He had his own gallery set up inside his private, little...he lived in something that looked like a little school, a schoolhouse out in the country, in the South. I was scared shitless, and shaking, and looking at these photos of these mutilated people, and trying to comfort this guy, trying to point out good parts of his work, the whole time being completely horrified. And the police came in and saved me at the last moment. The police also took me away to be sentenced to death by lethal injection -- for what I don't remember. I think I was flying, I flew to escape some bullies, and I flew out of bounds regulated by the city. So the cops took me, and the bullies, the assailants, into this chamber. We're walking down the hallway, and I keep on talking to the police, which I learned was forbidden, a misdemeanor. I said, "Wh..."
The rule was not to speak to the guards at all. What I did I don't know. Okay, maybe I flew too high out of bounds, but they just sentenced me to death. They assigned me legal counsel, this useless blonde lady, who didn't tell me exactly what was going on. All she told me was that I had ten minutes to live. And she gave me this state's evidence, these file pictures showing what what was going to happen to me. What happens is they take you to these doctors' pavilions, and they're sitting at picnic tables in front of the pavilions. So, I saw the photos -- there were about ten or eight, something like that. First thing they do is they shave your head. The second thing they do is they lay you in this sort of dentists' harness. And you're strapped in, and then they take one needle and they stick it in your stomach, and then they take another needle, and they stick that in the base of your neck. What they're doing is inserting a little metal globule into your brain, and also giving you a serum that makes...
Shit like that. That's where my work comes from. And other things. It's not a literal thing, and it's not anything I can explain. It's not a magic thing that I can explain. It just is what it is, and I can describe it to you. You know what I mean? That's my wellspring.
2-29-96 DoubleTake Magazine Interview, by Josh Farrar
And I thought I had crazy dreams. What a mind he had.
Well, people came to him (Bob Dylan) with this...disbelieving hostility, and really stupid questions, really demeaning questions -- "Do you think people are really understanding what you sing?" "Fuck you!" -- that would be my response. His was, "Yeah, they told me [they understand]."
Do you think of yourself as a cult figure?
A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change.
