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.’