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Elihu Targuman, Datura Specialist

from The Reeducation of a Turd Peddler
by John Henry Peabody

 

AND SO WE COME TO Targuman—Elihu Targuman. I saw him skirting the festival the day Serra’s heart disappeared the same way I have seen him around town for years: furtive, odd, semi-homeless and the embodiment of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, although I don’t think he’s the perv Aqualung was. Targuman is just psychotic and affected by years of datura use. He’s also a 1968 graduate of El Fornio High, which makes him a Moor.
  And a troll under the bridge.
  Most people don’t know that if you see a homeless person up towards their sixties, they were likely normal at some point in their lives: had a relationship, a career, were a parent. Older homeless people can’t have lived like that for thirty years. There’s too much attrition. They lost what they had for one reason or another—drink, hurt, insanity, any combination of the three—and at a glance you see who they are now.
  So like most people, I wrote Targuman off.
  As I grew older, though, I learned through Darby’s mother, Janis, who went to high school with Targuman, that Targuman was different. While he did manifest early adult onset schizophrenia, he was also regarded as a master toalache maker—a brewer of the datura plant used by the Fornay—and with that seemed to have come up with a use for his insanity.
  At first the Fornay regarded him as an interloper and a doper, but by the 1980s, with Reagan retooling the culture, the threat of the old mission being rebuilt, and many old time Fornay passing—along with their brewing secrets—Targuman’s historied use and understanding of the plant became an asset that provided him both shelter and authenticity.
  Like me, he was kind of adopted. When I was younger, I remember seeing the Targ coming and going at the Librado compound—with the sweet, rancid whiff of an unwashed person. I wasn’t sure at the time why he came around, but it was because of Targuman that I withheld a certain amount of judgment for people who were outsiders.
  We touched through a handshake once when I was in my early teens, wiping my hand on my pants afterwards. We passed only occasionally after that. By the time I graduated high school, went off to college and grad school, I had forgotten all about him. It was only in the last few years of my residency as the curator at the historical society that I began interacting with Targuman again.
  I couldn’t believe he was still alive.
  To be honest, it was Elihu Targuman, through Janet and the brothers Librado, who administered my first and only datura trip. Ladies and germs, I don’t recommend it, but I needed to know what my father went through, and what the Librado brothers and the Native Americans I had studied experienced. It was a rite of passage for them and I didn’t want to be denied. As usual, I was doing my best to be included in something I probably shouldn’t be part of.

The datura blossom and tobacco-like leaves.

  Datura goes by many names: Jimson Weed, Jamestown Weed (they were so hungry they ate it and went insane afterwards). It’s also called Devil's Weed, Moonflower, Hell's Bells, Devil's Cucumber, Thorn-Apple (from its spiny fruit), Pricklyburr and Devil's Trumpet. It looks like a large morning glory. It is related to tobacco, petunias, tomatoes and even, I’m told, tomatillos.
  Respect Datura and you will not be hurt by it. And when I say respect, I mean avoid. There are better ways to get high. The average seeker can use psylocibic mushrooms, marijuana, good Burgundy, double expressos, handfuls of gummi bears or even hit themselves in the head with a hammer all afternoon if they want to transcend the mundane. Datura is only for professionals.
  The root of the word is Hindi, derived from Sanskrit. It dates before 2000 BC. Species of datura are both New and Old World. Many front yards in California have so-called Angel Trumpet (Datura solanacae) standing tall next to the front door porch, its orange bells handing down against lime green tobacco leaves. This is the datura from India. I once met an Indian medical student who told me that datura was used by thieves who would dose a person and when they were blacked out on the drug make off with the unconscious person’s things.
  I have no reason to doubt that. You could have made off with many of my things when I was dosed on the stuff.
  The active ingredients in datura are alkaloids: atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine—the same stuff they use in Lucky Charms. The plant itself has a wicked, rancid smell that alerts any creature to its potency. All of these chemicals are classified as deliriants. They make the user high, full of hallucinations, blind and even on the edge of death. People die from datura. The pictographs found in Chumash territory and up in the Pass were done while the performer was under the influence of datura. It was this kind of datura brew that Targuman was so good at. He never overbrewed, never underbrewed. He didn’t kill you. What he did was thrill you.
  So I said okay.
  I drank the elixir in the late afternoon. It was an August. I was home from my freshman year at college, staying with the Librados. They tucked me into a dry sewer vault we used to use as a fort when we were kids. We had all decided that the spot was a place I felt comfortable enough to be when I fell into my trance and sought out my “dreamhelper.”
  A dreamhelper is a totem, an animal mostly, that visits you during your trip. It can be a skunk, a hawk, a beetle, snake, all versions of those things. My father’s dreamhelper was a pelican.
  Scheisse.
  By the time my dreamhelper walked into the room—and it was a pelican, talking away at me—I was accelerated, hot, seeing the hidden world through my glasses, written upon the opposite wall. So I took my glasses off. The wall produced a perfect text, Baskerville. There were full sentences and paragraphs. I read them. I think I read them. I think I could read them. Maybe I think I could read them. Maybe I think I could read. Maybe I didn’t think I could read, maybe couldn’t read when I read them when I was thinking. Them. Could. Maybe. Read.
  You get the idea.
  But I did talk to the pelican for hours.
  Turns out it was Sean, as in Heany, and it was one of his first gigs as the Pelican Man. The Librado boys, with Janet’s backing, had set me up. They knew that I would be so high on Targuman’s concoction that I would think that Heany was a real pelican.
  Those fuckers. I learned a lot about myself on that trip. And felt that I had actually drawn to me the same dreamhelper that my father had. But the key element of the charade that I realized I had to ignore was that even though my dreamhelper was an act, a lie, what I learned about myself was true—and I kept to it.
  Later Heany told me we had only spoken for a few minutes. There were no hours with him at all.
  “Hours? I got out of there, Hank!” Sean explained over beers one day. “I was nervous. It was my first gig!” hands up in explanation. “And you looked way too bright eyed and pallid for me to hang out and shoot the psychedelic shit with you, bro. The Librados just thought it would be a hoot and then you got all deep on me and talked about your dead dad and mom—even Janet. Stuff I was not supposed to hear in this life. So by the time you’re beginning to weep and exalt, I’m grabbing my feathers and boots and high tailing it.”
  The whole afternoon, which made its way into night, then day, played out my strengths and weaknesses. I accepted the pelican as my dreamhelper, even though it was my dwarf friend in a costume, and took the information I had gathered while in my datura haze back to my second year in college.
  Although I was such a wonderer, I was okay, I realized. I might be a little less than I wanted to be as guy growing up, but I was okay. School was okay. My life was okay. My dead parents and adopted, Otherly Indian “family” were okay. Everything was okay just because this weird, homeless El Fornio High School Moor—this troll under a bridge over a creek that never ran with water—concocted his testy brew after years of testing it by himself. He had a talent that the average family coming out Safeway, spying him poking through a dumpster for a bite, had no idea he was in possession of.
  Targuman would go on to dose hundreds of locals for the right reason. And by the time we caught up with the thief of Junipero Serra’s heart, Targuman—with the help of a certain sea captain—would dose that person too as a lesson, an instruction, a ferreting out of truth, to show that one might think they want to travel like the Fornay, but more than likely what they want to do is buy a few postcards from the mission gift shop, later at the register ask if any kind of olive oil might be available on top of all the other chotckes they had purchased that day.

RELATED LINKS

Datura
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura

Toalache and Rock Art
http://www.rain.org/campinternet/trailguides/hyderchumashshaman.html