Aboard the Royal Iris for their second Riverboat Shuffle, John, Paul, and George have their first encounter with a Ouija board. After it proves to be a bust, John convinces Paul to give it another try later that night and finds the board to be a convenient voice for a ghost less than eager to make itself known.
***
“Ah,” he breathes quietly, “now he’s seen a ghost.” When his eyes settle back on the glass, finger stroking one of its deep grooves, Paul’s body sways to a riverboat that no longer carries them. “But I won’t hold you to whatever it uses you to say. Just stays between us and the board, that.”
Can you a fanfic based on the Beatles's drug trip with Peter Fonda
Revolver
Before the gun went off, Peter knew what it was like to be a man. He wrapped his fingers around the grip as a man would, firmly and unafraid, and felt in the steel made colder by the early January air, all the mature adrenaline of a man made deadlier by a trigger.
When he misfired the pistol into his stomach, he remembered with terrific clarity what it was like to be a boy. Holding himself at gunpoint as he loaded the chamber was the potential mistake of any amateur, but the guaranteed mistake of a ten-year-old. On the operating table, his heart stopped three times while Dr. Sweet retrieved the pea-sized bullet from his right kidney. It took three blood transfusions before his condition stabilized into what the Onning Hospital considered “a remarkable comeback.”
What Peter found more remarkable was that no one asked him what it was like to be dead. Maybe they thought he was still too young to know, as if death required maturity more so than flat-lining. Peter knew the face of his mother, though. He knew her authentic, unmedicated smile and her profound peace, penetrating all numbness. He knew he was seeing it all too soon, but that someday she would return to him with that familiar peace when his heart stopped for a fourth and final time.
“I know what it’s like to be dead.”
At once, Peter can tell he’s starting to lose George—not in any literal sense, as George fears is happening. His heart still beats through his shirt, squirming and squirming like a toad, very much alive. Nothing Peter says can reach him anymore over all the incessant head-noise. Then again, it could be for the best, because maybe George doesn’t mind dying all that much, he just doesn’t dig being told about it.
For some reason, trying not to talk about it is handling a loaded .22 at ten years old all over again. After fifteen years, Peter should be less fatally clumsy than he was then. But they were playing with psychedelics now. Big boy games of Russian roulette with the fragile psyche, blowing their fucking brains out without ever pulling a trigger.
David Crosby had been the one to tell him that poor Harrison got the bad trip bullet.
“You have to go down and help George. He got too loaded.”
To the Beatles, though, Peter was a relative nobody. The Byrds had done more than the famous Fonda surname to earn him clearance into the exclusive circle. So why was he the tour guide?
“Because I’m loaded too, man.”
Somehow David hadn’t realized that his effort to prevent the blind from leading the blind had only led him to yet another blind man. All shiny in their tin foil, those sugar cubes of acid had looked so much like party favors that Peter assumed the obligation of any polite guest. The whole scene was predictably Hollywood of them. Flying high in the Beverly Hills mansion of Zsa Zsa Gabor, rapping about Gene Vincent and Ravi Shankar with the incorrigible easy riders of the west, toeing the fine line between Too Loaded or Loaded Too.
“Don’t worry about it,” Peter tells George. “This is a drug that makes you feel like dying and your brain doesn’t want to do that, so it's trying to stop and that’s the conflict so just let it go and ease out.”
George eases out and onto the cold bathroom tiles. The deep crevices between each vibrating square run evenly across the lines of panic on his face. They’re thinning George out into oblivion, all of these disorienting, intersecting lines.
“It’s okay, George,” Peter whispers. “I know what it’s like to be dead. Don’t worry about it, just let the drug take you down the trip.”
“Who put all that shit in your head?” Outside of a song, John’s voice is almost unrecognizable. Peter waits, as he has been well-conditioned to, for McCartney to soften the blow with the harmonies that never come. “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born.”
John keeps his distance, staring at Peter over this long, rounded beak of a nose with two plump juniper berries where his nostrils should be. If the cycle of fear is anything like the cycle of life, he’ll age out of this prenatal paralysis soon enough.
“Well,” Peter finally says, “maybe none of us have been born until we’ve died.”
“Don’t you hear yourself? It’s mad, all that shit you’re saying.”
“No, man, it’s true. A month before I turned eleven—”
“Don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead!”
In less than five minutes John has told Peter what no one else could in fifteen years. It never seemed so obvious to him. Peter always assumed curiosity was stronger than fear. Why else does a man take drugs or sleep with other men or turn on the news? Anything frightening is worth knowing. But how typical of a musician to be so unwilling to hear anything more disruptive than their music.
To be fair, John isn’t entirely without readiness. In leaving, he shows more than enough of it.
An entire year will pass before Peter even realizes the full extent to which he spooked Lennon into some sort of existential crisis of creativity. Then millions will be overhearing their year-old conversation as the grapevine winds around the grooves on the acetates. By then, Peter will have been excluded from the conversation altogether, talked over by some anonymous girl who, through her femininity, made mortality only slightly less unspeakable to John. In fact, the only nod of acknowledgement given to Peter at all will be in the title of the album: Revolver.
For the rest of the night Peter realizes how much better he liked John when he was unborn. At least he had his attention then.
In Hollywood the only thing worse than being a relative nobody is being a definitive pest. Being a tour guide in between matters only insofar as it just makes him a definitive pest with a head full of acid.
Peter knows they are talking about him, mocking him. They must be.
Why else had all that tension on John’s face lifted if not by some growing hysteria? And why did it have him pulling Paul away from the party so urgently? Why the hell had John kept staring at Paul like that in the first place? Like he held laughter in his throat—or something just as painful, just as uncontainable.
From the other side of the closed door, laughter never comes. But the harmonies finally do.
“Are you alright, John?”
“I keep seeing you.”
“I’ve seen you too, barely able to feed yourself. Look. Even now, with that glass. You’ll sooner have the floor pissed, you know, holding it like that.”
The tightness in Paul’s voice is audible, lips moving as if around something that could be as great as disappointment but might just be as small as a cigarette. All doubt should be removed the second Paul asks for a match, but Peter isn't sure John wouldn't light his disappointment for him too.
“I keep seeing you, but it’s like I can’t reach you anymore. I want you here with me.”
“I’m here. I’m right here, John.”
“You’re not. Not like the rest of us.”
“George thought he was dying.”
Despite fully expecting it, the immediate outburst from John still makes Peter flinch. “Chrissakes, you sound just like that creep!”
“Ah, fucking—see there?” Paul gripes with sudden frustration. “Will you just put it…yes, there. Thank you.”
“I don’t want to hear that dying shit. It’s not all bad.”
“Sure. You’ve still got a clean shirt.”
“If you tried it, you’d see that. Like I’m seeing you.”
A placating sigh. “What do you see?”
“All this moving inside you just like I knew it would. We could pour right into each other, you know. The whole thing is beautiful. I want you to know what it’s like.”
Slowly, carefully, Peter lifts his head from the door.
All at once he can see the two of them, silhouetted by swirling grains of light and dark wood. Coming together and apart again. Rippling. Destined to dance. This is how the ocean breathes. This is how time bends the truth. This is how life begins, after death.
They’re making love, Peter thinks madly.
No.
It’s somehow more intimate than that.
No, they are the conception of two ancient bodies that have already done the love-making for them, and Peter has his ear pressed to the distended pregnant belly, listening to them in utero.
Silence never carried a longer echo than theirs.
John breaks it with a familiar desperation in his voice. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”
“I don’t know,” Paul answers, too softly to be heard without straining. “Maybe another night.”
“It won’t be me. You’ll let somebody else turn you on.”
“It’s just not the right time. That’s all, you know. I mean, it’s a very private thing, you know. I can’t get into it with all the birds and newspapers all shoved up to the gates.”
“You’re a good boy, Paul. A very good boy.”
Peter nearly winces at the pain shooting through his liver, phantom but wickedly sharp. He knows how it feels when a bullet gets lodged. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
At least Paul takes it like a man.
“Yeah, well…one of us has to be.”
“You’ve gone all fuzzy on me now,” John says with a certain sadness. “If I can’t see you, I’ll lose you.”
For the fourth time in his life, Peter’s heart stops beating. All of a sudden the door has opened like a sprung trigger to this thick curling smoke and everything appears blacker than ever behind the dark shades he wears. Slipping away and away into nothingness. Unraveling. Doomed to decay. This is how the ember suffocates. This is how fetal flesh consumes itself. This is how ten-year-olds die, as definitive pests.
Just let it go, Peter pleads with himself. Ease out.
All the while he waits for that peace, so motherly and profound and familiar. Just like the harmonies, it never comes.
“You again,” John is roaring, unrecognizable again if only from his strange sense of relief. “Have you met Paul, Saint Peter? You’d get on well. He’s a big fucking bore too.”
His way of acquainting them is suitably informal, pushing clear past Peter so that he and Paul have no other choice but to look at one another. He has already met Paul anyway. Not like this, though. Not this wounded.
With considerable alarm Peter stares at the large splotch on the right side of Paul’s stomach, all arterial red and seeping. Bullets will tear through a man like that but never leave him standing as casually as Paul does, smoking away as if he cannot feel the pain or can somehow choose not to.
Had it in fact been a bullet that Paul took, Peter would know how to better help him. But he has never seen anything quite like this. John has gnawed his way right out of their shared womb and Peter can think of nothing to say besides the obvious.
“You’re bleeding.”
In no apparent hurry to staunch it, Paul looks down at his stained shirt. “Oh,” he mutters. “John’s a bit clumsy with the wine tonight.”
Peter has this sudden strong urge to check, to reach out and remember the consistency, the smell. But he gets the impression that Paul McCartney would never admit to anything so vulnerable as bleeding—only spilling wine. So Peter lets him walk away sweetly blood-soaked, back into the swinging party, because he knows what it’s like to be dead. And Paul isn’t dead yet—only dying.
This global beatles day, tell us how you got into the beatles! (thank you @warmrevolver for the tag! ❤️)
*takes a long drag from cigarette* I remember it like it was yesterday.
But it was actually 12 years ago, roundabout February of 2014. The time frame is relevant bc on TV they were going to be airing a 50 year reunion concert special type thing of the Beatles coming to America. This was the olden days of satellite, so my dad was able to see that it was about to come on and he wanted to watch it. I, on the other hand, had no interest. In my 16-year-old mind The Beatles looked like The Beach Boys in that one episode of Full House:
While my dad is consumed in his Baby Boomer propaganda, I inevitably pass through living room and hear these songs I've heard before but never associated with The Beatles: Twist and Shout, Hello, Goodbye, etc etc. Thinking on it now, their generational reach is unmatched. You might as well have put on the Ed Sullivan performance right there in my living room, 50 years later, it was that impactful. The only difference is I immediately went onto iTunes to buy Blackbird, thinking it was Ticket to Ride which I'd gotten mixed up at the time for some reason lol.
I was hooked that night and exclusively listened to The Beatles for an entire year before I even let them be the gateway drug they truly are. My favorite piece of personal lore with their music is when I rediscovered "I'm Looking Through You" bc it plays at the end credits of Ricky Gervais' Ghost Town. That was where I first heard it as a kid and would always rewind the credits, I loved the song so much. Then all those years later I learn it was from The Beatles. It was like fate. That being said, I was still embarrassed about listening to what was considered old music as a teenager. It was not at all cool then. I toured a college and the only thing I brought home were 2 Beatles posters.
Surprisingly, though, all of that was me still being chill about the band. Bc the mclennon rabbit hole did not come until the summer of 2016 (and thank the lord for that or I might not have graduated high school with that distraction). I remember finding it all so strange at first. I had never been in fandom culture, had never read fanfics, was still deeply closeted when it came to all things gay. But damn if it isn't the best of Baby's First Fandom bc no others have hooked me like this one since. their history inspires so much creativity in anyone it reaches. I could have never channeled my creativity into something concrete without them.
the beatles are the first domino in the effect of my entire personality. all of the music I have listened to, the movies I have watched, the books I have read, the dreams I have had, can all be traced back to them.
and with all of your help, we can file a class action lawsuit against them. call it Legalmania
thank you @certified-paul-girl & @carryingthatweight for the tags!! in honor of Florida Man Monday™, I pulled from my playlist some of my particular favorites as of late
Pretend I Never Happened - Willie Nelson
Always Be You - Neil Merryweather
Make Me Smile (Come up and See Me) - Steve Harley
Jack Daniels Old #7 - Head, Hands, and Feet
Superlungs My Supergirl - Terry Reid
no-pressure tagging: @warmrevolver @downthepub @teacups-andtime @gordonfinn @therealsaintscully @cheese-danish-42
Please turn Florida man Paul and Lost Vegas John into a real fic, I need their drug smuggling adventures
You mean a fic where the last things John remembers are Harry in his ear telling him to always bet on black, more American dollars than he’s ever seen, then glimpses through headlights of the fading desert? A fic where he washes up in Florida with nothing more than a tape machine to relay the past 24 hours to him since Nilsson’s memory is about as reliable as a drunken goldfish? A fic where the mysterious voice John hears on the tape eventually leads him to the swift inheritor of all his earnings and more American dope than he’s ever smoked or sniffed? A fic where playing Macca the Mule for every touring band that crosses the panhandle has become more dodgy than lucrative and Paul starts to consider that maybe all this hollowed-out recording equipment could do more than just conceal his contraband between counties? A fic where during all those trailer park trysts, maybe John managed to screw Paul’s head on right too, while he was at it? A fic with a premade playlist that I’ve used to immerse myself into the sex- and drug-fueled degeneracy for months now and can be found here for your listening pleasure?
