‘Nuclear Medicine’, says Carlos, ‘that’s what keeps me going. When my mind works it burns up six steaks in one minute flat. Who can afford it? I need an energy source that’s on all the time. Nuclear Medicine. On! Every try it?’ Terms of Use
When Carlos says on it’s like a verbal karate chop upside the head. It carries the universality of a Hare Krishna chant—OM—his own man-trie code that says it all and which fixes him in the cosmic eye more decidedly than his birth certificate. It is meant as an explosive rather than a meditative catalyst, worrying the rest of his monologue into a dizzy ziggurat, out of sight and out of mind, leaving only the clap of a sonic boom. On! His abstractions wave themselves into a pattern of theories, postulates and corrolaries that blazon the emblems of the new age—the Age of Aquarius which he celebrates each night dancing in the French production of Hair on the stage of the Theatre St. Martin in Paris. And when he is not dancing he talks. Communicates. Relates to people. Opens their minds. Turns them on!
‘The whole point about Nuclear Medicine is that we can’t relate to our environment unless we’re plugged in. We’re still basically living in a low-energy world because people are not tapping the power that’s there. Ask yourself, what makes our society what it is? Technology. Right. But where do you find it? Only in industry. Correct? People generally are not aware of how to turn it to their own use and that’s why they get alienated from their environment. Know what I mean? Take art. It can be reduced to a circuit like the diagram you find stuck to the inside cover of your radio. The dance is an art, but it is not tuned into technology. It is still in the dark ages. It’s not plugged in. On!’
Carlos gets up from the floor and disappears into another room, taking quick dancer’s leaps. He is 22, born in Colombia, raised in the US, and just arrived from San Francisco. He was living there in a commune with people who were plugged in but not really on! They were drop-outs from the ‘machine’. Carlos loves the ‘machine’—from the electric toothbrush to the atom-smasher he bounces to its whirr like a cheerleader to a Sousa march.
In Paris he is staying with friends —friends who are plugged in. On! Their large, dishevelled house in Contrescarpe has a curious warp to it. The floors slope off to one side, the wood-panelled walls seem to buckle and the windows are painted black. Negotiating the room’s different gradients required a compass and dropping a plumb line in different places. One probes struts and supports for a more solid foot-
ing, grasping the window sill like a taffrail and sizing up the long broad-beam table for use as a life boat. It’s as big as a raft, anyway, like the three straight-back chairs positioned on either side, it is massive, solid and unwieldy. The large room has some of the dampness of an empty house on a tide-water— the kind of musty envelope in which monks craft illumined manuscripts and, in the accustomed manner, challenge the phantasms that try their faith: ‘Whence comest thou? Art thou some god, some angel or some devil?’
It was Carlos. Plugged in. On! The beaded fringe vest and tie-dyed shirt pulled up to the neck, his chest wrapped in a broad plastic harness trailing half a dozen wires from various contact points on its surface. The wires run to a metal console bearing four buttons. He flicks one of them. And beams. His chest heaves and rolls at the contact points where the wires disappear into the coloured nodules on the wraparound harness. The exposed flesh of his torso puckers and jolts as if being nibbled by a flying wedge of electronic chiggers. Underneath the harness band, convulsing steadily, a litter of puppies seems to be struggling in purblind fury. The sound of his voice descends as from a great height above his fitful chest.
‘You ever try one of those muscle exercisers? They shoot impulses into your muscles, tones them up, keeps them exercised without doing any real exercise. Know what I mean? The voltage is on pretty low now. About nine volts is the highest you can go with this, but the human body can take as much as several hundred. Can you imagine how you’re muscles will be jerking when they receive really powerful impulses? I mean not so powerful that you get electrocuted, but just strong enough so you twitch. I’ve got a dance figured out where all the dancers are hooked up to this sort
of console run by a computer which selects the strength of the voltage and the muscles it sends the impulses to in each individual dancer. You’ll have some of them, say, twisting themselves into the ground like a corkscrew; some will just be shooting out their arms or legs at a certain angle set by the computer, and some will be doing absolutely nothing except to show a facial twitch. Know what I mean? It’ll be a mathematical precision ballet. The dancer’s body itself won’t be moving much, but only certain parts of it will. Can you see it? With the lights? Electronic music? Plugged in dancing! On! On the moon.
‘On the moon. Yeah. The moon is the only place I’d want to do this sort of thing. The earth isn’t ready for it yet. The dancers got to be astronauts wearing space suits with built-in electric impulse points shooting out into their muscles. The computer will feed the information from earth and I’ll be sitting at the control switch, watching the whole thing on television. I’ve designed a space helmet that lights up like a pinball machine and suits that flash different colors. The dancers will be wired for sound, too, because the impulses going into their body are amplified by a radio transmitter going beep-beep-beep, depending on the strength of the impulses and the muscle movements. Like beep-bop in jazz 20 years ago. Beep-bop! They’ll have these groupies here on earth, sort of like a fan club, that are called teeny-beep-boppers. Get it? My dancers will be wired for everything— sound, light, movement. And on earth everybody will be sitting home watching it on television. The whole world is plugged in. On!’
His upper body becalms. The turmoil in his rib cage ceases as the low electric hum of the console flees down tinny echo filters. Carlos unplugs himself by removing the harness from his chest, gathering
up the wires and placing them by the console. He arranges his necklace of amber beads and the fringes vest, tucking the tie-dyed T-shirt into the top if his vevet trousers, the cuffs of which in turn are tucked into a pair of high-heeled Mexican boots. He flings his Moroccan cape in the air, letting it circumscribe his shoulders in a half-whirl and clasps it around the neck, like a magician tossing his cloak ceremoniously before pulling five white rabbits out of a hat. Whichever way he turns the autumn sunlight flooding the black windows casts him into a silhouette—an Amazonian jungle shaman in outasight gear picked up along Haight Street or St. Mark’s Place in shops bearing names like The Grain of Truth, the Ball Bearing and The Salt in the Wound.
‘I’ll tell you why people react to me. It’s because I’m a child of the Aquarian Age. I turn them on. On! I got Star Power. Not the Hollywood kind, but real stars in space. Know what I mean? Star Power is like Nuclear Medicine except it’s a million times stronger and it only works on Aquarian kids. I’m an Aquarian kid with Star Power. That’s why my dancing is so freaky —it’s the influence of Star Power and Nuclear Medicine. No joke. People plug into me because they know intuitively that I’ve got all this energy to give away. Did you know I was born with the Sun in Scorpio? Scorpio is the sex sign and it never stays in the middle. It moves continually from one extreme to the other—on all the time. Then, I’ve got my Moon in Cancer which reinforces all the other influences of my sign, so I get double its strength. I can’t plug into other people. Not too much, anyway. It messes them up. I’ve got this Mind Zap, you know, like a laser beam. I plug into someone else and they receive my Mind Zap. Burns out half their brain and 25 steaks. I don’t want to see this happen. I’m non-violent’.
His mother brought Carlos to New York when he was a chile. She left Colombia to seek ‘liberation’, but instead, says Carlos, she found ethnic surgery. ‘Ethnic surgery. It’s America’s biggest business and probably run by the Mafia or the CIA. It’s like a heart transplant except you transfer ethnic stereotypes instead of an organ. In America everybody goes through ten or twenty ethnic changes and at the end nobody knows who or what he is. Blacks become whites, whites become blacks, yellows turn into reds, reds turn into browns. Know what I mean? Look, I myself have been through all the ethnic transplants. I’ve been everything—Chinese, Black, Italian, Jew, WASP, Irish, and I mean everything. Now I’m myself. On!’
