Demon Box

The Search for the Secret Pyramid

I: Safari So Good

September 26, 1974. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At-One-Ment. To be observed, God makes it plain, this one-day fast from sundown to sundown once a year, forever and ever. An auspicious day to embark on a pilgrimage to the pyramids.

September 28, Saturday. Paul Krassner’s in S.F. I ask Krassner if he observed the Yom Kippur fast. He says he would have but he was too busy eating.

September 29, Sunday. Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Krassner’s packed and ready. He plans to visit the pyramid with me as part of his conspiracy research, something about using the angle of the Grand Gallery to prove conclusively that the bullet that killed Kennedy could not possibly have come from Jack Ruby’s gun.

September 30, Monday. Jack Cherry from Rolling Stone drives Krassner and me to the airport where we are going to fly to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with the great underground pyramid expert, Enoch of Ohio, about the Great Underground Pyramid. Cherry is to fly to New York later to rendezvous with the safari. He speaks Egyptian.

October 1, Tuesday. Succoth, the First Day of Tabernacles. Enoch of Ohio runs a tattoo parlor where he specializes in tattooing women and pierces nipples on the side. The walls of his shop are filled with color Polaroids of his satisfied customers. When we arrive he is buzzing a rendition of Adam and Eve Being Driven from The Garden into the flaccid flank of a forty-year-old housewife from Columbus, wiping aside the ooze of ink and blood every few seconds. Krassner stares as I question the artist.

Enoch tells us, over the whir of the needle and the whine of the housewife, what he knows about the secret underground temple. Enoch of Ohio is a famous Astral Traveler and has visited the Valley of the Kings often in his less corporeal form. He is full of information and predictions. His eyes burn brighter as he talks, and his needle produces more flourishes and blood. The housewife continues to groan and grimace until we can barely hear his prophecies.

“Okay, Sweetmeats, that’s enough for today. You look a little pale.”

I follow him to the back of his shop where he washes his hands clean of the stain of his trade, still expounding on ancient and future Egypt. A gasp and a crash from the other room rushes us back. But the housewife is fine. Krassner has fainted.

October 2, Wednesday. I throw Lu, The Wanderer, and am ready to move on. But Krassner has had enough of the arcane. “They’d probably search me and find out that I am circumcised,” he says and flies back to San Fran.

I buy a creamo ‘66 Pontiac convertible from a furniture designer and head out to Wendell Berry’s in Port Royal, Kentucky, hoping to enlist him in the cause. I hear over the car radio that the earliest frost in fifty years has smitten the Kentucky tobacco crop. Fields on both sides of the road are full of limp leaves and dour farmers. Much as I dislike cigarettes I can’t help but be touched by these forlorn figures in overalls and baseball caps. There is a quality timeless and universal about a farmer standing in the aftermath of a killer frost. It could be a hieroglyph, a symbol scratched on a sheet of papyrus depicting that immortal phrase of fruitless frustration: “Stung!”

October 3, Thursday. Birthday of St. Theresa. Another record-breaking cold night. After biscuits and eggs Wendell and I hitch up his two huge-haunched Belgian work mares and gee and haw out into the cold Kentucky morn to see if his sorghum survived. The leaves are dark and drooping but the stalks are still firm. We cut a few samples and head on up to the ridge for the opinion of two old brothers he is acquainted with.

“The Tidwell twins’ll know,” Wendell allows. “They been farming this area since the year ‘ought-one.”

The wagon rumbles along the winding, rocky ruts, through thorn thickets and groves of sugar maple and osage and dogwood. We find the brothers working a lofty meadow high above the neighboring spreads. No woe is frosted on the faces of this pair; their tobacco crop is hanging neatly in the barn since well before the cold snap, and they are already disking under the stalks. Erect, alert, and nearing eighty, the picture presented by these two identical Good Old Boys might describe another hieroglyph: Them as Didn’t Get Stung.

They examine Wendell’s stalk of sorghum and assure him how it ain’t hurt in the joint, which is what roorins the crop.

“Don’t let no cows into it, though,” they warn. “Freeze like that makes prussic acid sorghum. Mought make a animal sickly…”