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.