17.

I saw Big Chris one more time before I left Baton Rouge forever. He was perched atop a bar stool at the Bayou, sipping from an endless glass of scotch. From time to time the bartender added a cube of ice or a splash of Macallan but the rocks glass never left his hand. On the bar in front of him was a silver cross pen and a checkbook. There was something vaguely medical about Big Chris as if he were the world’s top surgeon who’d become engulfed by drink and so was often called upon for consultation but kept far away from the scalpels. He toasted me.

“I just paid my tab,” he said. “1,367 dollars. Can you believe that? Can you believe that shit?” He laughed and wiped a tear from his eye. He and Andy were shutting down the business. Andy had knocked up his girlfriend and they were moving to New Orleans to have the child.

“Stupid fuck,” said Big Chris. He had woman problems of his own. He’d fallen for a foreign woman who spoke in a foreign tongue. They’d stay up all night talking philosophy and smoking cigarettes. He was getting no sleep and no work done and had become somewhat addicted to Mexican valium. He’d been Little Chris’s best customer but wasn’t at all sorry to hear that he’d been killed.

“Fuck him,” he said. “The last time I bought from him he threatened me. He came over to my house and said he could ‘get me’ now if he wanted because he knew where I lived. That shit head. I wish I had killed him. I told you he was bad news.” Big Chris stubbed out his cigarette and took another sip of scotch. “I got the last laugh anyway,” he said. “I still owed him twenty bucks for the last bottle of pills. Ha. Can’t pay that debt, fo’ sho.”

In fact Big Chris had been all over Baton Rouge that day paying off everyone he owed money to. He wrote them all checks and they all bounced. When I heard that later I wasn’t surprised. I had done stunts like that myself, though thankfully with cash. It was the need to redeem ourselves. We wanted it like everyone else. We walked through the desert and sought communion through acid with the Acid Christ. It wasn’t enough to achieve salvation. It had to be a good time.

The semester was almost over when I got the news about Little Chris. The last time I saw him was Easter Monday. He had spent the night on the couch after our all-day drive from Texas. In the morning I boiled up some cowboy coffee while Chris looked over my books. He selected a short stack of everything but he wanted more than that; he wanted to move in with me, as had once been the plan. He had stuck me with this pad, a little too big and too far from work and school but I’d grown accustomed to the African rhythms of the neighborhood and the easy access to the levees. I had room for him and he promised he wouldn’t take up much space, I’d never know he was here and he could help me walk Pineapple.

I stood in the doorway, sipping hot coffee, thinking it over. An eerie wind began to blow through the shotgun double, whipping and swirling, shaking the boards. It felt like the ghost of a dead crack dealer and it promised to destroy Little Chris and me and my good dog. I stood there so long, paralyzed with fear that Little Chris said, “Say something man. You’re creeping me out.”

I looked at him and said, “I’m sorry brother. You can’t stay here.”

He gave me a look. ‘You too?’ That’s what that look was. Then he spat his coffee out in the sink and walked out the door, leaving the books behind.

I called his father one afternoon in early May. It was the only number I had for Chris that worked anymore. A woman answered and when I asked if Little Chris was there she said, “He’s dead.”

“What.”

“He’s dead,” she said. “Or almost.”

“Wait a minute, Chris Morgan is dead?”

“Or almost,” she said, sounding both bored and annoyed.

“Where is he?”

She told me the name of the hospital and when I asked her what he’d been admitted for she said, “Gunshot wounds,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

I went to see him but he was so messed up they would only let me look at him through a pane of glass. He’d been found in his car shot to pieces and that consumptive body would only be able to hold on so long. As he slowly expired I thought of the chance I had to save him. I knew that as he lay there hooked up to the Great Twitch itself he forgave me. The only things going through his battered brain were thoughts of making it all up to his daughter. He’d get back the apartment, the cool car, the good coffee, dig up Disco, call upon all the old friends, reestablish his west coast acid connection. It would all come together, she’d see. Once he had owned that town.

16.

The Acid Christ was a mural of Jesus spray painted on the outside of a bar. A kid from Germany did it as a gift to the community. One look at him and you could tell he’d had a good summer as an exchange student. He smiled broadly as he worked, drinking from a quart bottle of beer. The Bayou was paying him in acid and he’d been up for two days working feverishly. Now in the hot darkness of a July night in the Deep South, he applied the last spray-paint to the eyes, black voids that promised everything and nothing. His American girl sat on a nearby curb clutching her knees, admiring her German.

“Jesus is the loneliest man that ever lived,” said the German kid with a smile. “When He died they buried him in a graveyard where no one knows His name.”

The kid went back to Germany but his gift remained, unsullied, revered. The other random graffiti around the Acid Christ was replaced with a series of interlocked tube figures, red and blue victims of life on the floating clock of HIV. Someone cleaned up the moon that had been shining on the alley since the 1970’s and for awhile, the Bayou was holy ground where a man could go to get his swerve on, smoke a little doobage, drop a little acid and when he was feeling gooey, he could go outside and get right with The Man. There was the Acid Christ, a dark-eyed forgiving face whose tightly-coiled locks were wreathed with thorns. You looked at that LSD messiah and you asked forgiveness or you told Him your worst fears or you prayed for love or you just watched and waited for people to walk by and admire the mural, knowing that you had been there when He was born.

One night, Kent and I stumbled out of the Bayou to burn a number. Kent’s ex lived in an apartment down the block and he decided to go spy on her apartment. We huddled in the bushes under the darkened windows of her pad, passing the joint back and forth like two giggly girls. But a few minutes later we realized that her windows weren’t dark because she wasn’t home. Quite the opposite. She was with someone and she was loud and getting louder. Kent and I beat a hasty retreat back to the Acid Christ, both of us embarrassed at what we’d heard and done.

Crashed out in the alley was Hank the Drunk, nearly naked, his long stringy hair in a corona around his puffy and ravaged face. He’d been chalked off like a homicide victim and a crowd of skater punks gathered around him, laughing. Someone had drawn a chalk arrow pointing to his ass and had written ‘fuck me’ on the cement. We passed this scene in a flash and headed inside. I bought Kent a round and he bought me a round and we tried to console each other about what losers we were when it came to women. I spied a tall redhead shooting pool and pointed her out.

“Maybe she wants to be your rebound,” I said.

Kent laughed and said, “I’m not into guys.”

“That’s a girl. It’s a tall girl but that’s definitely a girl.”

Kent laughed again and said, “Five bucks.”

“Five bucks that she’s not a girl? You’re on.”

We stepped over to the pool table and Kent greeted the Redhead. “How’s the game going?”

The Redhead gave Kent a whothefuckareyoulook and said in his deep voice, “Pretty good.”

Then the Redhead made his shot, took a sip of beer and stepped over to kiss on a brown-haired girl. Meanwhile I was reaching for my wallet. I was also questioning my own thinking once more. If I couldn’t be sure about the Redhead, what could I be sure of anymore? Maybe I’d fried my mind so hard there was nothing left to sieve fiction from reality.

Reality was passed out in the alley. Big John the doorman asked Kent and me if we would take Hank the Drunk home.

“Sure,” said Kent, ready to redeem himself for letting another one get away.

We shooed away the skaters and hoisted the dead weight that was Hank the Drunk onto our shoulders. It was like carrying a sleeping horse that might all of a sudden kick out in terror at the unholy dreams crashing through its mind. We lugged that bloated wastoid of a body to Kent’s car and poured him into the backseat.

“Where does he live?” said Kent.

Indeed, where did a dude like Hank the Drunk live? Rumor had it that he came from money and his parents paid him to not come home. That seemed reasonable. The thought of Hank the Drunk knocking on my parent’s door would send them to the cancer ward. The looks of the neighbors peering from behind their blinds, the postman passing, throwing worried looks at this poor creature in ass pants and blown up huaraches, shirtless, his hairless chest covered by a fur lined arctic coat that he wore 365 days of the year. In that poor tragic face was just too much heartbreak for one lifetime.

However, Hank the Drunk did have an abode, an apartment on State Street, nearly stumbling distance home from the Bayou. We drove a couple blocks, parked in the dirt yard and dragged Hank out of the car, onto the porch and laid his wasted ass out on a sagging sofa, face down of course. Then we dusted off our hands and clapped each other on the back and gave one another credit for being sons of God.

There was a party going on down the block, an after hours affair with music and a bong going around the room and ‘A Clockwork Orange’ playing on the TV and a nearly empty keg and a lot of empty bottles of Everclear in the kitchen and pretty much nothing to drink. Kent and I stood in the yard trying to decide whether it was better to stay and hit on the chicks or go home and continue the buzz. The Redhead answered our questions for us. It turned out that it was his house, his party and his girlfriend was standing on the back stoop talking to a handsome guy. The Redhead appeared from inside the house and said a few words to his girlfriend, urging her to come back inside. He said nothing to the Handsome Guy who ignored him as well. Blown off, the Redhead retreated into the house.

He returned moments later carrying a full quart of Colt .45 malt liquor. I eyed the bottle greedily, hoping he might pass around that sacrament and assuage our thirst but instead the Redhead threw the bottle into the Handsome Guy’s face, breaking the bottle and breaking the face. The Brown-Haired Girl screamed and ran inside. The Handsome Guy collapsed to the ground but to his credit jumped immediately to his feet. But he had only one move he could make and he made it, staggering into the darkness trying to hold together with bloody fingers what was left of his face. The Redhead looked over at Kent and me.

“You saw him! He was trying to take my girlfriend!”

We took off.

The Handsome Guy was a block ahead of us moving quickly but erratically. As he reached the corner at State Street he fell to his knees, blood running off his head in a stream. A figure emerged from the shadows and pulled the Handsome Guy to his feet. As Kent and I ran up we saw it was Hank the Drunk putting his arctic coat around the Handsome Guy’s shoulders and taking him up onto the porch of his apartment house.

“He has been smitten by the Lord,” said Hank the Drunk. “He is bloody but he is unbowed. And if he lives he’ll have a good story to tell. And a gnarly scar.”

Kent and I walked back to the car.

“That was crazy,” he said. “What a night.”

“Indeed.”

“Oh well,” said Kent. “Good old Hank.”

“Every man an Acid Christ.”

“I like that.”

“Me too.”

“Words to live by: every man an Acid Christ.”

“Every man an Acid Christ,” we both said.

15.

Easter Sunday we pointed the Buick east and headed home. Once again Little Chris was behind the wheel, smoking and grimacing at the shit sandwich he’d made for himself. He’d sold zero pills in Austin. He saw the entire place as being a Potemkin village of coolness disguising the ugly reality of what he was and what he meant to the people there he once called friends. For no other reason besides stubborn foolishness, he rejected any thought of staying anyway if only for the simple matter that certain people in Baton Rouge wanted him dead.

“Fuck it,” he said as Texas whipped by. “I used to own that town.”

For me I couldn’t wait to get out of Baton Rouge for good. I had been poisoning that place off and on for nine years. Friends had gotten in and out of LSU and come back for law degrees and here I was still trying to pass college algebra. No license, no girl, nothing but a lot of debt and a half dozen suspensions. But for now I had clarity. That last bad trip had scared me more than any of the ones before. Even that hellish day in New Orleans, with carnival ringing in my ears and the uncertain thoughts of whether I was alive and experiencing all of this or simply having that last incident at Owl Creek, so to speak, no, none of that could compare to what I felt in those few moments in San Antonio. I had willed myself to not lose my shit. I had become an Acid Christ. For now I knew they were everywhere.

I had met one this past Mardi Gras day. He was a salty old Mick who marched with a crew of his fellow Hibernians. Two years ago I took a random black and white photo of him while I was partying with my friends. The next year I spotted him again at the same intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles. I pointed him out to Mrs. A. and then snapped his photo, that one in vivid color. Then I saw him again. Three years in a row this clean shaven, white haired, gleamy eyed Irishman crossed my path. In the middle of my freakout, my eyes hidden behind sunglasses to hide the terror I felt, I approached him. We were about two blocks from Canal Street and the parades were passing like one continuous riot. In all directions we heard sirens.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You don’t know me but my name is Gabe Doucette.”

“Hello Gabe,” he said with a boozy smile. He was in full green and white silk costume with a jesters cap on his head. He was carrying a tall sheaf of paper flowers which he’d been trading for kisses and he wore the look of a man who’d kissed thousands of strange women in his life. I told him that I’d seen him three years in a row and twice taken his picture and now I had to meet him. I’m not sure he understood me. He was heavily sedated and I was tripping on acid. But he listened patiently and when I was finished rambling he clapped me on the back.

“I just got off the phone with my brother in Baltimore,” he said. “You know what today is in Baltimore?”

He paused to let me think about it. Sirens were blasting. Drunks walked the streets in profusion. Freaks in costumes, freaks in my head, the parades blowing down the street in sheets of screams and brass bands. I searched my mind. Baltimore. What was happening in Baltimore today? Drawing a blank I looked at the old Mick and said, “No, what’s today in Baltimore.”

“It’s Tuesday,” he said, casually looking around at the chaos that surrounded us. “In Baltimore, today is Tuesday. That’s it. Tuesday.”

Then he shook my hand and walked away.

That clarity. I loved it. I needed it. And on the ride back to Baton Rouge, something happened that made things even clearer, more obvious that there was no one more worth saving than myself. It was a simple thing, as always. A jeep blew past us outside Houston. The girl I had met a few days ago, Sunny, was behind the wheel and I pointed this out. Little Chris made a face like he’d just smelled his own shit.

“That bitch,” he said. “Another liar. She said she was leaving a lot earlier than us. She just didn’t want me riding back with her.” He stubbed out his 10,000^th cigarette and rolled the window back up. Adjusting his battered jockey body in the soft bench seat he said, “I’m glad I fucked her ass that time she passed out at Starr’s party.” He laughed real mean, a scrathchy laugh from the back of his throat. “Hell yeah,” he said. “I tore that shit up.”

14.

Pink Floyd’s Laser Show.

Split the pills with Little Chris and watched him make his rounds of the trailer park, trying to induce its citizens to purchase Mexican Valium. Good luck. Their tastes tended towards crystal meth but who knew. Everybody can get too high. Oh yes they can. Meanwhile Motherland and I were preparing ourselves for the trip to San Antonio to see the Floyd. I’d been warned that it was a life-altering experience and I was ready. My mind was such a ball of confusion already, I may as well alter it some more. Bang and a door slammed shut. Little Chris retreated from a weed-filled yard. I guess they weren’t interested. My poor amigo. Once more his stubborn pride wouldn’t let him say yes to a free ticket to the show. He’d sit at the picnic table next to Motherland’s trailer and continue his long letter to his wife. He wasn’t sure of her address. He might have to tie it to a balloon and set it free. He needed to tie himself to another balloon and cut the cord, let himself off the hook for his crimes. He wanted to be a good father. It was in him to do so. If he could just get over the hump, get it all together, make a new start. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Little Chris backing down someone’s driveway with his hands in the air. The owner of the trailer was advancing towards Little Chris with a heavy revolver in his hand. No sale there today.

So back in the Buick and Motherland behind the wheel and me rolling my terrible joints, the kind that look like a python swallowed a porcupine. We had these huge horse tranquiller sized pills that allegedly were Ecstasy but might actually be acid. Or something else. Who knew what was going around in the mid-90’s? Heroin, borax, PCP, we put anything into our livers and figured what didn’t kill us would make us stronger. Why were we like that? Could we just blame our parents and call it a day? That seemed too easy, but the evidence was all too real. My own family was a nest of alcoholics, drug addicts, attempted suicides and long stints in the pokey. Motherland’s tale was about the same. At that very moment his mother was behind bars in Huntsville, his brother was on the run for manslaughter and his father was on a three day blow from which he would arise on Easter Sunday with a tattoo on his forearm that said Inez and he had no idea who Inez was. He’d eventually replace it with a really cool panther.

But that was later. Let’s get our ass to the show and our butts in the seats because we need to get this freakout on. Because that’s the whole point. Now the following should not be construed as medical advice because it isn’t. But maybe you’ll use it someday when you see someone acting like I was. Because once we got settled in the stadium and the lights went down and the chick on the stage started wailing and the music was boiling and we were reaching for the first joint to ease us through the ragged edges of the X, or LSD or whatthefuckever, sparking it up, there were the ushers with flashlights and their Gestapo powers to eject you from the concert if you even thought you were going to smoke anything in this pristine stadium where no football team played. And so I sat there feeling whacky and I began to get the premonition that I might be having a bad trip and then I was, I was beginning to get the crazies, the roar in the ears, the swirl of maddening voices, the panic attack. I looked at Motherland. He was loving every minute of whatever the drug was doing to him. Not me. I left my seat and headed for the concession stand. Surely a Coca Cola was the answer at a time like this.

I stood in the line surrounded by San Antonio’s finest. My body began shaking. I thought of the bottles of pills in my jeans, the many jazz cigarettes I held. A fellow standing in front of me glanced over his shoulder. His face morphed into a melting mask of demonic intensity. Oh Lord, oh Lord. This would be a terrible time to freak out. I could see it all happening, the cops shooting me with mace, clubbing me, no Acid Christ anywhere to talk me down, tell me that I was okay, that I was indeed a Son of Man and worthy of Life if I would just get my shit together and calm down. Oh Lord, oh lord. I felt my thumping heart, could almost see it beating its way through my Mr. Fatty t-shirt. My heart. That was it. My heart was going a mile a minute. The overload to my system was telling my brain that I was dying. The sympathetic nervous system. Fight or flight. Or neither. Put on the brakes. Slow down that heart. Take four deep breaths. Relax. Rethefucklax. And I did. I simply stopped freaking out. I ‘willed’ if such a thing is possible my heart to slow down. The fellow in front of me looked over his shoulder again. He smiled. He wasn’t even looking at me. His sandal shoed girlfriend was joining him for a hug. All was well with the world. I was shaking and pissing my pants but I was alive. There’d be no Texas hold ‘em, no death by misadventure. I didn’t think I’d ever want nor need drugs again. I stepped up to the counter and told the pretty girl that I’d like a 7-Up.

“We got Sprite,” she said.

“That’ll be fine.”

13.

We walked the streets of Nuevo Laredo looking for a dentist. After an early morning rising and coffee on the go, Little Chris and I had jumped in the Buick and driven 250 miles to the border. It was a bleak and cloud-covered day. The car, parked on the American side, looked as ghastly in the morning light as the people who’d sold it to me. They were a cancerous old couple living in the lee shadow of a chemical plant in Zachary, Louisiana. The old man had a respirator and spoke through a tube. Forty years in the plants had been good to him. His wife stood under the car port smoking a Pall Mall and giving me the history of the car. Other than the deteriorated paint, it ran smooth as ExLax.

“It’s a good car,” she said, waving the smoke away from her tanned and emaciated face. “It didn’t even catch fire when the plant exploded in ’72.”

Done and for 750 dollars that old stage coach was mine. Of course, it was the apex of folly buying a car when I had neither license nor any need for a car. It was the idea of the grand gesture that still infected my soul, same as it always had. I couldn’t do things straight and narrow, by the book, remain within the system. I saw a system and I sought the means to corrupt it, make it work for me rather than work for it.

Plus I had bad car Karma. I had made some type of devil’s deal with the automobile and though I drove well and was generally kind to my cars, they all went bad on me some how, some way. The Impala, towed out of my life last year, now belonged to a mad tow truck driver in Port Allen. The Toyota had been abandoned when I left to go to sea. The Toyota it replaced was repossessed by the city of New Orleans to pay for parking tickets. The Honda…Not to mention wrecking TC’s car in a head to head matchup against a pickup truck. Then I caved in the quarter panel on his replacement car. Man, was I menace to myself and others or what?

But not today my friend. Not today. That morning in Mexico Little Chris and I were gringos with a grip of cash and just enough Spanish to be dangerous. The way it works is this: a ‘dentist’ writes you a prescription. You pay her, then take your scrip to a pharmacy, get your pills, go your ass back to America. Do not pass Go. Do not buy a woman or any mota or coca or fruit. Do not buy any pottery or velvet Elvis or Corona beer. Don’t drink the water. Do get your boots polished. Do sit in a zocalo and admire the Mexican pigeons and their Mexican ways. Do eat breakfast in some greasy joint where the flames rise behind the mustached cook. Do ignore the stares of the clientele as they attempt to glean whether you are freaks or undercover cops disguised as freaks. I preferred people believe I was the former while Little Chris acted like he was carrying at least two guns. He gave off that smell of desperation, like he was always kneeling at the edge of the cornfield, ready to sprint down those rows and leave it all behind.

Finding a dentist was the easiest part of the day. Walking the steps up to her office was a bit harder. Choosing from the available drugs was hardest, though we knew what we were there for, Valium and a bit of speed. The dentist sat behind her desk under a framed copy of her diploma and passed Chris the photo albums. The floors were threadbare carpet, the walls cheap paneling. Not much dentistry going on. Just as well. A body might get a bit more anesthesia than they desired. We made our choices, paid the nice dentist lady, took our scrips and then paid a guide to lead us around the corner to a pharmacy. Tipping everyone in American notes, we waited to get our prescriptions filled.

Staring through the pharmacy windows, the neon Rx appearing backwards, the street and its milling populace spread out before me, Little Chris shopping for Mexican toothpaste and being told no one bought Colgate because it meant ‘hang yourself’, I had a hallucination. Surely it was brought on by the concatenation of long nights and an endless ride across the nation. And my feeble brain flame was about extinguished from the drudgeries of college algebra and college lit. So I wasn’t afraid of what transpired. I figured I was due a few free hits after all the money I’d spent on acid in the last year.

I saw my father standing across the street, leaning against the wall of a furniture store. He lit a cigarette and blew a puff into the sky. He was clean shaven and very young. I knew why he was there. He’d come to this very town almost thirty years earlier to get a Mexican divorce from his first wife. Accompanying him on the bus ride from Chicago was his soon to be second wife as well as my mama. She emerged now from the furniture store carrying a small stool painted primary blue. She showed it to my father to admire, taking a drag off his smoke. They walked off hand in hand as the Abierto sign flicked off on the store. There was a shout, and my parents turned around. A rider had fallen off his bicycle and the machine was amuck, flying riderless down the crowded sidewalk. People leapt to the side as the bicycle careened left and right. My parents tried to remain together while getting out of the way but it was impossible, and each leapt aside as the bicycle passed between them. You could see it in her eyes; that look that someday she’d jump away like that for good.

Then the Valiums were in our hands and together Little Chris and I walked back across the Rio Bravo carrying nothing but ourselves, a helluva lot of Mexican sleeping sickness and a bottle of El Presidente brandy. The border dicks let Little Chris, murderer, pass right on through but for me they had a special room with flashlights and a nut busting pat down. I was clean as Mr. Rogers but my clothes reeked of concert fumes and the doobie we’d rolled in the car. A German shepherd, thankfully leashed, lunged at my crotch as the dicks gave me the evil eye. They knew a douche bag when they saw one and I had Summer’s Eve written all over me. Done with the questioning and the frisk, they gave me a last look of contempt and let me back onto American soil.

12.

Pumpkin Time. As dusk arrived and with it all the dreams of the gloaming, I found myself packed into a car heading for a concert at the Meadows, an outdoor amphitheatre at the edge of Austin. We’d run into some friends at the springs and they’d invited us along. I said yes. Motherland was working. Little Chris was flat-broke.

“I’ll pay your way,” I said.

But he just smiled and said he wanted to hang out back at Motherland’s trailer and write his way to a new mind. He had Pineapple for company and a snow scene paper weight that he carried around for luck. Inside was a little girl, catching snow on her tongue. He said it reminded him of his daughter, stuck inside a water and wet dust filled world, as far from him as he was from the North Pole.

So it was just me and the freaks, typical Austin people, eat any drug available, smoke anything that was passed to them, have as much sex as they wanted with as many people as possible. They were good hearted souls, people I had met through Crazy A., well-read strippers with gobs of ready cash. Someone passed me a chunk of magic mushroom. Never before had I felt so gladly unconnected to this or any other world. As I walked through the gates of the Meadows I knew I was in for the ride of my life.

It’s wonderful to be a satellite, to have a mother Earth that you can circle while you test the limits of physics. My friends sat on the side of the gentle hill and took in the spectacle of the opening acts as I set forth for the front. Minutes later and a lot of sour pusses passed I was pressed against the front row barricades with the sweaty chicks and the beefy dudes and the worried security impervious to the rock and roll blowing up behind them. I was there when the Smashing Pumpkins took the stage and smashed us. They did more for us in that hour and a half than we would do in all our lifetimes. They changed our point of view. They disarmed us. They gave us that rare feeling normally associated with scenes of mass violence or mass suicide or the second coming when all of us with ears open felt that we were together in a brotherhood of man. We loved and were loved back. The woman on the stage cutting a cello to pieces was our Uber Mama. The bald giant with the guitar was Zeus. And all of us were springing fully armored from his forehead. That’s when the moshing began.

Or rather that’s when it began for me. I’d always thought it was kind of stupid to jump into a scrum and knock someone around. But I was a natural. I liked to hit and I could take a hit. And buddy, them Texans were built for slamdancing. As the guitars waxed and vox humana competed with vox angelic me and a mob of sweaty knuckle heads blasted each other out of this world. Boom and the shoulder dropped. Bam and someone caught you in the back. Look out above and below because minute by minute there was always a new sheriff in town, someone meaner or bigger or more willing to sacrifice it all to snap your neck back or bust your lip open or drop you to the hard concrete. Little Chris was a monster in the pit, the kind of dude to punch you right in the liver. He’d done it to me at Christmas when we got all stupid in front of the Reverend Horton Heat. Wham and his fist connected. He was that kind of friend and at this moment with the psilocybin eating out my eyes and the hot bodies bouncing I didn’t miss him a bit. Nor did I miss Crazy A. except she wasn’t Crazy A. anymore. No sir, she was Mrs. A. from now on. I had lost her, let her fly away as easy as letting a kit go. No, I didn’t miss her a bit. But that was coming.

11.

At Barton Springs, I invented a new game called Left Finger, Right Finger. You know how girls have that subtle way of adjusting their swimsuit bottoms when they get out of the pool? She usually uses her left or right index finger. Little Chris took left finger. I took right finger. Motherland Mark just laughed. Then he got into it and took left and right finger top. Meanwhile we sat on the grassy knoll and let the sun cleanse us. The tweet of the lifeguards, the splash of the cold water, the shouts and screams of delight, the whizz of Frisbees, the strumming of guitars, the occasional whiff of acrid weed, the lounging bodies, multiple piercings, multiple tattoos, it was all of a piece and excellence had returned. We were alive and well and taking the best that Austin had to offer. Clouds piled up like frosted cakes, beautiful people, well-crafted beer, a green oasis in the bitter badlands of Texas.

Left finger. Right finger. Left finger top. Right finger top.

We were leering but only so much, never staring directly at a girl’s soft spots, never inhabiting a predator’s face. No, instead we celebrated all things woman and all things feminine, how ladies should rule the world; after all they have half the money and all the ass. No, we loved and were loved and treated our women well. Or at least we tried to. Little Chris’ wife wouldn’t take his phone calls. Crazy A. was officially another man’s woman. Motherland Mark had a string of waitresses and strippers. In general we were beautiful losers. But we didn’t care.

Left finger. Right finger. Left finger. Right finger. Right finger. The daily double.

We stretched on the grass, our muscles hard, our abs flat, Motherland as tanned as a Polynesian, me red as a pink rose, Little Chris ghostly white. Already the life was draining out of him, a mental pool of plasma leaking onto the grass. Seeing his old friends had bummed him out. No woman, no money, down to his last pack of American Cancer cigarettes, a last few cups of good coffee and then what? Who knew? Hopefully the trip to Mexico would reap the profits of old, when his phone never stopped ringing and he had the good shit shipped to him from San José California and the money was flying and his friends were many. Where were they now? Nowhere to be seen. He had me and that was it. Motherland had taken one look at Little Chris and shook his head. No way. That dude was bad news.

Left finger. Right finger. Left finger. Left finger top. Right finger.

So when you can’t save the world and you can’t save your friends there’s few things left to do besides try and purify. So get up off the towel and walk down to the water you strapping young dude with your hack peace sign tattooed on your shoulder like something done in jail and the purple rose on the other shoulder for another woman gone years ago, left on the Oregon shore. Always leaving. Always moving on. Young Gabe, young Gabe, when will you ever grow up, settle down, become something more than a traveler through life?

I stood on the edge of that long, spring-fed swimming pool. It was cold and deep and 300 yards to the other side. The eyes of God upon me, I dove in and swam across as if my life depended on it. Which of course it did.