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.