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.

10.

We visited some of Little Chris’ friends. These were people from Baton Rouge who long ago abandoned that septic city of pothead busting cops. Here the music ran through the water system and weed was so easy to find that it was practically legal. Their bungalow was in my old neighborhood and a few of them were on the porch smoking cigarettes when we pulled up in my antique car. They eyed Chris warily as he approached them with a broad smile and an outstretched hand. They were cordial to me and thought my dog was the bees’ knees but for Little Chris there was a big plate of Fuck Yourself. We went inside and sat around the TV set watching music videos and passing a bong. I was introduced to a young woman named Sunny, girlfriend of one of the guys. She shook my hand but would not even look at Little Chris. No one offered us a beer or even water. Little Chris asked a few questions about people they knew. He was surprised so many lived in Austin now. None of them had ever bothered to contact him. He was one of the reasons they had split.

I could easily relate to that feeling. Several years earlier, my buddies all ganged up on me to tell me what a shit I had become. It was true. My closet was filled with my friends’ clothes. I’d lied and cheated and gotten fired from every single job I ever had, wrecked cars, wrecked motorcycles, screwed over all my girlfriends, on and on they laid it on me, making me feel like the insect that I was. They weren’t without faults of course. Peter for example never had a penny (‘I have to cash my check’) yet drank his share anyway. TC would bang your girlfriend as soon as look at her. Russell and Maginnis were incorrigible drunks. But I was singled out simply because they all knew I was different and they encouraged that difference, that need to taste from the well of sorrows, that need to walk through the doors of perception, that need to be lashed to the mast as the Sirens scream, if just to say I’d been there and done that. They knew that and they wanted me to do it and so like any good tribe they drove me from them, sent me off to sea and acid eating seasons of endless summers. They wanted me to feel and do all the shit they wouldn’t be feeling or doing. And if I lived and if I didn’t become completely mad, bad and dangerous to know then I’d share some secret with them, some elixir of beauty that I had extracted from years of wickedness.

In Little Chris’ case, I’m sorry to say that his crew wasn’t ready to welcome him back to the pack. Even I was somewhat shady despite the car and the dog and the money. They were rather unimpressed that we were driving to the border tomorrow to buy a bunch of drugs. Austin was full of drugs. Acid, X, mescaline, coke, good old stinky bud, it could all be had here. Sadly, nobody in this house had any to sell. In fact they wanted us to leave. The TV went silent, the bong stayed unpassed, the silence grew like noise itself until no one could stand it. I got up, Little Chris got up, we said our goodbyes and I called my dog.

Someone had the grace to ask us when we were heading back and I said, “Easter Sunday.” That person mentioned that Sunny was heading back that day as well. She was finishing up her last semester at LSU, same as me.

“Maybe we could caravan,” said Little Chris, making that last effort to be human. His intentions were completely kind, I’m sure of that. Later he would become almost unrecognizable to me but that first morning in Austin, Little Chris was still as sweet as chess pie. It didn’t matter. The road to our own personal hell is paved flat with our best intentions. When Little Chris suggested caravanning, Sunny’s face morphed into a mask of hurried fear, as if she’d just glimpsed herself being hacked to bits.

“I’m leaving really early,” she said. “I might even leave the night before.”

With that we were done with Little Chris’ friends the way they were done with him. It was almost as sad as losing Crazy A. to another man, but not half as shocking. I remembered Big Chris’ words. ‘Be careful. That dude is bad news.’

9.

Dawn caught us somewhere outside Houston. It had been an easy run across a familiar landscape of cities burning in the velvet blackness. Now we were alive and breathing in the Texas morning. We rode under the glorious skies of our 20’s, still unripe, still full of adventures, still sure that we had plenty of time to change our wicked ways. The land unfolded in slopes and gullies, dotted with cows. Abandoned shacks and barns stood out against the golden fields like rotten teeth. The large new homes that had replaced them were all of a piece, chunks of ugly crafted out of bricks and aluminum siding. The road was fast and well-maintained and the cops weren’t copping and we weren’t stopping, not for gas anymore though we’d had to fill up the s.o.b. three times already, not for food because we loathed and despised sustenance, not for anything at all except to walk my dog. He was a rare and gifted beast and exactly the opposite of what I had asked for. The previous Christmas, Crazy A. and I gave each other dogs. I wanted a shorthaired mutt that would get really big. Instead, I received a purebred long hair that topped out at 35 pounds. But Pineapple was the greatest gift a man could get besides the first one, the gift of life. He was young then, not even two, but already he was attached to me like sonar. I need barely speak and he knew my mood. He went everywhere without a leash and if his eyesight had been better I could have taught him how to drive. As it was, Crazy A.’s wonderful Xmas present was part of what was keeping me alive.

So we stopped at a Scenic View and let him urinate on the bushes and chase an armadillo. The view was scenic indeed, miles of land spread out in waves. Standing in the foreground was the largest power plant I had ever sees, an aberrant fortress of petrochemicals pumping clouds of white vapor into the atmosphere, mimicking the cumulonimbus piling up like nuclear explosions. Then we were back on the road and moving fast, that Wildcat engine purring, taking us over the hills and past the Texans in their Texas Ways, in their trucks and hats and boots. We scooted through that clean and law abiding country and I thought of Crazy A. sleeping it off, another night of work probably and she was up until the wee hours but I’d wake her up, see how she was doing, take her out for coffee, show her how much I’d changed in the last few months. Yes, I would surprise her with my presence and then I’d know that I had made the right decision to walk away from her forever love.

And here came Austin, past titty bars and football fields and car dealerships and car hops and everyone was going to work except us, we were going to drop in on all our old friends and prove to them that we were worthy of their respect, their kindness, their welcome mat and toilet seat. We jumped off the freeway and navigated through the streets until we reached my old neighborhood and at last my old house. It had been too big for Crazy A and me and only got more so after our roommate fled. But it was a homey joint with a blasted little yard and a front porch smooth as glass. We got out of the car and walked up to the door. Pineapple recognized his old digs and baptized the corners with his piss. I peered in the windows at the empty rooms. Nada, not even a piece of mail in the mailbox. The neighbor came out on her porch and waved. She remembered me from last year. Chris and I walked over to say hello.

“Are you looking for A?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Gabe, she got married and moved to Chicago.”

8.

A running joke in ‘Doonesbury’ was the attempts by Duke’s translator, Honey, to mask the Duke’s comments when he addressed his Chinese hosts. During one drunken speech, he informed his audience that being posted to China allowed him to fulfill a dream of dropping acid on the Great Wall. Honey told the audience that he had just paid Mao a compliment and they applauded. I found this amusing as I pictured Duke with his sunglasses and chrome dome pouring a beaker of hydrochloric acid on those ancient stones just to watch them burn. But that’s not at all what he meant, and I remember the look on my teacher’s face when I told her that joke. I was in 6^th grade, which is a bit young to be dropping acid.

Acid was around in high school but I gave it a miss. I’d heard of wild freak outs that are more associated with Angel Dust and anything with a name like acid or a complicated word that was shortened to LSD seemed a lot more dangerous than Coy beer and Jack Daniels. I was past my 22^nd birthday before I dosed myself, and it was certainly worth the wait. How lucky was I to have my first trip amongst friends old and new on the sunny shores of St. Petersburg. I stared at the sky seeing my future. There was good grass and sneaky beer and no fear at all. From that December day I was a glutton for the Sid. I took it whenever and wherever I could. Kent and I split a hit on Good Friday one year and the restaurant got slammed. Figuring it was going to be slow, most of the staff had been cut. It was Kent in the kitchen engulfed in flames sending out plate after perfect plate of trout meuniere. It was me, Gabriel the acid-eating freak Doucette carrying huge stacks of plates, pouring wine with aplomb, popping champagne corks. I was whacked like a board and wired for sound but I did it and thanks to an indulgent bartender who kept me fueled with Greyhounds, I waited on 100 people in two hours and walked out the door that night with a thousand bucks. There were those kinds of days and nights back then. But there was also the cautionary tale, the trip gone bad, the party ruined, friends gone in bewilderment and disgust, mad swirling fugues in which your overloaded brain seemed incapable of sorting out your thoughts, where every gesture was bathed in evil, where your overwhelming sense of unease became a cavalcade of crazy horsemen. Like the night of the Twitch.

The Night of the Twitch went something like this. A and I threw a party at the end of the fall semester. The usual crowd of theatre freaks and strippers gathered at our pad. My brother Yves, a freshman at LSU was there as well, drinking deep from the tequila punch. Somewhere amidst the revelry and good vibrations I lost my mind. By that I mean I could not control my own thinking. Instead I saw a film running at hyper speed through the portals of my consciousness. I was panicking. I was freaking the fuck out. Naturally that cancelled the party in its tracks and I retreated (or was hauled) to the bathroom. There on the cool tiles wrapped around the porcelain god, Kent ministered to me the way a true Acid Christ does. He talked me down. He told me that I wasn’t dying, that I was alive and that he loved me and A loved me and Marlon loved me and on and on until I calmed down and realized that he was right, I was a son of Man just like him and not some fool hell bound for a death by misadventure.

Kent was my first Acid Christ. But there is another kind as well and I saw him that night too. Once I recovered my senses enough to sit in a chair and drink a beer I realized that my brother was stretched across the sofa, vomiting into a bucket. His head was in Marlon’s lap and Marlon stroked Yves’ long dark locks, telling him he’d be okay. He’d had too much punch. One of Kent’s paintings was on the wall above them, a line of crucifix telephone poles against a darkling sky. The effect was one of Jesus, dying in the arms of a gay Mary Magdalene. I walked over and crouched next to Yves.

“Are you all right?”

The answer was no and when I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital the answer was yes. And so I turned into the other Acid Christ, the one for whom no good deed goes unpunished. In my acid eating wisdom I informed the house calmly that I was calling 911. And then I did. My friends hid the drugs or left the house as I sat on the couch cradling my brother in my arms. Moments later, the Twitch arrived.

He stood apart from the other paramedics, barking orders as they strapped Yves to the gurney in the living room. His eyes bulged, his bristle brush haircut bobbing like an angry paint brush. Every few seconds his shoulders would roll back and his face would twitch. I stared at him for a full minute. No fucking way. The paramedic does not have a nervous tic. I must be tripping balls. So I said nothing. Not even when I noticed that the paramedics hadn’t properly strapped my brother down. Sure enough, as they carted him out the door, Yves slipped to his right. Or did he? The Twitch told my brother that he needed to sit up properly. My brother gurgled some reply.

“Strap him down you idiots,” I said. “Do your goddamn job.”

Marlon pulled me back and said that if I didn’t cool down they’d be putting me into the back of that ambulance. Maybe they should have. It would have beat the feeling that I carried from that point on. I wasn’t sure anymore if I could trust my own thinking. Did the ambulance driver really have a tic or was I just spazzing out? Did my brother really slip and so had I been right all along that they failed to strap him down? Nobody could tell me, and later when I asked Kent if the ambulance driver really had a twitch, he laughed and said, “You were the Twitch, mutherfucker.”

7.

It was a fun date, one of our best. It was also the last. Crazy A. had driven in from Texas in that big Suburban of hers ferrying my dog and three cats to Baton Rouge. We went out on the town for one more good time, the kind of thing that we were best at. We knew we’d be getting hammered so for once we were smart and took a cab. The taxi driver, a gentle Algerian with one arm, remembered me from the old days when I worked at the Hilton.

“So good to see you my friend,” he said, opening the door for Crazy A. “Salaam Aleichem.”

“Aleichem Salaam.”

He drove us across town in search of Tabby’s Blue Box, a mysterious joint that never seemed to be where you remembered it was. The driver rolled us through the desolate streets near downtown, crossing and recrossing railroad tracks. He stopped for directions at a convenience store where a sign was posted on the window that said ‘We accept torn money.’ The Christmas cheer was in the air and people wanted us to buy things, mostly crack rock and ditch weed. We abstained. We had each other. For one last night we were in love all over again. I was wearing a suit; Crazy A. was in one of her sexy dresses with six inch pumps. Her cigarette burned like a lighthouse, the smoke forming complex colloids in the air. We kissed and touched and she called me Mean Old Gabe. Her voice was gravely as always, even more so with all the hard living of the last year. She still had her looks and her hair was still long and brown and her belly was flat and her booty was black girl big for a white girl. She was perfect and easy in so many ways and I wondered why it just never seemed to work out with us. Maybe we were too alike, born one year and two weeks apart. All we cared about was how we felt and it took a lot of adult-strength Whatever to make us feel anything.

The cabbie got us to our destination and further impressed Crazy A. by refusing to take any payment. He shook my hand, left to left, a great indignity for a Muslim.

“You are a very happy man,” he said as he departed.

I wondered what he meant. Happy that I was with Crazy A. one more time or happy that I was with Crazy A. only one more time.

Meanwhile a woman was standing outside Tabby’s talking into a payphone. She had been listening to someone in silence. Now she spoke.

“You don’t have no explanation, mutherfucker,” she said and slammed the phone into the cradle so hard that it jumped out and dangled on its steel cable. She turned and walked inside the bar. We followed.

Tabby’s son Chris was on stage, cutting the room to pieces with his blues and his guitar. A few couples sat at the little round tables. In the back was a bar where the only thing available was cheap bourbon in a plastic cup. We swirled around each other, touching and dancing. Crazy A. had a magnificent growl and Chris Thomas asked her to get up on stage. She did, and again I loved her harder and farther than the Indian Ocean fighting Jersey Joe. She sang Little Milton’s ‘Grits Ain’t Groceries’ and I wondered indeed if Mona Lisa was a man. Crazy A. had the soul of a hundred misplanted flowers pushing through her body, and inside that body, our child was still alive. This was its last best chance to be the one, a new Christ, one that would cleanse mankind of its sins with something besides blood. But it was not to be.

We took another cab back to my brother’s pad and we went to sleep in the same room for what I hoped would not be the last time. In the morning she put on a red silk shirt and said goodbye. This was it, and she looked lovelier than I had ever seen her. I was turning her loose, turning her over to the wolves and her mother and a someday trip to see a certain kind of doctor. All of that and more as she climbed in that big truck.

“Mean Old Gabe,” she said again, and then dropped it in gear and drove out of my life.

6.

We love cops. They’re so nice. And the best thing about them is that they listen. They truly want to believe your story, your song and dance, your tale of woe. They see so much ugliness, so many stains of humanity that they begin to think that we are a race of ingrates and inbreds. So when they stumble upon our parched and dedicated souls, they are so willing to be easy with us, give us a pass, a chance to reclaim ourselves and our lives. And sometimes, we just amuse them.

For example: back in the day I found it convenient to not possess a driver’s license. I’d missed so many court dates in so many states that I figured I’d just walk, ride a bike, take buses forever. However, when Crazy A. and I were a team I often drove the getaway car. Sure as shit, one day my no-driver’s-license-suspended-seven-(or 8)-times-self was pulled over for running a red light. The motorcycle cop, a handsome man with an ermine mustache waved me to the curb, then continued to write a ticket for some other unlucky fool. I turned off the car and looked at Crazy A. We were both dressed for a Mardi Gras party, half drunk already, high.

“You’re going to have to fake an emergency,” I said. “Or else tomorrow you’ll be bailing my sorry ass out of jail.”

“Okay,” she said with a wicked grin.

As I got out of the car and began approaching the police officer she started shrieking.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“We’re on the way to the hospital,” I lied. “She’s having really bad menstrual cramps.”

“Where’s your driver’s license?”

“I left it at home,” I lied again. “We were in such a hurry I just rushed out the door.”

She let out a series of shrieks that made both the cop and I jump.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, writing me a ticket for running the red light. He have me a break for no license and thank God didn’t call my name in. “Good luck with that,” he said, gesturing to the car. Crazy A.’s shrieks had turned into profanity-laced grunts punctuated with long moans.

“You’re telling me,” I said. “It’s like this every month.”

Which wasn’t true. She was really only like that when I was egging her on.

Little Chris had his own good story about beating the fuzz.

“We were speeding through Iowa,” he said. “Cop pulled us over, made us kneel on the side of the road with our hands behind our back. He ripped my car apart but we didn’t have anything except some acid in a pill bottle. The cop opened the bottle, shook a few pills into his gloved hand, asked me what they were. I said ‘allergy medicine,’ which was true. Then the cop, he was a state trooper, I remember his mirrored sunglasses, he pointed at the sheet of acid all folded up and said, ‘What’s that?’”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said it was the moisture-absorbent paper that comes with the pills.”

“And he believed that shit?”

“Yes he did. He put the acid and the pills back in the bottle, gave me a ticket for speeding and sent me on my way.”

“What would you have done if he didn’t believe you?”

“Well,” said Little Chris, crushing his cigarette out in the car’s ashtray. “I figured I could make it to the nearest cornfield. After that, I had no plan.”

5.

We had a plan. Drive to Austin, Texas and pay a visit to Motherland Mark. We’d hit Barton Springs, cool off, slam a few Lone Stars, burn a few doobies and pretend that I was still young enough to be screwing around like this and not the 27 year old undergraduate I was. Then we’d head for the border, cross the Rio Bravo and buy our personal quotas of Mexican Valium. Maybe we’d get some tequila or a piñata but that would be about the summation of our visit to our southern neighbor. Then back to Austin for more good times. And a reunion with Crazy A. Sure, I had to admit it to myself. I was looking forward to seeing her again. It didn’t matter if she had a new man or a string of new men. I knew she’d give me a hug and a kiss and let me make it right with her one more time. Let me ease the sting of our three breakups in less than a year. Ease the sting of the dead puppy, the dead cats, the runaway tortoise, the abortion. We’d put away all those sad photo albums of the mind and instead we’d break out the Black Love incense and the Boone’s Farm and we’d go at it the way we used to when our love set the world on fire and everybody looked at us and said it couldn’t last. They were right. Nobody can stay on fire forever. Eventually you simply run out of fuel.

Little Chris was along for two reasons. He was my driver, and I intended to split the pills with him and he’d pay me back later. But he had his own agenda as well. He’d killed a crack dealer a few nights ago and found it convenient to leave town for awhile. He related this to me as Baton Rouge disappeared in the rearview and mother night enveloped the car. In the backseat my dog slept peacefully in a curl of tail and ears. Little Chris was behind the wheel, hunched up. The cigarette smoke contorted about him, his face lit up by the courtesy lights. He said that the crack dealer pulled a gun on him and got off the first shots but all were misses. Then Chris pulled out his own weapon.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened?” said Little Chris with a mean laugh. “I shot him in the chest. He fell down and didn’t get back up.”

“Are you sure you killed him?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Little Chris. “I’m pretty sure I killed him. I put three bullets in him.”

“How come he missed and you didn’t”

“Because I don’t shoot like a nigger,” said Chris, and he demonstrated the crack dealer holding the gun, sideways and slack as if he killed ten men a day before breakfast. Maybe, but he missed that day.

Still, he had friends or a crew or someone who would be interested in putting a few bullet holes in Little Chris. The best plan then was to flee Baton Rouge altogether. There was nothing there for him anymore. His wife had fled the state and taken their child. At this rate his daughter would grow up never knowing Little Chris, never seeing his artistic side, the part of him that selected a dozen books from my shelf, plays, novels, military histories, he wanted to know everything, he’d wasted so much time, taken so many drugs, tasted his mind too many times. He’d had close call after close call and so far he’d survived them all. But it couldn’t go on and he knew it. This was the chance then to redeem himself, to sell a few downers and turn it into an upper. A chance to live someplace where nobody knew your mud fence past, where forgiveness was as easy as standing everybody to a round of Irish whiskey. Whatever he had, Little Chris was willing to share. Special coffee, his last cigarette, hell, even a bullet to the heart, Little Chris was willing to provide. All he asked in return was that you understand him, understand the special pains he felt in that stunted junky body. He was a man, but he was incomplete, inchoate, misunderstood. He was superfluous and he knew it. He wanted more and I had the power to make it so.

The Acid Christ

The Acid Christ

1.

How did I meet Chris Morgan? Hard to remember. After all these years, he seems more than a memory, almost a haunting. I’m sure if I dig into my photographs I’ll find that picture of him in the backseat of my Buick, passed out, looking more dead than alive. Those sunken cheeks, full lips, hollowed eyes. The torment. You could see it in him. He was a junky monkey, the kind of kid who starts smoking when he’s six and is doing rails of speed in middle school. And it had stunted his growth. That’s why I called him Little Chris.

I had another friend at this time of my life named Chris and he was nearly the diametric opposite of Little Chris. Tall and tragic, his eyes shot with blood and alcohol and cigarettes, he was definitely Big Chris, though there wasn’t much that was big about him. He was a cool dude. You’d run into him at the Bayou and he’d always buy you a drink. Or three. He and his business partner Andy did as much work from a bar stool as they did from their office off State Street. Maybe more. Whenever I came around to see them, they were invariably staring at the clouds of cigarette smoke forming over their desks, pondering the ineffable with a monkish calm. I’m not sure what their business actually was. They had computers and printers and phones. Publicity, maybe. Definitely not drugs. That’s why I had stopped by, to take their drug order. I was leaving for Mexico that night.

“I don’t have any cash on me,” said Big Chris. “I can write you a check.”

“No worries. I just got my student loans. I have plenty of cash. You want Valium, right? Anything else?”

Big Chris looked over at Andy who was ashing his cigarette into a pool of dried mustard on a paper plate. “Hey spic, do we need anything else besides Valium?”

“Nah,” said Andy. “Well, maybe some speed. Get some synthetic Ritalin if you can. Or Adderall.”

“What’s the matter?” said Big Chris. “Your attention is at a deficit? I hear that. Last time I saw my tab at the Bayou I about shit my pants. That definitely got my attention. Maybe the Valiums will help me drink less.”

“Speaking of,” said Andy, regarding his watch.

“What’s today?” said Big Chris.

“Thursday,” said Andy.

“Oh yeah,” said Big Chris. “Tom Collins, you are a friend of mine. Hey, you wanna come have a drink? Two for one Collins at the Bayou.”

I was tempted. The thought of a big plastic cup filled with gin and sweet and sour mix and ice and a cherry served by a dark haired woman in a darker bar with something wailing on the speakers and the occasional click of pool balls and the low murmur of conversation, professors and students and full time boozers all belly up at the bar, perched on barstools, checking out their reflections in the occluded mirrors, it was tempting indeed, for the Bayou was an oasis in the desert-like heat of Baton Rouge, even if today was spring-like and mild. The Bayou was always a welcome spot to unload your mind and drink deeply and cheaply and remember to remember or remember to forget. The ceiling vanished in cigarette smoke. The bartenders were hot and never screwed the customers. The night doorman was huge and black and kindly. They let you write checks. They let Big Chris and Andy run up huge tabs. And once in a great while, they served Hank the Drunk.

But I had to say no. There was a long drive to Texas staring me in the face.

“You going alone?” said Andy as he rose from his chair and shook my hand.

“Chris Morgan is going with me. He’s my driver. You know I got that whole no-license thing still going on.”

Big Chris and Andy exchanged a look, then Big Chris said, “Be careful, that dude is bad news.”

With that we slapped dap and I was gone.

2.

Little Chris always seemed more grown up than the rest of us. He had a nice apartment, a wife, a kid, a station wagon. He was 25 or 26 but he looked worn and when he moved it was like Pinocchio on painkillers. But he always had good drugs to sell and had a reputation for procuring the best LSD in Baton Rouge. It was coming in from California and a lot of us were eating it every weekend. Each batch seemed better than the last and we’d compare the effects of blue shields versus purple shields versus cartoon Popeyes versus etc. You’d drop by Chris’ pad, his big white cat named Disco sleeping on the leather sofa and Little Chris was rolling a number and the stereo might be playing ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and the big male pot plant named Fred would be thriving in its orange glazed pot and Little Chris’ wife might offer you tea and the baby was getting bigger and life was beautiful. You got your stuff and then you went and did something fun. We didn’t know how to have fun back then unless we were three sheets to the wind. If playing Frisbee was fun then taking mushrooms and playing Frisbee was 200% more fun. If Saturday night was choice already with a pretty gal on your arm and forty bucks to burn on hooch then Saturday night under the aegis of lysergic diethylamide acid was so much the better. I don’t know why we were the way we were. I guess we were the TV babies, burned out on the regular world. We’d grown up on the Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island. We demanded a laugh track. And for a while Little Chris was the funny man. College students came and went, left school and reenrolled and left for good, graduated or quit, it didn’t matter, there was always a steady stream of heads moving in and out of the apartment on Ivanhoe Street.

One day the cops came busting through the door the way they always do, nice and polite. They put Little Chris on the floor and pressed a heavy automatic to his temple and asked real sweetly where the acid was. Disco hid under the leather sofa, ears perked, green eyes taking in the rubber soled boots. The police ripped a safe out of the closet and tore it open. Weed, money, Chris’ pistol but no acid. They wanted the acid. They wanted the acid bad. Possession of a single dose equaled a mandatory five year prison term. The cops gashed drawers, emptied the refrigerator, knocked down books, all the while repeating their mantra, where’s the acid, Chris? Where is it? We know you got acid here. Where is it? Where, where, where is the acid, acid, acid? His wife was holding their screaming daughter. A female police officer had a gun pointed at them both. The life of the drug dealer’s wife looked a whole lot less romantic. Little Chris was on the floor with a knee up his ass and a gun on his medulla oblongata and he probably looked so little and vulnerable at that moment that she made up her mind to leave him right then and there, or as soon as the cops let her go. One of the narcs picked up a comic book from the coffee table and thumbed through it. He knew what he was looking for but he missed it, two sheets of cartoon Popeyes, two hundred hits of bathtub LSD, 1,000 years in jail. He skipped right over that nightmare, tossed the comic book back on the coffee table and gave Little Chris another chance to change his life.

3.

I guess it’s mean to call her Crazy Alice. She hated it when I said she was crazy. Her eyes would get narrow and if she was driving, her fists would clench around the steering wheel and her foot would crush the accelerator and she’d run three or four red lights.

“You wanna see crazy?” she’d say. “I’ll show you crazy!”

I guess what I meant was that she was driving me crazy, but to be fair, I was pretty messed up too. You can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his mother and I rarely spoke to mine. In fact, my greatest fear was winding up like my father, married to a hellion whom he had neither the strength nor the will to desert. Each time Crazy Alice and I had a rumble I’d hear my father’s words flying out of my mouth and hear my stepmother’s coming from Crazy Alice. Sometimes I would be pushed to the edge of violence. Sometimes I’d go over that edge. I hated it in myself, taking out all my stepmother’s abuses on Crazy Alice’s poor and battered soul. I began seeing a shrink, a pregnant psychology graduate student. By the third session, I knew I had to break up with Crazy Alice. We were hell bound and I had no desire to be in hell.

On April Fool’s Day I moved out of the house we shared with numerous animals and people and moved in with a coke whore who worked the cash register at the restaurant. I got my Impala fixed and though I still had no license, I drove with impunity. One night I stopped by the old pad to check on our dogs. They were still puppies and no one had taken the time to house train them. I walked through the unlocked front door into a house of doom. Dogshit everywhere, the stereo playing, most of the lights on, nobody home. I took the dogs for a walk and fed them, put down fresh water, cleaned up the soiled newspapers, put down fresh ones and made a drink. There was no ice as one of the roommates, Marlon, had stabbed the Freon coil with an ice pick. He had also sketched a huge face on the refrigerator door with a Sharpie. The house, once a cozy two bedroom with hardwood floors and a black and white tiled kitchen now looked like a fraternity of freaks had decamped. Quotes were written on the walls. ‘Beware the fury of a patient man.’ John Dryden. ‘In much wisdom is much grief.’ Ecclesiastes. ‘I have decided to believe my own thinking.’ Georgia O’Keefe. There had been a fire when Marlon and Kent passed out, leaving a candle to set flame to a bowl of plastic balls. The fumes had nearly killed them both, coating every surface in the house with an oily black patina.

Meanwhile, the record player reset itself and began to play again. The Fine Young Cannibals. Breakup music. Everybody was breaking up. Alice and I had inspired several other couples to sunder their commitments. The house was usually filled with drunk and high and weepy women. Where were they all tonight? Working. Working at the titty bar. The love of my life had dropped out of college to work as a topless dancer. Like Hamlet in his moment of darkness, I had driven my Ophelia mad. She was Crazy Alice all right but it was me who was making her crazy.

After finishing my warm vodka and 7 and congratulating myself on cleaning up the house and walking the dogs and petting the cats (if all the cats weren’t dead and buried by then) I looked around the house for weed. I didn’t have to look too hard. There were two baggies on a plate on a speaker. I took one, said goodbye to the dogs and their heartbreaking faces and then I left. A last glance as I closed the door revealed a quote written next to the light switch. ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’ Shakespeare.

A few days later I was busted, though I managed to hide the weed from Officer Friendly, mostly because he was too busy writing me tickets for no driver’s license, no registration, no proof of insurance. He let me off on the parking ticket and possession of an open container which in this case was a beer can I had been using as a pipe. The fuzz took my Impala away forever that day and the next day they came to the restaurant and arrested me. It seems I was wanted in New Orleans for felony theft, a crime I had apparently committed in an alcoholic fugue. The fuzz let me call one person before they hauled me off to jail. I reached for the phone and dialed Alice’s number. Somebody high answered.

“Put Alice on the phone right now,” I said. “This is serious shit.”

In my hour of greatest need I called the person I had been hurting the most. Why? Why do we do it? Why do we fall in love with people who end up hating us? It’s a mystery.

4.

We got on the road to Texas but we didn’t get far. Little Chris had forgotten to pack his special coffee, a dwindling reserve of Jamaican Blue Mountain.

“Screw it,” I said but Chris was down to his last few luxuries and his coffee must not be left behind.

So we headed to his parents’ house in Sherwood Forest, a subdivision about identical to the one I had grown up in, Sherwood Forest East. The fact that mine was located 80 miles away in New Orleans mattered not a jot. It was the same kind of soul-sucking paradigm devoid of any culture or mojo or crooked alleys of the mind. It was simply a place where people wanted to raise their kids, free of other races and other religions, well-kept yards and well-stocked gun cabinets and the biggest TV and no books except the Encyclopedia (1959 edition) and the Bible. It was a wholesome place where the daily paper arrived on time and coffee was always ready and everybody worried about black people and the gays. You smoked your Marlboros or your cigars and you talked LSU football and what the old lady was making for dinner and did you see that sweet little piece of ass at work? And it had made Little Chris. And it had made me. We were identical in design, screwed-up lab rats that had jumped the wall. We were addicts in the real sense of the word; our need to be addicted was itself addictive. For Chris, crack rock and other forms of the white menace were his demons of first choice. For me it was weed and malt liquor. And sometimes the occasional hit of LSD. Very occasional. In fact, I was wondering that very night whether I would trip on this trip. Or rather, whether I would trip good or trip bad. There had been a few bad ones lately. Bad enough to make me question whether I would ever trip again.

But that was tomorrow and beyond. Tonight we were steaming up the driveway in my 62 Buick and creeping in the carport door. Little Chris didn’t want to wake his father and I understood why. They, like my parents, regarded him as an untrustworthy menace.

I filled a glass with tap water while Chris hustled the coffee out of the freezer and into a zip-loc bag. We were deadly quiet but daddy heard us anyway. He walked into the kitchen with a chrome plated revolver.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Christopher you scared the living shit out of me.”

“Sorry pop,” said Chris, a sheepish smile on his lips. “I forgot my coffee.”

His father said nothing. He wasn’t interested in meeting me, another one of Chris’ whacked out friends. Go toTexas. He didn’t care. Go to Texas and stay there. Or leave his son there. He’d had enough. You could tell. The way he hung his head, put the gun in the pocket of the robe, walked us to the door, let us out and made sure we were empty-handed except for coffee, yeah, you could tell that he was ready to close the door on his son forever. I knew it because I’d felt it from my own clan. ‘Go away,’ Gabriel, my father might say. ‘I love you but you just keep breaking my fucking heart.’