"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
     Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"      "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.      "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."      "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."      "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

     You would not likely mistake Gritzmacher Junior College for a State Mental Hospital - unless you happened to notice the striking resemblance between the buildings and the inmates at both locations. Gritzmacher Junior College is the institution of Higher Learning where I got my Start.

      I was flunking Hermeneutics. I was bombing Greek Exegesis. And I might as well admit it, I was doing poorly in Dogmas of True Anthromorphism. This institution was not - I might add - a Bible College, for the Anthromorphites do not believe in a tittle of the Bible. Their Scripture is the RANTINGS, the work of Josiah Schuyler Gritzmacher, who one 19th century evening got shown the Light of True Anthromorphism by an angel named Alvin.

      As luck would not have it, my mother had been converted, and spiritually seduced, by a traveling harbinger of Anthromorphism, a third generation descendant of old Josiah Schuyler himself. So I had received a good healthy dose of Heresy from my mother, Fundamentalist-Baiting Atheism from my father - and wound up a convert to Confusion.

      I had received a scholarship in pole-vaulting to Gritzmacher Junior College. Old Main, the only building on the barren campus, housed the library on the third floor, classrooms and offices on the second, and athletic equipment in the basement. I was browsing in the library early one morning trying to find some unknown author I could plagiarize for a paper on "If We Hadn't Invented God Would He Have Had to Invent Us?", when I happened upon a book on Nostradamus. As I read this Ancient Prophet I suddenly Saw Through Anthromorphism. I have never since been able to recapture the Experience, but it was clear as a bell: Anthromorphism, I suddenly realized, was a lot of HogWash.

      Thus I wound up about a half hour later, as usual, at Harold's Snooker Parlor in down-town Gritzmacher Springs - a one-street village with a total of nine different business establishments. I know now that if Nostradamus had not shown me the Light, I would not have been playing snooker, and the Turning Point in my life would not have revolved.

      I had learned to play Snooker ¹ from Gomer, one of my college chums, who had beat me out of twelve dollars and thirty five cents over a three-day period the week before. Gomer and I were just racking up another set when Dudley came to the snooker parlor window. He began tapping insistently on the pane. Dudley, an Anthromorphite true believer student, knew I had signed up as a pre-ministerial student to get my scholarship - he was trying to Save My Soul from snooker.

      "You lily-livered, yellow-bellied SapSucker!" I screeched at him outside. A devastating phrase I had learned in high school. (You must remember this was a village where cursing was actually a felony.)

      I knew my fun was ruined so I decided, out of boredom, to follow Dudley to the Salvation Navy where they let students practice on their transients. Actually, I was somewhat relieved to get out of Harold's Snooker Parlor, because the cigarette Gomer was smoking had a funny smell to it and I suspected he might have been smoking something other than tobacco. I had begun to feel strange even before I left.

      At the Salvation Navy, Dudley quickly found just the kind of weary, deranged sinner who would listen to his ravings about Anthromorphism. I cast my gaze around the dank, ill-lit, fetid hole until it landed on an unkempt, stubble-faced derelict sitting in the corner - in the lotus position. I walked over to see if I could strike up a quarrel.

      In a voice filled with indifference, he said, "I am your guru."

      "Yea," I replied, "and I'm your Co-Redemptrix." My flair for humor was already showing itself.

      An hour later I was still feeling somewhat strange but I had completely forgotten the old tramp, until, back at the Junior College - there he was- outside my hymn-singing class - sitting in the lotus position on the hallway floor staring at me as I walked past him. That didn't make much of an impression, but that afternoon as I was finishing my pole-vaulting practice in the snow, there he was, sitting in the ice-covered bleachers in the lotus position, shivering.

      As I was walking home, one of my fellow-students asked me if I'd seen the crazy old creep hanging around the campus. I shouted at her that I didn't know what she was talking about, and ran to my dorm room. There he was, in the lotus position, outside my room in the Army pre-fab Quonset hut that served as a dormitory.

      "Damn it," I said softly, looking down the hall to see if anyone could overhear my trespass, "whatta you want?"

      "I don't want anything," he said passively. "It's you who want me. I am your guru." He closed his eyes and began to moan a mantra.

      Frankly, I didn't even know what "guru" meant, so I stalked into my room and looked up the word in my roommate's Old Collegiate Dictionary. It read: "Guru: a personal religious teacher and spiritual guide, And how are my Mr. Livergood?"

      That did it! I tore open the door to curse at the villain, only to find a seven foot White Rabbit learning against the wall.

      "Where'd that tramp go?" I snapped.

      "Who, Harvey?" the Rabbit replied.

      "Harvey Schmarvey," I yelled, "the vagrant who thinks he's my guru!"

      "Oh, he's your guru too?" the Rabbit asked in what I felt was a friendly way.

      "Follow me," the Poobah said, with a twist of his pink nose.

     Why not, I thought.

     When we came to the end of the corridor, he motioned for me to step into a full-length mirror on the wall.

      "Oh no," I demurred.

     He stepped into it himself, as if to convince me it was all right. Well, if a rabbit can do it, I thought, and was through in the twinkling of an eye. As soon as we were through, the White Rabbit turned into a human charioteer and I noticed we were riding in a chariot in the midst of a raging war.

      "Arjuna," my charioteer said to me, "we're coming to a Giant Mushroom. Cut off a piece as we ride by." I did as Krishna told me, and took a bite of it as he directed.

      Suddenly, he was transformed into a Red Queen and I into a silly girl; we were standing in a forest before the White King who was sleeping. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud...

      "You're only a figment of his Dream," the Red Queen said to me nonchalantly, "a butterfly dreaming you're a girl named Alice."

      "You don't expect me to believe anything so preposterous, do you?" I complained.

      "I'm afraid I do," she said sadly. "You humans have a way of believing preposterous things even without much practice."

      "But, hurry," she exclaimed, "or time will catch up with us. Quick, run up that hill and talk to that coyote!"

      I was afraid to disobey, so I began to run. As I did so the forest changed into the Mexican desert and I could see don Juan in the valley below, laughing at me for trying to write as I was running.

      All at once I was back in my dorm room in the totally normal environs of Gritzmacher Junior College. And not a second too soon. I didn't dig living in Phantasy Worlds and Changing Identities. Let me be here on the good old earth and with things as I know them: the giant oak trees migrating to the south each year, as usual, and eating my ration of soylent green wafers like any other normal, ordinary creature.

      As I stood in my dormitory room, with the dictionary in my hand and the strange sentence in the definition staring me in the face, someone pounded softly on my door, shouting, "Beg me to come in!"

      I opened the door, expecting to see a White Rabbit or a White King. The old bum suddenly turned into Lawrence Harvey dressed as the Queen of Diamonds.

      "I don't need a guru," I protested.

      "Of course you don't know you need one yet," he said insistently. "You'll learn."

      "All right, then," I decided to test him, "what's reality?"

      "See, you do need me. But you're getting ahead of yourself. First you must learn to see Through Un-reality. Come on." Changing into a Mexican shaman, he got up from the lotus position and began running with a noticeable limp. I tried to imitate him but kept falling down.

      On my guru ran until we came to a large outdoor gathering where the mayor was making a re-election speech. My guru touched me on the shoulder and suddenly it was as if we were standing outside everything happening. No one was aware of us, but we could see what was going on. We walked up to the mayor. My guru spoke to him and a cloud-like replica of the mayor separated itself from his body and replied, "Yes, what is it?"

      "What are you doing?" my guru asked.

      "I'm trying every deceitful trick I know to get these nit-wits to vote for me. I've just started building my new million dollar home from bribes, and I need another four years to get it, my yacht and Swiss bank account in good shape."

      "Don't you ever feel guilty, mulcting the public?" asked my teacher.

      "Not a bit. Look, this culture's on its way out. No one's honest any more. Those so-called 'honest' citizens cheat and lie whenever they think they can get away with it. Of course they love to act righteously indignant whenever one of us politicians gets caught. What moralistic hypocrites!"

      On we ran, till we came to a dilapidated frame building where a church service was in progress. My guru spoke to one of the parishioners and again the astral wraith appeared beside the woman he spoke to.

      "Why am I here?" she answered. "Because Sandra Woolcraft is going to burn up with envy when she sees this new red dress I'm wearing."

      "I'm here," her husband's double said, "because she (he pointed to his wife) makes me come. If I go to church with her and sweet-talk her all evening, maybe I can get her to go to bed with me. Once a week, and I have to work like a dog for it."

      Completely unseen by the parishioners, we walked onto the dais and spoke to the preacher, who was shouting away.

      "Doing?" his double replied, "scaring hell out of a few, amusing most. These people are about due for a revival or a new con-man. They stopped listening to me, most of 'em, 'bout a year ago."

      "Does he know that?" my guru pointed to his corporeal double, who was pounding his fist on the pulpit, threatening eternal damnation.

      "Not him," the ethereal specter replied. "He's merely a spirit-less corpse - a confused pattern of dogmas and terrors that got wound up and keeps going."

      On we ran to Harold's Snooker Parlor, where we sat down to drink a bottle of Orange Crush and a Grapette together, while the smoke from Gomer's strange cigarette drifted lazily over the room.

      "Now you see why you need me," he said, as though I understood him.

      "No, I don't see."

      "That was the world of Un-reality I just showed you."

      "You mean the funny ghosts you talked to."

      "No, stupid!" he exclaimed benevolently. "That's the world of Double Un-reality. They're what you and everyone else assumes is the Reality behind Appearance."

      "Then what's the world of Un-reality?" I asked dumbly.

      "You!" he said, and with that he vanished into thick air.

      To this day I have seen neither Hyde nor Hare of him again. But I keep looking for him - just in back of me - because I know that beneath or in-between what seems to be going on, he may be there.

¹A game of exacting finesse, vastly superior to the sloppy idleness named pool.