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.