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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
History 103:
The mickey>> Kaneohe
How long had it been going on? How far along the timeline of humanity did we progress before somebody tried to slip somebody else a mickey? How long before someone invented the hemlock martini? Or perhaps before that a grog brewed with poison mushrooms?
Kamasami Khan figured it had to be fairly early after we made the jump down from the trees and by trial and error started the first home-school chemistry/biology lessons. Had to be early, for our history is full of potions and poisons.
The Chinese were masters of the genre, for good and for evil. On the one hand, herbalists with their arcane healing mixtures, gall bladder of a skink and all that. On the other, they'd poisoned the 10th Panchen Lama in 1996 after he criticized China's treatment of Tibetans. And just yesterday Te-Wu, the Chinese secret police that went back over 500 years, tried to poison the second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa's stunt double at his Waikiki hotel, cleverly posing as room service waiters to gain access to the room.
Khan and the Free Tibet Warrior Society could play that game too. So it was that Khan sent Bodhicita Guzman off for her evening with Fon Du, the local head of Te-Wu, with a vial of clear, odorless, tasteless liquid.
It wasn't just any mickey she'd be slipping. With a mad scientist he knew -- ex-CIA lab guy who taught part-time at UH -- Khan was secretly working on several potions to be used when he began guerilla strikes against the Chinese army and government offices in Tibet. The one he sent off with Bodhicita was what you'd call a custom designer drug -- a five-part, time-release mickey. It started with Viagra, which gave way to a clinical dose of truth serum, followed by a muscle relaxant, then a sleep enhancer, finishing with enough marijuana THC to make him wake up paranoid.
Khan had a plan. As much as they needed Bodhicita close to Fon Du, sleeping with the enemy, Khan didn't want another Mata Hari -- the Dutch dancer who was executed by the French for spying during WWI. That's why they needed an exit strategy for Bodhicita, one that would allow her to walk away from Fon Du without looking nervously over her shoulder. It had to be his decision to banish her. Khan did not want her death in his karma.
Besides, now that the lama revealed she was his eternal consort, way bad karma if she got offed by the Communists.
The lama was downstairs with his brother Joe, meditating again while hooked up to Joe's virtual reality monitors. Khan started down to check on them, at the very moment Fon Du was showing up in his black Mercedes at Bodhicita's Kaimuki apartment, overdue and ready for a night of love.
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com