Memory Motel: A Rock And Roll Fantasy, Part Three Section Ten: No Hangovers

Part Three: In The Aftermath

14 – Ron Wood

Some spade chick and Keith are at the door. I hadn’t seen Keith in years, I hadn’t seen Keith since I died and retired here with Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott and a coupla other buddies to drink and take drugs and never with a hangover and never with a downside. Sometimes I’d look down on Karolina and just watch over her, Plonk hd told me: “I don’t know how they know we re looking over them, we can’t do much even when we do but sometimes I just watch my lkids and I do about as much for them as I did when I was alive.” So, one way or the other I watched Karolina and I watched my children, drunk and depressed, cranking old Faces, it was like watching a movie. And that is what the After Math was for me. I was just waiting for my family to arrive and enjoying my life much as I did on earth except NO HANGOVERS.

I can not tell you how fantastic it is to drink all day and all night, doing cocaine, hanging with the boys, and then passing out and waking up and feeling absolutely great. I swear this heaven. This is like a daydream I used to have, or like those anti hangover pills or something. But it really worked, it really happened. We watch old movies, we had Norman Wisdom over once. Yeah, the real one.Ian McLaghlan hadn’t made it over for awhile, his wife is here and they had been romancing for the past eight years, but he finally showed as well. It ws a reunion of sorts and while I missed Karolina, and it got worse as the years went by and she found someone else, the pain wasn’t fidelity because it is till death do us part so that was good, and I knopw her toow ell, he wasn’t replacing me and I was right. He lasted a couple of months and she moved on and found another guy.

As for the kids, they were grown and Grand Kids didn’t need me as much. Except for the youngest, Veronica, she I never knew in life and I watched her more than any one else. Ron, well what would they call her?, fascinated me. I watched her all the time, she had her Mom’s features (thank God), but she had my good humor. By the time she was two she was a chatterbox, running round the mansion shouting at the top of her voice, singing, always with the singing, drawing. Ron ran her Mom ragged, ran her half brothers and sisters ragged as well, but she was truly loved the way I was truly loved… but a handful, rebellious, her favorite word was “Why?”. She used it as though it was every single word in the vocabulary, you used it for all salutations, for all conversation, she used it as though it had an inner meaning all its own. “Why why why?” She especially used it when she was having a crying fit, and then, when all was forgiven, she’d nestle next to Karolina and whisper “Why?” as though the word had some secret meaning. Sometimes Karolina spoke Czech to Ron, but everybody else spoke English. Ron was fine with either.

I could watch her for hours. I could watch her from the moment she woke up till the moment she went to sleep and then I’d call the guys around and we’d play all night long. I guess there is a paradise because once Karolina gets here this is the perfect world. You’d think in a place of pure thought you’d miss matter but really, all artistic achievements are acts of imagination. Plonk explained how as you stay here longer you become different, you integrate yourself so you are aware you are part of something bigger than this world you’ve created and that Plonk himself was delving deeper and further into the After Math –with his Daddy’s help he began to understand that there were things he needed to do that had no connection to his past life at all. “Not yet, Woody”, he told me, not today at all but someday it will happen and I will be bigger than I was there, not in an ego way but in a manner of soul, I think. It won’t be my great achievement, it will… I can’t really explain it.”

Plonk had change but not in ways you could notice, and not just because he was physically different, taller, and not riddled with MS, and I guess that made him happy but also content the way the After Math made you content. It wasn’t the bubbling joy of humanity,but rather a deep seated certainty that things would be alright. He wasn’t scared, no one is scared. Newcomer Ian still had one foot in each place,s till viewed in to earth all the time. So did Norman Wisdom. I think if you were a flower or a fomosaur or something your connection might not have been so strong but it is hard to throw off the world of the finite and the truth is, rumors were abounding, if a rumor can abound when everybody knows something, that the Universe was winding down just because of that. There were ,I;;opms pf planets wioh intelligent life and the After Math included them all as everythought added to more thoughts and more.

I am happy and content in my world and when a woman arrived unbidden at my door.