The Download
Ura's Story
It's a strange story. Unbelievable. You'll think I'm pulling your leg. It's been a long, twisted journey, diabolical at times, and sometimes I wonder if it was all a dream. It's just too wild.
How Becky Kowalski became Ura Yeehah Yu
It was 1986, and I was doing pretty well. My name was Becky Kowalski. I was working in what I used to call "High Cosmetology." I had a 7th floor condo in Toronto, a husband and a child. I was at the very beginning of lip plumping, and while I can't say I invented cosmetic botox, I was at the forefront of something very similar. I was making close to six figures, which in the 80's was very different than six figures today. I plumped the lips of Hollywood celebrities before it was popular. I worked on a certain Italian movie starlet, who recommended me to everyone, and a fair number of pop stars right at the beginning of MTV. You wouldn't believe it, the faces I touched.
I drove a pink Cadillac (!), and did my fair share of cocaine at parties. I drank regularly and lived at a breakneck pace just to reach that next rung of the ladder. The sky was the limit. What a life. Then something extraordinary happened. I can't even tell you what it was. It was like something just snapped in me. I told my husband I needed a bag of Cheetos— and boy, did I need a bag of Cheetos—, so I walked out of the house, drove my pink car to the supermarket, opened the door, and walked away. The car was still running.
I didn't even know what I was thinking— I wasn't thinking. I only had my huarache chunky heels and my Betsey Johnson shoulder bag, and I watched myself walk to the train station. I bought a ticket to New York, and I can't even remember the trip. I found myself in New York and felt I need to go to W. 56th Street. Why W. 56th? No idea. I just went. When I got out on the street, I saw a beauty spa down the block, and I knew I had to go there. I wasn't thinking about my family, or my work, I was just following breadcrumbs. When I looked at the menu of services, I knew I needed to get a Brazilian Wax. That was the instruction. They let me in without an appointment because of all my big name connections. There was a light around the esthetician. Her name was Pomodoro. I asked her where she was from, and she said Portugal. That was it. The next words out of my mouth were, "I'm going there."
Pom told me to call her Grandfather when I got there. He lived on the island of Flores. I went to the airport, and got on the next flight to Portugal. I never looked back. I started a new life, with nothing. Or more accurately, I just dropped my life. I left it all behind, and started to let life live me. That was the first thing. I was being prepared. I didn't even know it.
To make a long story shorter, I ended up living in this old man's back garden. He left me alone, for the most part. He did ask me to give him facials and thread his eyebrows from time to time, and I was happy to. He was a good guy. There was a shed, that basically became my home. It was under a huge eucalyptus tree. I experimented with various psychedelics, and boy, did I get to know that tree. The whisper of the leaves rubbing against each other. And the smell. The house and garden backed up to a cliff over the sea. The view was incredible. And if you looked into the side of the cliff, from the sea side, you could see there was a cave in it. Later on I realized the cave went on and on, deep into the earth. That's where The Odor emanated from. See, I didn't know about that then, but I was being prepared.
Another thing that happened, getting me warmed up, was a shamanic tattoo. There was this man in the village, Arturo, and we decided to drop acid together one day. He was an itinerant tattoo artist, stick and poke was his specialty. So when we came out of this trip, it was wild, he had given me these tattoos of these geometric shapes and diagrams. They reminded me of crop circles. He didn't remember doing it, and I didn't remember getting them. They were just there, like a this sign right on my body, of what was coming.
So I had been living there for several months, in this shack, and teaching some of the local kids how to cut hair, kids that nobody knew how to teach. They all wanted to learn to cut hair, but every time somebody tried to teach them, it just didn't work. They were deemed unteachable. Then I came along, and for whatever reason, I got through to them. They learned to do fades and long layers and all of it, and for some reason we always ended up talking about cosmic things. Dancing between a 1 and a 2, subject and object, ontology up the wazoo. So there I was teaching these unteachable kids, living in this shack with this huge cat that had shown up one day, Tomas. Tommy was this huge orange cat with a personality to match. Sometimes he looked at me and I swear he was seeing into my soul. Tommy was a good boy.
And one day in the winter I was walking into town to get some mackerel for Tommy. There was a fisherman I knew down at the marina who would save scraps for him. I got the fish, which was wrapped in brown paper, and on my way out of the marina, this young guy I knew, he was a resourceful kid, he got everybody everything they needed. He was always giving me wild things to try. He handed me a smoothie and said he had put ketamine in it. And I got the fish, and I walked back up to my shack, drinking my ketamine smoothie. It was mixed with orange juice and açaí, kind of sour, kind of bitter. And what happened after that was really— I can barely talk about it. But it's time.
When I got back to the shack, it was dusk, the "gloaming" time, and Tommy didn't come out. That was the first thing. Usually Tommy always came out to greet me as soon as I entered the garden, every time. But he wasn't there. I thought maybe something had happened to him. I went to go into the shack but the door was locked. This was super weird, because there had never even been a lock on the door before, and this tumbledown shack a person could practically push over. But there was a lock, and it was a combination lock with three number slots. There I was, what to do? But a number came to me, and I put it in. It was 128. And the lock opened.
When I went in, the first thing I noticed was this light that looked like a golden disco ball hanging from the ceiling, spinning slowly. It was like a discotheque in the shack. A cosmic disco, that was the joke. I just stared at it, and then there was a light that came out of the ground, it kind of connected with the disco ball, and then I lost my mind.
The first thing I noticed was—and this is hard to explain— it was like the light went into my nose. And as soon as the light went into my nose, I began to smell things. I smelled smells from another world, I couldn't begin to describe them. Things a human brain has never encountered. And the smells transmitted information. It was like something I heard. When I talk about it, I say "the Odor Said," but it didn't say anything. It transmitted, in an olfactory way. That's what I mean.
Something happened to my body. The light went into my nose, and then it was like it spread over my whole body, like a light suit. Tommy was clinging to the ceiling, not moving. It was like he was stuck to it. I was stuck, too, in this suit of light, with The Odor coming into me from below. The first thing The Odor told me was to "exhale the erstwhile person you were, and prepare to inhale." Then I started shaking, and sweating, and a pool of liquid formed under me. It was like all the plasma was poured out of my body, out of my cells, and replaced with this light-odor. I can't really describe that. But it was like I was standing in a puddle of plasma and shaking but I couldn't move. And then The Odor began to transmit things.
The Odor told me my name was now Ura Yeehah Yu. Becky was gone. It showed me the beginning and the end, and everything in between. I smelled the gestation of the universe. How it's all a kind of joke, really. Just a joke. I inhaled the charts that looked like the crop circles tattooed on my arms, I inhaled the meanings of each irrigation ditch in the charts, and each sluice gate in the charts, and a cosmic agrarian ontology I could never begin to make up. I was shown what we humans are for. We are like the seeds that sprout into a new crop. That crop is a super-agrarian, post-human hive-mind being that we are giving way to. I'm here to tell you all of it. I wrote it all in notebooks, in that altered state, using my own plasma as ink, but it was burned into me, written into my body.
It lasted for seven days and seven nights. I didn't eat or drink or sleep. I should have been dead. Maybe I was. When the transmission stopped, and the light suit retreated from my body, and finally my nose, what was left of the puddle of plasma returned to my body, and Tommy suddenly began to move again, I knew I still wasn't done. I knew I had to crawl down the narrow path that led to the sea. So down I climbed, back to earth, so to speak. I was as weak as a kitten. I got there eventually, and when I did, was led to a rock on the shore. On the rock was an ordinary barnacle, but there was something otherworldly about it, too. I stared into the center of the barnacle for hours, and I saw an angel. And I knew my life would never be the same. What a joke.
