American Daze Purple Haze is back… he went down to Sydney to help a jailbird… twenty-two hours from New York… flying through darkness, hitting a storm around Fiji… 30,000 feet down to the sea… plane rockin and rollin… like riding a buckin horse in the dead of night… finally a glimpse of morning light… sun coming up over the Opera House… wanna see Die Fiedermaus?.. going through Customs… the wily coyote flashes a vax card, excellent forgery, breezes through the Covid bull… takes a bus to Long Bay Prison… bail hearing for an old mate who saved his life in ’78… he’s in the pokey for killing a man in a bar fight, both crazy with booze… the dude has paid his dues… let him go… Thanks for coming, we’ll let you know.
American Daze Purple Haze had planned to stay awhile… but then came the rain, millions of mice came up the drain… time to get out of this town, everything is upside down… he takes the first flight to wherever it’s going… it’s going to Tahiti, eight hours to Papeete… no sweat, order a mai tai… check into the Hotel Tahiti Nui… tempted to pack it all in and stay here, no one will miss him… but on the chance they do, he’ll say he got amnesia in French Polynesia… forget all that, you got a cat… in the
drunken heat he wanders the streets… looking for the ghost of Cheyenne Brando… je me souviens… he walks into the wrong bar on Papeete Street… but let’s be discreet and draw a veil on that tale… our hero is just trying to get back… another bird on the tarmac… jumps on board, eight hours to LA, City of Angels… but the angels have fled… and the Devil ain’t dead… he’s alive and well and living at the Rainbow Hotel… no time to tarry, American Daze Purple Haze is still on the fly, another plane, another sky… a smooth six hours to Gotham City… a night at the Casablanca… rubbing shoulders with faded memories in Times Square, the pungent smell of the past in the air… and next day the final leg, a train from Grand Central to Mumblypeg… picks up his cat, Where you been Marco Polo? Six days looking out a window, take me home to the bungalow… and thus they repair to the hermitage, he’s rolling and she’s lolling… the sweet aroma of purple haze in the air.