So I met Mystic Steve when Ricky Williams took me into the swamps outside of Byron Bay. There was a guy living out there who looked like Tom Hanks at the end of Cast Away, lost in his little campsite, bathed in his introspection and the shadows of pot plants ten feet tall.
Ricky had first met Mystic Steve on the beach, mostly because Mystic Steve was wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt. In his journeys, Ricky has collected friends the way other people collect souvenirs, and that T-shirt was all it took for him and Mystic Steve to fall in together.
They talked to each other like father and son. It was lovely. Ricky would ask a question, and Mystic Steve would offer an answer. Mystic Steve would ask a question, and Ricky would offer an answer. If they disagreed, they kept talking until both of their minds were settled.
We had a great day sitting by a fire, making flat bread, and passing around a bong made out of a plastic orange juice jug and the stem from a papaya tree. It was slightly unnerving because trees would randomly fall over with a crash. I was like, Well, if this is how I go…
My favourite part was when we were trying to name the farm Ricky planned on buying. (We’d looked at this gorgeous property north of town.) We came up with Corner Stone, after the Bob Marley song. “WOOOOO!” Ricky hollered at the falling trees. “Good meditation!”
We lingered too long. At dusk the snakes came out. Every living thing in Australia is designed to kill every other living thing. Ricky was barefoot, and he LEVITATED out of those swamps. I have never seen a human being move so fast. Ricky was an athlete, man. He had JETS.
Anyway, Ricky and Mystic Steve had made plans to go to India together. I’d caught up with Ricky in Australia because they were waiting for their visas. After I’d spent my wonderful week with Ricky and headed home, their paperwork arrived. Mystic Steve had to harvest his crop.
Ricky and Mystic Steve wrapped a massive amount of weed in plastic and buried it for their return. Suitably prepared for more than one departure, they flew together to their first stop, Bangkok, where they decided to get out and smell the jasmine.
Now things get a little complicated. While in Bangkok, Ricky was invited to go to an Alicia Keys concert in Shanghai. Sounded like fun. He applied for a Chinese visa. His passport had gone through the wash at some point, and the Chinese authorities found it unsatisfactory.
In his waiting, Ricky headed to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, because he wanted to buy Jim Brown a chess set made of jade. (I love that sentence.) Mystic Steve stayed in Bangkok. Ricky was sleeping at a youth hostel, and one morning, someone turned on the TV.
It happened to flick on to an American football game, and it happened to be the Raiders playing the Bucs, and Ricky happened to catch a glimpse of Norv Turner, one of his former coaches, and all of those happenings in a row shined like a neon sign for Ricky: He had to go home.
He flew back to Bangkok and broke the news to Mystic Steve: Ricky was going to California instead. Mystic Steve was like, Oh, okay, I’m still gonna go to India. The football star and the homeless oracle embraced and went their separate ways. They haven’t seen each other since.
Ricky heard through a friend that Mystic Steve somehow made it back to Australia. But I prefer to think that he’s still somewhere in the Himalayas, receiving visitors on the top of his mountain, passing around a makeshift bong, and shouting: “WOOOO! Good meditation!”
Because if that’s true, then it’s also true that somewhere under the earth in Byron Bay, there remains a giant bag of sticky icky that was lovingly harvested by two unlikely friends, forever bound by the time they spent searching for answers together in the swamps.
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