Picture it this way: You’ve offed your home, a comfy if rustic little villa with a wood stove and deer standing outside the picture window. You’ve summarily given up a movie and TV writing career that’s been quite good to you over the years, although it currently appears to be going nowhere.² You’ve sold, chucked or given away everything that might impede swift, economical movement and hit the road—it’s just your dog and you, with no plans to return.

You’ve burned bridges.

Your former life seems over, kaput. The only apparent meaning to your new life is based on this idea: You’re in search of an old friend and sometime partner in crime who vanished into the wilds of Central America five years before. You have little idea of what you’re going to say to this guy if and when you track him down—although you do have some questions in mind—or where you might go and what you might do afterward, but that’s the plan.

In some sense, what you’re doing is an attempt at making sense of things, of your life.³

Truth is, you’re about halfway out of your mind.⁴

You’re in far southern Mexico now, four months into your bolt. You left in 1996 but it’s now 1997. You’ve pulled over onto the side of a road labeled Mex 200 on the map. You cut your engine. There’s no traffic. It’s very quiet. You’re staring at a sign indicating a turnoff to a town some distance inland. Motozintla. You’re suddenly feeling dizzy and a little disoriented—a little more disoriented than usual. You’ve seen this word, this name, before.

Where?

Had a ring to it when you first saw it.

You say it aloud. Motozintla. Moe-toe-ZEEN-tlah.

Still has a ring to it.

In your mind you travel back in time to 1982. Your life of crime is over, recently abandoned due to ridiculous, though dangerous, circumstances. You’re staring at the first page of a composition book. You start writing. Your goal is to make sense of things, of your life.⁵

Before that first session of writing is finished, you find you’ve turned back to the first page and printed at the top the words Cosmic Banditos. You don’t know where this came from, since you have no real idea of where the story is going. You’re completely winging it. About all you’ve accomplished so far is the description of a dog. You shrug and press on.

Back on the roadside in Mexico in 1997, you dimly recall that at some point in the writing you did back in 1982, you needed a town in southern Mexico for some things to happen in. You’d pulled out a world atlas and searched for a name that has a ring to it. Motozintla. The characters in the story you’re writing have an adventure in Motozintla, then move on.

So: You’re staring at a sign indicating the turnoff to a place you’ve written about as if you’d been there, but of course had not. You’d made everything up, including your physical description of Motozintla.⁶

But that’s not why you’re feeling weird.

You’re feeling weird because you’re beset by a creeping epiphany.

The term déjà vu comes to mind, but it isn’t quite accurate.

How about vújà de? An experience you’re sure you’ve never had before but gives you the willies anyway, because you may have imagined having it.

You glance at your dog, sitting beside you in the cab of your pickup truck, looking at you in the way dogs do that asks the question, What’s next?

Normally, the sight of your dog has a calming effect on you, but now the reverse is the case. For the moment, your dog’s presence is no help at all.

Your dog is a big part of your creeping epiphany, your vújà de experience.

In order to avoid eye contact with your dog, you look out the window, only to find yourself again staring at the Motozintla sign, which sports an arrow pointing off toward the right, to the turnoff. Your sense of dizziness, of increased disorientation, of heightened weirdness, increases further.

What’s going on here?

This: The tale you wrote in 1982 in order to make sense of things appears to be actually taking place now, fifteen years later. By the way: Although the tale was inspired by real events in your life, the crux of it was not only made-up, but essentially nonsensical.⁷

Yet here you are.

The hero of your fictional tale is in the throes of a crisis. His former life appears to be over, kaput, due to ridiculous though dangerous circumstances, and he’s about halfway out of his mind. Spurred to action by rising dementia, he embarks on a quest with his dog through Mexico and Central America, in search of an enigmatic figure who presumably has the answers to some important questions. En route, he comes across various banditos, fugitives, corrupt establishmentarians, and all-around lunatics and miscreants.

You, while on this real-life quest to find your vanished old chum—an enigmatic figure for whom you have some questions—have encountered various banditos, fugitives, corrupt establishmentarians, and all-around lunatics and miscreants.

The hero of your fictional tale has a peculiar obsession, having to do with the physics of matter and energy.

You have a peculiar obsession, in practice quite different from that of your fictional hero, but—come to think of it—with identical theoretical roots: the physics of matter and energy.

One of the essential themes of your fictional tale is the idea that human beings exist in different branches of reality, an unaccountable number of them, and all of them are real. In other words, anything that can happen will happen or may have already happened.

This realization causes you to swallow with an audible gulp.

You look at your dog, who is brown with asymmetrical white patches here and there. Her ears are out of alignment and she has a large tongue that always hangs out, giving her a clownish appearance.

This is the exact description of your fictional⁸ hero’s canine sidekick. A clownish appearance—these are in fact the words you used in that first writing session to sum up the fictional dog’s appearance. The thought crosses your mind that your real dog⁹ was born in 1987, five years after you’d described the other dog. Further, you teamed up with this current dog accidentally. You did not pick her out of the canine multitudes due to a predilection for brown dogs with asymmetrical white patches here and there, ears out of alignment and large tongues that always hang out. Dogs with clownish appearances.

In fact, none of what’s taking place can be explained by your innate predilections, storytelling preferences or some sort of interconnection between the two. And anyway, remember: The real events are taking place fifteen years after the events you made up.

The word coincidence pops into your mind, then pops right back out again. You thumb through your mental thesaurus but don’t come up with anything that accurately defines the situation. ¹⁰

You’re still staring at the Motozintla sign. Thinking maybe you should make the turn, follow the arrow¹¹ and pay Motozintla a visit. See who, or what, shows up there—or is already there.

Or maybe not. Maybe you shouldn’t go anywhere near the place.

Out of the corner of your eye, you dimly perceive that the dog sitting beside you is still looking at you with that expression that asks, What’s next?

It was now midsummer of 1998, going on two years since I’d bolted south to find my old friend. Lots of stuff had happened—a ridiculous amount of stuff. Geographically at least, I was back where I’d started in the United States. I was a better guy, if a sadder and wiser one, as a result of dealing with all the stuff that happened. I was no longer about halfway out of my mind. More like a quarter, maybe less. Say, eighteen percent.

I contacted an old stateside buddy, just to say hi and to inform him that I was still among the living. At some point, he mentioned that the fictional tale I’d written in 1982, and which had been published as a book in 1986 (and almost immediately gone out of print), was causing a stir on the World Wide Web.

In dealing with all the stuff that happened over all those months since the Motozintla creeping epiphany, vújà de experience, bizarre twist of fate, whatever, I’d pretty much forgotten about my old book, Cosmic Banditos.

Listen: While I was gone, while I was away, I’d been mostly in very remote places. Places at the ends of various roads and beyond the ends of those roads. In the bush. I’d been essentially incommunicado with the civilized world. Being a low-tech kind of guy to begin with, in 1996 I was only vaguely aware of the World Wide Web. By 1998, if anything, I was even less aware of it, having forgotten what little I’d previously known. I’d hardly seen a TV set in the last two years, never mind this newfangled communications network.

My friend told me to check out Cosmic Banditos on Amazon.com.

My initial reaction to this was to wonder why a wilderness outfitter would see fit to mention this book I’d written years ago.

Eventually I got around to learning a bit about the World Wide Web, and yes, the book was causing a bit of a stir. Aside from a bunch of ridiculously enthusiastic reader reviews on Amazon.com, discussion groups had been started; one fellow ran a Cosmic Banditos Web site; another had published the first four chapters on his Web site, under a banner announcing that Cosmic Banditos is the best novel ever written; the book was featured on several recommended reading lists, including one that specialized in philosopbical(!)¹² works. There was my name, alongside the likes of Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, Immanuel Kant, Hermann Hesse and William Shakespeare. My book and I were at the top of another list, which specialized in Science Fiction and Fantasy.¹³ A German rock group had dubbed itself the Cosmic Banditos. I even stumbled upon a Web site that had swiped the image of the fictional dog from the book’s back cover for use as a logo, and that used the word bandito in its E-addresses. The term Banditomania kept cropping up. And so on.

The other thing I noticed was that people were clamoring to get copies, which were apparently very scarce. Expanding my World Wide Web search, I was astonished to discover that my little trade paperback was now selling for up to $300 (for copies in good condition and apparently signed by me), at rare-book stores and at auction. (The original cover price was $5.95. Ahh ... the good old days.)

I was amused to find that I was often referred to as “the enigmatic author.”¹⁴

I called a rare-book store in Santa Monica, California, and made inquiries about my old book, meanwhile failing to mention that I was the enigmatic author.¹⁵ The fellow I spoke to offered to sell me a copy for $150. He said the reason for the low price was the copy’s condition. A previous owner had apparently made lots of notes in the margins. This piqued my curiosity, but not to the tune of a hundred and a half.

Warming to the subject, the fellow then informed me that he’d recently come across some interesting information via a reliable source in the rare-book biz. He paused for dramatic effect.

“The author, this guy Weisbecker, doesn’t actually exist,” he said.

Were it not for the fact that I make the assertion that this Foreword to the New Edition is written at least in the spirit of nonfiction, I might have here claimed to have been beset by another creeping epiphany, or maybe to have been astrally projected back to the roadside near Motozintla, Mexico, in 1997. I might even have come up with another goofball term, like vuja de, to describe whatever inner experience I would be alleging. In point of fact, my reaction to the above theory regarding my nonexistence was much more mundane and predictable: I was swept up in an almost overwhelming sense of scholarly superiority.

“Word is,” the fellow at the rare-book store smugly rambled on, unaware of my overwhelming scholarly superiority, “that Thomas Pynchon¹⁶ actually wrote Cosmic Banditos.”

I was given momentary pause as I reflected that there was a connection between Pynchon and myself. A connection that the fellow on the phone might find interesting, if he thought about it. The connection was this: Pynchon and I shared the same literary agent. This could be viewed as a potentially suspicious, even sinister, circumstance, especially if one is given to belief in conspiracy theories regarding authors who don’t actually exist.¹⁷ I was tempted to point out the three-way relationship between Pynchon, myself and the agent, just to get the fellow’s reaction, but then realized that there was a conceptual problem in doing this. I needed to simultaneously maintain the original theory, i.e., that the author of the book, this guy Weisbecker, me, doesn’t exist, for the three-way relationship revelation to be meaningful. In other words, if the theory of my nonexistence went out the window—was, in effect, defenestrated ¹⁸—by my owning up to being me, then the three-way relationship would be neither suspicious nor sinister.¹⁹ In which case, why had I brought it up at all?

This is exactly the sort of paradoxical conundrum that makes time travel an unlikely scenario, at least in our branch of reality.²⁰

The probability that the story conveyed in Cosmic Banditos would actually happen is probably very small; but it is not impossible. Cosmic Banditos might be an improbable story but not an improbable one (sic).²¹ It is a humoristic work, with psychedelic ingredients. But it is also a philosophical work about human knowledge and the perception of reality. You could call it a postmodern pulp “tzeuberg.”

I feel no shame in admitting that the “postmodern pulp ‘tzeuberg”’ bit left me in the dust.

Just one more example of this sort of thing, but one with potentially distressing implications. In 1991 I bought 100 copies of Cosmic Banditos from its original publisher, Random House, at a much reduced price. Something like a buck a piece. This was possible because the book hadn’t yet caught on²² and Random House was desperate to dump the stacks of it that were cluttering up its warehouse.

I’d love to be able to claim that I bought the 100 copies because I suspected that my book was on the verge of rising from the ashes of the remainder bin to become a cult phenom, and that I could then make a killing (100 books at $300 a pop—you do the math), but (again, in the spirit of nonfiction, etc.) alas, such was not the case.

The Gulf War had just started and my plan was to send the 100 books, in separate mailings, to “Any Soldier” over there. (The U.S. government supplied an address for this sort of thing.) This was to be my way of supporting our troops²³—the troops themselves, not the hypocritical, greed-driven slugs who had sent them off to war. I’d written a note on the title page of each copy, requesting that the book be passed along to a comrade when the soldier was finished reading it. I stamped my mailing address under the notes, sat back and waited to see what would happen.

The results were spectacular.

Over the next few months I received stacks of letters from our Gulf War troops—more than 100, all told—proof that the troops had done as I asked: The book had been widely circulated.²⁴

This came as a shock, but what took me even further aback was the fact that no one said anything negative about the book. I was in fact prepared for some severe hostility from folks who are in theory the very epitome of the establishment mind-set. You see, aside from being a nonsensical complete crock of shit, the tale I wrote in 1982—in order to make sense of things, of my life—is riddled with drug usage, rampant criminality, blatant and unapologetic nihilism, and all-around chaos and destruction.²⁵

But apart from some gentle chastisement from a few devout Christian types, the reactions were uniformly positive. Possibly a nonsensical complete crock of shit riddled with drug usage, rampant criminality, blatant and unapologetic nihilism, and all-around chaos and destruction is exactly what human beings who are waging war need, to put their situation in its proper perspective.

One letter stood out, however, as an example of something. Around 20 pages, handwritten in a minuscule scrawl, it made the Marxist/bandito manifesto excerpted above look like an archetype of brevity, style and clear thinking.²⁶ My initial thought was that the author was some poor, disoriented grunt who had slipped through a crack in the system and been accepted into the armed forces by unfortunate accident.

Not so. Based on the return address at the end, the guy was an officer, a captain and a military lifer. Interpreting the implications of some of his gibberish, it became evident that he was in command of a bunch—a veritable shitload-of Patriot missiles. ²⁷ My tale of drug-ridden random chaos and destruction had apparently struck a deep chord in the fellow’s psyche.

From the day I received the letter until the troops came home, I watched CNN’s coverage of the conflict with some trepidation, fearing that if something untoward happened with a shitload of Patriot missiles, I would have been somehow responsible. Listen: I’m not kidding.

Indeed, on several levels, the episode is a perfect example of something.

One more thought about this Gulf War business and how it may be directly affecting your life, at this very moment. The thought goes back to how widely the book had been circulated among the troops. My theory is that it had been very widely circulated. How else to explain my receiving more reactions than the number of books I’d sent? And, obviously: Not everyone who read it would have taken the time to respond. In fact, given that the folks over there were somewhat busy dodging bullets and artillery fire, ducking Scud missile barrages,²⁸, avoiding poison gas attacks, yelling at reporters to get out of the way so they could return fire—all the neat stuff that goes with waging modern war—it’s likely that only a very small percentage of people who read the book contacted me.

What if thousands of Gulf War troops had been subjected to my nonsensical crock? And what if my nonsensical crock had, for a high percentage of those troops, put their situation in its proper perspective? In other words, had a positive effect, essentially perverse though it may have been? And then, those troops having come home, what might they have told their friends and loved ones about this book they’d received out of the blue? And what might have then happened, in terms of demand for the book?

Do you see what I’m getting at?

The timing would have been right. As far as I can figure, in 1991 Cosmic Banditos had not yet begun its rise to pop cultdom. People were not yet clamoring for copies. Proof of this is the fact that Random House had gleefully coughed up a bunch for a buck a throw.

Yet, soon enough, people would be clamoring for copies.

Paying hundreds of dollars for copies signed by the author. ²⁹

The direct upshot being that the powers-that-be in the publishing business would see fit to give Cosmic Banditos another shot.³⁰

What we have here is a convoluted, ridiculous chain of cause and effect, for the moment terminating with you reading these words.

By the way: As you will likely soon find out, convoluted, ridiculous chains of cause and effect are what the fucking book is about.

Speaking further of what the book is about, any or all of the following concepts may be occurring to you at this moment : creeping epiphany, arrow of time, bizarre twist of fate, enigmatic, vújà de, Motozintla, Bolivian burrito (or Bolivian bandito), clownish, postmodern pulp “tzeuberg,” you’re out of luck, kaput.

And, need I say it? A complete crock of ...