Neolithic Equinox

Written 2011

In the autumn of 1978 my girlfriend Lisa was a model for Elite. She thought I looked like a Neanderthal. That Neolithic blood clan had a heightened sense of smell. Her skin a desert highway paved with peachs. Elite's John Casablancas thought her beauty might sell better in Europe. The blonde from Buffalo was only 5-7. Too short for New York. He flew her to Europe with plan. I planned to join her in the UK. We split at the TWA terminal. Eero Saarinen's design was from a distant future. One out of reach for America.

That November I informed the Hurrah Nightclub owners that I was leaving for London for a month. Barbara paid my flight. I caught the PanAm 747 at JFK. I had been out of the USA twice. To Quebec and Mexico. My home state of Maine didn't not count nor IT'S A SMALL WORLD in Disneyland. I showed my passport at the control and boarded the big jet. It was nearly empty.

Eight hours later the 747 landed at Heathrow a little after dawn. A pale immigration officer examined my return ticket. The stamp in my passport was good for six months. I wasn't planning on staying that long. Outside the terminal a gray Saturday morning outside. A taxi to the Fulham Road ran twenty English pounds. A little less than $40. I said nothing to the driver. Not a single American car on the weekend motorway. I only knew one person in London. One person in Europe. Lisa. She greeeted me with a hug at the door to the West London Studio next to the Chelsea Football Stadium. Stramford Bridge. We made love twice before she left for an appointment. One person was all I needed in London. All I wanted too.

As she dresssed for the day, I looked out the window. Hordes of Chelsea supporters were massed before the pub on the other side of Fulham. Fights broke out outside the Butcher's Hook. Lisa watched the brawls from the window.

"I have to go to a shooting."

Her rendevous with David Bailey. He was world famous. Michelangelo Antonioni had based the lead played by David Hemming in BLOW-UP on the famed hip photographer from Swinging London of the 1960s. I loved the scene, where the Yardbird guitarist smashed his instrument before a zombie audience. I looked out the window.

"There's no walking through that mob."

"Maybe not for you, but I can walk anywhere. This casting is important."

She pulled on a white leather coat over her mini dress and hurried out the door. I follow her onto Fulham Road. She was swallowed by the fracas. I returned inside the apartment and waited for her call.

After the mob had entered the stadium for the match, I ate in a workers' cafe at Fulham Broadway. Bangers, bacon, eggs, beans, and toast. The other diners were working-class. I barely understood their accent. I said nothing to no one. I wrote in my journal. Lisa coming back late. I had the key. My day was free. An American in London.

King's Road. The Mod era had been replaced by punks. I bought a black leather coat for 50 pounds. It had no belt. The punks wrote motorcycle jackets. I hung out at CGGBs. I worked at a punk disco. I was one of them in spirit. Not in attire. A foreigner and I kept to myself, stopping at the Chelsea Drugstore, famed for the line from the Rolling Stones YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT.

"I went down to the Chelsea Drugstore to get my prescription filled."

ME. I just bought a Coca Cola. They tasted different in England.

I perused a Fodor's Travel Book at a WS Smith bookstore and read about a foot traffic tunnel under the Thames to Greenwich linking the Isle of Dogs shipyards to the grounds of the Royal Observatory. Mostly for the dockworkers back in the early prt of this century. This was a different England. Strikes. Labor Unions fighting the police. Wages were Workers of the world unite. I figured the travel time to be an hour. I had time on my hands.

I rode the Underground to Mudchute and walked through the Millwall Park to the tunnel entrance at Island Gardens. Entry was free. Few people trod through the tunnel constructed at the turn of the last century. It was the weekend. Football ruled the country. Even fewer were on the grounds of the Royal Observatory. The upper-classes on England were at war with the workers in the late-70s and the battles were for the hearts of the young. Punks in the foreground. I emerged from the depth to the center of all time. The clock here governed all time across the globe. The BBC World Radio Service announced the hour according to Greenwich Mean Time. Here it was 1:37 GMT.

In the early 1970s I had studied math at university. In Multi-variable Calculus class I had argued against the sanctity of the speed of light. Everyone had chorused Einstein's calculation of 300,000 kilometers per second was a constant. In fact Einstein had conjectured that time mutated as light traveled through Space subject to gravity, solar flares et al. I had also countered that while the speed limit in America was 55 and none of us drove that slow. The same for light. Everyone likes to speed. Rene Marcus my professor thought the idea was interesting. I received a D-. He would have failed me, but I dropped out of Math to score that borderline grade.

Here on the gravel driveway before the Greenwich Observatory I stood still. Before me the Shephards Gate Clock. The seconds accurate. The minutes and hours the same. I held my breath. he clock ticked slow and I thanked the stars the speed limit was not 45. 1:48. I was not alone. Earth held billions. I was only apart from them all drifting in a time zone four hours from New York.

The clock ticked slow and I thanked the stars the speed limit in the USA was not 45. I stayed in London a month. Lisa came back and we lasted until a littel after the New Year, when she vanished in Europe. I relished every second and hated every second thereafter, until I fell in love again. There is no better cure for a broken heart.

Six years later I once more stood at Earth's center of time and watched my watch's third hand tick off every second. I was living in Paris. Here to work at a nightclub in Leicester Square. I had no idea where Lisa was. I breathed deep and long. My heartbeat lowered to 60 per minute.

Universal time was no longer the sole possession of the Royal Observatory. My Texas Instrument Chronograph was on the same beat. Same as the Shepard Gate Clock. Tick tock tick tock. I held my breath. 2:10. I was in synch with the planets. At least for humans and Neanderthals.

I was seduced by the International Terrestrial Reference Frame and had been enraptured by a time warp coma. It did not last forever. A man in a white coat asked, "Are you all right?"

At first I thought the man was a Bedlam intern coming to take me away, but he was just an Observatory groundskeeper and I said, "Just struck with awe."

"As well you should be. This is the center of time."

"Tempus fugit." I had studied Latin in grammar school with the nuns.

I returned to London proper through the 1210-foot tunnel. No one in the tunnel. My steps echoing against the tube's white tiles. I counted the seconds Almost 600. Ten minutes. My watch revealed the same. I was 28.

Throughout the 1980s I stayed in Paris. The City of Light. I ran nightclub doors as a physionomiste or doorman or bouncer.

Also in Hamburg, Nice, and London. I was the toughest man in all those cities and I didn't win all my fights. With others or myself.

But city gangs in each city took my back. The Bufalos in Paris. The White Snake and GMbH in Hamburg. We didn't lie according to clocks or watches. Time was determined by the starts and ends of the night and in those years no one wanted to end the night young. I hadn't forgotten math. In 1984 I was 32.

My girlfriend in Paris Candia was younger than me. I loved her. The singer thought I resembled a caveman too.

Nothing stalled the clock ticking like a younger woman. She was crazy and I was crazy in love. I wrote down the measures of time we spent together. Numerology was a refuge for the mad and no one was madder than an older man in love with a younger woman. She was seeing someone else. Maybe two someone elses. I had to escape the moments between her going and coming, because my misunderstanding of math had no control over love.

In mid-September of 1985 I fled Paris for England by hydrofoil. The Prince Of Wales traversed the Channel in forty minutes. I rode from Dover to Waterloo Station on an ancient train, eating a bacon sandwich in the cafe car. 80 minutes to Waterloo. I didn't give a shit about gaining an hour of time and prayed for time to stop along with my heart. Candia was in Milan. She never said with whom.

I stayed with my old friend AJ in Queen's Park. Late. I had stopped at a pub. Tai chi teachers never graded you for tardiness. We drank at his house. A bottle of vodka from the Dover Ferry. Sleep. Oblivion. In the morning the tai chi teacher proposed a trip to Stonehenge.

"It is the equinox."

"The autumnal equinox?" It was September 22. The same as last year.

The equinoxes are the only times when night and day are equal. The sun falls most directly on the equator. They were three months from the solstices. Each event set the seasons. Winter, Spring, Summer. The passage of the moon determined the months and the passing of blood for women. Sowing of crops. The harvest. Year after year ad infinitum.

We came from the stars and I still didn't believe 186,000 miles per second was the fastest speed in the universe.

Even Captain Kirk knew there was no speed limit, but on Earth the seasons have forever been bound by the moon, the sun, and stars. The same with me.

A littel past 9am AJ and I rode west out of London in his Rover. The M3 to A303 through an English countryside. Rolls of hay rested on the shorn farms in rolls. Stonehenge had existed before the Romans over 750,000 days ago. No one knew who built them or how. I didn't care either. Today mattered only for today and today was the first day of autumn.

Especially in a burgundy Rover

The Avebury Circle was one of the greatest works by our Neolithic ancestors. The largest stone circle in Britain. The unknown builders existed before the Britains, the Celts, and the Picts, who invented beer 5000 years ago according to historians. No one knows for sure. Before that humans drank mead. No one know who, but those people might have had something to do with these Neolithic monuments. They also understood the passage of the stars, moon, and sun.

They spoke an extinct language, but I have Pict blood. Short arms. Short legs. A long torso. The Picts didn't built Stonehenge. Neanderthals might have. No one here did. There weren't that many tourists.

We parked the car by a pub and walked the northern avenue into the circle. The light golden. Pagans gathered here Neolithic times. Or not. No one knows. I touched the stones to be transported back thousands of years. Everything in me said, "Get naked. Understand time with the wind on your flesh."

Time flowed through my skin. AJ slapped my shoulder.

"Snap out of it. We have a lot of ground to cover. First a beer."

Only one place for it. The Red Lion. Inside the stone circle of time. We drank two Hardys & Hansons from Avebury Well Water on wooden tables and toasted Avebury.

At the next stop a mist rose over the burrows. I stood by the mound. I saw my dead Irish grandmother within my mind's eyes. Nana passed in 1967.I had been 15. All time relative. E=MC2.

Time is not constant and out the corners of my eyes I peeked at the past.

And then we reached Stonehenge. Tourists were few. Nothing stopped us from walking up to the stones. No fences. No guards. I embraced one. The sun pierced the stones. I fell to my knees. AJ lifted me to my feet.

"Is there something wrong?"

"No, five thousand years ago I was here."

"And we're here today."

I started to take off my clothes for the sun and the cosmos.

"Not now." AJ hauled me back to the Rover. "I know someplace better."

We headed east.

We drove north through rolling farmlands and small villages. Just a grocer and a pub, if the villagers were lucky. Through Bishops Canning and the crossroads at Buckhampton. Another mile more. A great mound lifted from the Wilshire plain to the height of the smaller pyramids.

"Silbury." AJ parked the car and we walked across the stubbled cornfield. "

"One thousand men worked ten years to build it." AJ sounded like an expert. "It's over a hundred feet tall."

"Can we climb it?"

"By the ancient route? Of course. But no photos."

Photos were sacrilege.

We climbed to the top. I stripped naked. AJ joined me. We spread out arms to the sun. Time passed through me, as Earth orbited the sun as the solar system crossed the forlorn edge of the Milky Way.

I was one with all the elements. The sun set. The evening got cold. I looked at AJ. He was crying too.

And like that we were lost to the eternity of an autumn sunset. As we all are. E=MC2 does not apply to me or mine. Not in this world's time.

I didn't care. Oceans measure time and the movement through the cosmos. Horseshoe crabs return to spawn at the same beach every years since time immemrial. Women bleed with the moon. I wake with the dawn in 2025.

I am 73 now. This morning I stood naked on the roof in Brooklyn. The dawn rising to the east. It wasn't that cold. I'm not a pagan. But I am alive.

In 1978 I was so much younger then and in 1960 with my mother even younger and today I'm younger than that still.

No matter what the age my heart beats eternal.