Creatures of Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire
knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding
how the knowledge was acquired.

Detective Baby Moon Gow is an
intuitive genius and the protagonist in my winter project. I have a few other
things to finish up before I get back to that fun book, but in the meantime I
can’t help but think about some of the more powerful intuitivists I’ve known
over the years. Front and center has to be the late David Knoll, convicted bank
robber and epic Old Portland drug dealer. Dave’s favorite book was The Master
and the Margarita, not a book I ever had any special love for, and he was also
way into Jerzy Kosinski, a depressing Pole. We bonded over books in spite of
this, and in the time I knew him I saw Dave perform stupendous feats of
intuition. He once became convinced that someone was about to kill the guy who
lived across the hall from him. He had no real evidence. He would have told me
if he did as the guy was a blabbermouth once you had his confidence. When he
told me of this suspicion I shrugged it off. When he called a few days later
and told me to come over and check something out, I thought it was a graphic
novel we were both looking for, Zombie Elvis, but when I went past the shredded
police tape and stepped over the dried pool of blood across from his door I
knew he’d been right. He’d predicted the death of his neighbor. I went in and
discovered Dave had taped his guns, maybe fifteen of them, to the walls and to
the backs of chairs. They were all pointed at the door with strings tied to the
triggers leading back to the stick in his hand. With one pull he could send a
hail of bullets at his door. He predicted the killer would return. Amazingly,
after I left, the killer DID return but he was unable to break down Dave’s door
and get himself killed.

Amazing, but Dave’s most astonishing
feat of intuition was a scientific one. This was all almost twenty years ago. I
don’t even think I had a cellphone yet. But I just read an article on Fecal
Transplant and not only was I astonished that such a thing exists, but even
more astonishing? Dave knew something about it years before there were pages on
the internet dedicated to this. I mean, what? Do tell, you ask? Read on at your
own peril, and don’t bother to email me PC freak out BS because I warned you.
It’s going to be gnarly from here on.

Dave had a series of unfortunate mishaps all at once. A crack pipe blew up in his face and the resulting scabs became infected. Some kind of terrible germ got in his eyes just before this. His teeth were jarred in a parking lot brawl and his gums were swollen. There was more. Much more. One day he woke up with a fever, his tongue coated in white fuzz, aching and dripping with sweat, with tunnel vision and a loud ringing in his hears. Being a drug dealer he had high level access to all kinds of things, including antibiotics. Dave scored some kind of next level Swiss kill-all turbo pills and ate the entire bottle in a single night.

The results were nothing short of
crazy, and as his only book friend (rather than a drug pal who might steal from
him) I had front row seats. Those pills blew the unholy shit out of everything
in his system. Everything cleared up, even some old, lingering things he never
associated with infection. Within a week he felt better than he had in years,
except- Except he was getting thinner. He had wicked diarrhea. All the helpful
bacteria in his intestines had been decimated. He began to fear that he’d die
before it came back and hatched on a brilliant idea people are only beginning
to understand.

“Got a date tonight,” Dave
explained. “Stripper.” He pronounced it ‘strippah’. “Yeah dog, gotta eat her ass
out and get my bugs back.”

“I see.” I considered. “Why a
stripper?”

“Tough dude. Strong. I don’t want no
weak bugs.” He glowered, deep in his intuitive process. “This chick will
survive the zombie apocalypse yo. She could walk across the fuckin’ Sahara
barefoot, probably lives off Doritos and Pepsi, ain’t seen a vitamin in years
and she could beat the fuck outta everyone in this building.” He smiled then. “I
gotta have bugs in my guts, I want those bugs.”

He did just that. He was fine.

The late David Knoll is just one example. He cut a record in New York, Rooster And The Rockets, and I’ll pay top dollar for that just to hear his voice again. Another good example of someone with fantastic intuition is you. You inexplicably KNEW this story about Old Portland legend David Knoll was going to be frothy but still worth reading, didn’t you? Intuition is what separates you from the people who didn’t make it to the period at the end of this sentence.