Punked-Out Punk: Part Three

Oh thank God, they’re “American-owned”

I pulled into the motel parking lot carefully listening for the crunch of syringes and crack vials.  Didn’t hear any.  They must sweep the place.  Classy joint this Comfort Inn.  Can’t see why Expedia only gave it two stars.  Maybe at night it becomes a stable for hookers.  Better get the top floor.  Don’t want to be hearing a bed creak every thirty minutes.  Unless, of course, I’m in it.

I parked the car and went inside the office to register.

A gentleman with a southern Mumbai accent processed my reservation, then directed me to a room on the first floor.  I thanked him and went out to get my bag from the car.

Wow.  Plastic key card.  Free buffet breakfast and WiFi.  Dish TV.  Little refrigerator.  Coffee maker.  Call me the King of Siam.  I was ready to settle for windows without bullet-holes and free local calls.  And I get all this.  The gourmet shit.  The Creator is too good to me.  Spoils me rotten.

I went in.  Nice enough digs.  Didn’t smell too funky.  A dark room.  Always like that.  Especially after I make it darker.

I dragged the blackout curtain across the window.  Unpacked some rags.  Put away the soda and beans.  Checked out the bathroom.  Didn’t get the vibe anybody had ever died in it.  Cool.  That’s worth at least half a star.  I got some ice from the machine and filled the sink.

Still feels a little weird not sticking in a bunch of beers.  But not as weird as waking up in a Mexican jail.  Here, see if you can put in cans of soda instead of beer and somehow still survive.

I did.  And did.

Spent the next twenty minutes trying to figure out the remote for the bullshit Dish TV.  Got to the point where I just started pushing buttons randomly.  That’s what finally worked.  I don’t know why I didn’t just do that right off the bat.  Don’t try to figure it out.  Just keep pushing buttons, baby.  Let mathematical chance work for you.  If you’re not hung up on any particular number–every one is a winner.

Wound up tuning into some football.  Two teams I didn’t give a fuck about.  Perfect.  A stress-free sporting event to kill some time.  I can relax a little before getting my eardrums punctured with punk rock.  I leaned back into my stack of pillows and exhaled.  Exhaled everything.  My previous stress.  My present apprehensions.  My future concerns.  Just gassed them out.

I don’t know what particular meditation technique it is, or from which tradition, but I like to make myself disappear.  It’s easy.  Just let the boundary between self and surroundings blur a bit…and poof.   I cease to be.  At least for a little while.

Now and then, I need to dissolve into the arms of Nuit.  “Oh, holy Eternal Void, I fling myself into Your infinite potential.  My fate to You I trust.  Redeem me, if You must.  But I don’t mind being dust.  Amen.”

Sweet inky oblivion.  It’s very relaxing.  And I’ve learned how to obtain it without a motel bathtub filled with beer.

As if the TV would be there. I call bullshit.

I woke up– if not entirely redeemed–certainly more refreshed.  I decided to take a shower.  Already talked to Gurz and he said the bands were still on their way to the show.  That meant I had time to stand under the hot water and realize some things.

Like as long you don’t put any expectations on the evening, you can’t be disappointed.  Don’t feel bad if you don’t feel like you’re twenty years old again.  You didn’t feel so great then either.

And even if the music doesn’t somehow erase all your hard-earned wisdom, you can still make bad decisions.  It’s a choice.

And there’s nothing wrong with mellowing.  So what if you’re not the reckless monster you used to be?  Who cares if you don’t pull down the scenery around you in an operatic gotterdammerung anymore, or make a hobby out of endangering the safety of others?  In fact, everyone is pretty okay with it.  You’re really the only hold-out– the only one giving yourself grief.

Huh.  Fucking me.  It’s always something.

Well, that’s where you come in.  You’re going to take care of you.

Me?  Why me?

Since you already have an in with old boy.  You being him and all.  You can put in a good word.  Get you to call the dogs off you.  You know, cool it.

Hmm.  Maybe.  I’ll see what I can do.  But you know me.

I do.  And I know you know you.  And if you’re cool to you, I know you’ll totally be cool.

Yeah, I know.

So we’re cool?

Totally.

Good shower.

I got dressed.  Laced the Martens.  Ate my salami and beans.  And Brazil nuts.  Washed it all down with a can of diet ginger-ale.  Put a key card in my wallet.  One in my sock.  Left the TV on.  Closed the door.

Okay, let’s see if the kids have anything on this old dog.

(to be continued)

That’s more like it.

Radio Hindenburg

Beloved radio personalities relaxing and eating bread.

For a short time, Marko and I had a late night call-in radio show on KUNM.  A short time because we sucked.  I think it was two shows.  Maybe one.  I don’t know.  I wasn’t there.  The whole thing seems surreal.  Dreamlike.  A dreamlike disaster.

Our friend Kelly was a radio intern at the University of New Mexico.  She offered us the gig.  From 1AM to 5AM, Monday morning.  That’s right. Primetime, baby!

We had never done radio, but after a few beers, decided to expand our undulating horizons.  This might be fun.  Produce a few of our own gag commercials to sprinkle throughout the shift.  Take some calls from any bat-chain pullers,  Pretty much wing it from there with a beer.  What could go wrong?  We were guaranteed to be smash hits.

As long as we didn’t get too crazy.  Too crazy drunk and out-of-control.  On the air.

Okay to be crazy drunk and out-of-control.  Just not too. 

On the radio.

In order to prevent that, we enacted an iron-clad NO DRINKING rule.

No drinking.  Until at least midnight.  So that we wouldn’t be too hammered by one.  Still be able to do radio shit.  Like announce the time.

And not say “fuck” a lot.

It was only the professional thing to do.  It’s a tough business.  Had to be at the top of our game, so we would refrain from drinking until an hour before our shift.  That way we would be less destroyed than normal.  Because we hardly had any time.

It was hard, but we did it.  Had to rent a cheap motel off Central and hole up in it.  Count off the tick-tocks before showtime.

Of course I hated it, but he wasn’t feeling Johnny High-On-Life either.  I felt better seeing him miserable.  Sitting there in a dirty Albuquerque motel.  On a Sunday.  Not drinking.  Nervous about being on the radio.  Nothing to take off the edge.  Except caffeine.  Sugar.  Nicotine.  A few small tablets of Ephedrine.  Snorted whole off knife-point.

Yeah, it was a lot of laughs, until I realized I was in the same predicament.

Cleaning our finger nails.  Sharpening knives.  Tossing cards into the toilet.  Anything to distract ourselves from the gut-sense of doom.  Knowing we were going to be on the radio.  Knowing it would be bad.  Knowing that whatever happened that night, there would be witnesses.  Maybe not too many.

But it only takes one.

Twaz bruttle, bro.  Knowing the seediest Albuquerque had to offer was just a cap-flick away, and having to sit there.  Sit for a while then get up and pace.  Endure a crawling clock.  Murder the minutes.  With cigarettes.  Coca-Cola.  And Elvis.

Viva Las Vegas was on one night.  We sat there and watched the whole stupid thing.  All of it.  Without drinking, we had no options.  Without our brewed propellant, we were reduced to watching some guy in a pantsuit sing.

Like the rest of America.

It was humbling.

At one point, Marko started singing along.  His dad was into The Elvis, so he knew all the words.  Strange enough, but more disconcerting to watch him belt it out.  So earnestly.  With such feeling.  Eyes burning.  Really trying to sell it.  Singing like his whole career depended on it.  Like everything depended on this Elvis impersonation.

I’d never seen him like that.  Dude was David Lynching me.  Laying down a highly-effective creep-out.

What made it scarier was the fact that he was stone cold sober.  So this is what happens.  My God, he was falling apart.  Going full nut-job.  Stark raving mad.

I joined him in the chorus.

“VIVA LAS VEGAS!”

At the top of our lungs.  Like children would go hungry if we didn’t squeeze out every decibel.  And mean every word.

“VIVA LAS VEGAS!”

Sonofabitch we were happy when midnight arrived.  Oh, Holy Hour of Magic, Thou Art Come to slake our forsaken thirst.

I remember waiting outside in the parking lot of the station,  Marko’s beeping Casio our starting gun.

Teep!

Right.  We have one hour to drink enough beer.  Before we go in.  Only one hour.  We have to drink a lot beer.  Really fast.  Before we go in.  Because once we go in, we’ll keep drinking of course.  But we only have an hour, to drink as much beer as we can…before we go in.

“So pound it, mother!  Because we couldn’t drink…”

“A beer every six minutes will still only be ten.”

“…all that time before!”

“Every five minutes will kill twelve.  But these are twenty-fours.”

“And a whole bunch of …Glug-glug-glah…other good…Glug-glug-glah…reasons.”

“We can kill fifteen.  But we’re gonna have to drink pissing. ”

“Don’t waste time doing math…Glug-glug-glooog-gah-glug ghaaach!  Pound!”

A determined individual can get pretty intoxicated, even in an hour.  But two motivated souls, supporting each other with encouragement, can achieve something really amazing.  Something rarely seen.

Gassing the big cans of Heineken straight down the throat.  One after another.  Non-stop.  Like some Indian sadhus showing-off in a beggar’s market.  Trying to get into the record books.  Trying to become eight-armed Hindu beer-drinking deities.  Popping a can with one hand while rolling out an empty to Kelly with the other.  To crunch.  Put in the trunk.  Recycle for cash.  Buy more cans.

“Every one of these is five cents we get.”

“Stop counting, fucker.  Pound!”

Gatling gunning them.  Spitting the casings out on the asphalt .  Kelly stomping on them with her big long legs like she’s dancing for rain.

“Are you guys going to be okay?”

“We’re gonna kill the world!”

Looking back, we would’ve been better off just coming in our regular amount of drunk by 1 AM.  Instead of pulling the elastic band all the way back, on a Sling-shot Sunday.  Then launching the show, after a Blue God Power Hour.

Live and learn, eh?  But at least now we were ready.   Ready to shine.  To radiate our bliss.  To bless the masses with our joy infernal.

Confidence restored?  Check.  Reckless disregard engaged?  Check  More beers in the jackets?  Checkmate.  We were ready.  For everything.  Ready for work.  We went in.

I don’t remember the D.J. we took over from, commending us on our professionalism.  For not drinking since midnight.

Fuck him.  We were plenty drunk now.  Thaaat whole caring about what people think wasss…ssomethinggggggg shhtupit 4 4 4 ofer chumfs an peepols wiff aaaahfukinon’t give-vah rattsaasss!  Mether feck head.  Hitler fecker…head-erhp I benner not say thaaat on a radio.  FC…CIA Nazi policituations an shit.  Wazz up Alqueburque?  Aneee strange stupf in a house? Here putty putty catty.  Gha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Pip.  Pop.  Fizz.  Glug.

Glug.

It didn’t go well.

Really love a rewind.

Don’t get those on live radio.  Or life.  And since this was both, we were double-fucked.

It was so bad, I hesitated writing this little piece.  That’s right, I didn’t want to revisit it.  Shit was bad enough to scar, even beneath an alcoholic blur.  One of those treats.  What I like to call my “special memories.”  The gut still tightens when I remember certain parts.

Ah, but you guys are like family to me, so what the hell.  I’ll share what happened.

Someday.

Not ready just yet.

But I will tell you, that not remembering to announce the time, wasn’t the worst part.

When Every Day Sucked.

I remember driving home from work one night.  Eight and a half hours without a drink.  The bolts were starting to pop out of the seams.  The matrix of reality, warping and woofing.  Psychosis nudging in.  Fear already camped out.  Making S’mores.

Besides a suspended license, I was driving with two feet.  Why?  Because I had drop foot, which is some form of alcohol-induced neuropathy.  Or at least that’s what the Chinese acupuncturist diagnosed.

But what does a few thousand years of medical wisdom know?  All I know is that it made me unable to lift my right foot.  I can’t move it from the gas to the brake.  Which turns out to be an important driving ability.  And this was an important time in my life, to have good driving ability.  Dig?

My solution was to outsource the job of braking to my left foot, while my dead right one would be in charge of flooring the gas.  I’ll be honest, it’s not the easiest way to drive.  Lot of lurching and sudden stopping involved.   Especially when braking for the Iguanacolussus, an irksome multi-ton ornithopod from the late Cretaceous period that keeps scuttling out into the middle of the road.  And then disappearing.

Anyway, I finally get my beer and I’m almost home.  Whip-lash Larousse just has to cross Cerrillos Rd. and he’ll make it.  Hands trembling.  So close.  To my beer.  To relief.

Then I spot him.  A cop cruising by the other way.  I look up into the rear-view.  Watch his brake lights flash.

Oh fuck no.  Please no.  Of course, yes.  There he goes.  Turning around.  And coming up right behind me.  Oh God.  If he pulls me over for anything I go to jail.  That much is guaranteed.  Just don’t panic.  The most important thing is not to panic.

I look away from the mirror in time to see the light turn red.  I panic.  Mash both feet down.  The gas and the brake together.

Bad move.  In terms of staying under the radar.

My back tires spin in a smoking burnout.  Just lighting it the fuck up.  All N.H.R.A.  Funny car shit.  The chassis tap dances through the red light, and into the middle of the busy intersection, where it comes to rest after I finally picked up my feet from the pedals.  Traffic both ways screeching and skidding to a stop.  Me just sitting there with my eyes shut.  Awaiting impact.

There was one final tire-squealing brake, and then silence.  I had stopped the entire intersection.  Now sat there idling.

I am so going to jail.  I am going to have to detox behind bars.

“Sweet Lord. help me.”

I look up at my rear-view.  I can’t believe it.  He’s gone.  The cop is not there.  Honest to God, he wasn’t even driving away.  He was just…gone.  I don’t know if I hallucinated him being there in the first place, but I know I didn’t hallucinate him not being there.  Because if he really was still there, I’d be in his back seat.

Holy and most merciful Creator!  Thank You for vaporizing that peace officer.  And hopefully to a happier dimension.

I exhale.  My spine puddles around my pants.  I’m hanging on to the steering wheel, when I see myself in the mirror.  My eyes looked like oven-baked marbles.  All cracked from the heat.  Glowing red.  I looked insane.

Even I thought so.

I lift my left foot.  And then press down with my right one.  The car goes forward.  Okay.  We’ve got this.

I crossed Cerrillos and traffic resumed.  I was going to get to those beers.  And everything was going to be okay.  Until tomorrow.

I need a drink.

I became physically addicted to alcohol around 1995.  The mental component had long been hooked.  But it took a while for the body to catch up.  It made it though.  Hooray!

Previous to this, I had, at times, experienced some ill-effects from consuming liberal amounts of alcohol.  Fire-hosing vomit across stranger’s laps could have been a warning that the quantity of beer I was inhaling wasn’t sitting well.  But once I realized I could carry a chopstick in my back pocket–a black lacquered Chinese one, I figured I’d solved that problem.  Now I could pick and choose where to discreetly dispel any tummy-upsetting froth.

The front entrance of Tom and Lenny’s Shoes, on 63rd Drive, in Rego Park, Queens was a favorite.  I had worked for them once, and felt my treatment there had been unfair.  Perhaps this wasn’t a valid way to protest it, but I just always seemed to feel better after barfing on their doorstep.  And that was good enough for me.

So you see, back then, the repercussions from my drinking, just weren’t bad enough, to even contemplate stopping.  Never mind actually trying to.

Sure, there were the usual hang-overs.  Some of them notably brutal.  But you learned to endure them.  They built character.

The Tuesday morning of a three-day bender, I’d feel a little out of sorts.  A little groggy and nervous about having to operate a vehicle.  Vertigo making the floor roll and buckle.  Eyes blurred from dehydration.  Ice pick in the forehead.   Tainted chowder gurgling in the guts.  Bones hurting and feeling too loose in their sockets.  Sore liver.  Acrid bile percolating in the throat.  Thoughts of suicide.

But it was nothing that a beer and chorizo omelet couldn’t fix.  A tickle of the chopstick, some Gatorade and a breath mint, and I was right as rain.

Then one day, I woke up and noticed my hands were shaking.  What’s this?  That’s so after-school special kind of alcoholism.  So stereo-typical.  So not my Ripley’s Believe it or Not kind of alcoholism.  When talking to friends, I would often cop to being an alcoholic.  “But I’m not one of those…you know…” I’d hold my hands out and make them shake, “I need a drink or I’m going to die kind.  All Ray Malland and shit.”

Well, it was looking like I was becoming all Ray Malland…and shit.

Accompanying the trembling was a rather snappy anxiety, one previously experienced while running from police or watching women take pregnancy tests.  Now it had me teething on a high-voltage power line whenever my beer levels went low.

Fucking great.  I’d sit there frozen in fear.  Too terrified to even twitch.   I’m scared to get up and brush my teeth.  How am I going to manage driving to work on a suspended license, then dealing with the public for eight hours?

It turns out, not very well.

There were moments, when the alcohol was leaving my system, that I thought I would go mad.  Only another Lost Weekender knows what I’m talking about.  It’s a bad dream.  Set-designed by a German expressionist.  The furniture bending at strange angles.  People are talking to you in Swahili or Urdu.  What are they saying?  Am I getting into trouble?  Or are they putting together a lunch order?

“Did someone just say something about Bea Arthur’s vagina?  No?  Never mind…I…”

I don’t know what is going on.

Except that I keep seeing sad angels in my head.  Skull people in concentration camps.  A coughing flower.

My pencil has become sinister and I have to throw it away from me.

As far as possible.

It takes every strand of will-power not to run out into the street flapping your arms.  Sweat pouring from your pits.  Stomach knotted in an icy grip.   Throat dry.  You hear strange organ music coming from the employee fridge.  Spy shadow figures darting around the periphery.  They’re waiting for you.

They can smell your death.

So can you, actually.  There’s a new strange funk that’s clouding out of your pores these days.  Besides, the sour beer smell.  It’s different.  It smells…like decay.  Killing off too many cells at once you are.  That’s kind of unnerving.  I better drink more so I don’t worry about that.

When I started morning maintenance drinking, it wasn’t done in any Cancun spring break, devil-may-care abandon.  It was conscious calculation.  I can’t function without having two or three beers before work.  I’m not drinking to “party down.”  I’m drinking so I don’t see the Devil while trying to make change for a customer.

I have to drink to make it.  Without it, I will fall apart.  Even faster.

I don’t care how much of a dumb-shit, clueless drunk you might be, but when an egg timer gets turned over after every last drink, you realize things.  Like maybe, you’re fucked.

Which is actually good.  To realize.

It’s the most important seed-thought an alcoholic can have.  If they’re going to have any chance.

Fortunately, I had been having that thought a lot.

So things were already good.  And I didn’t even know it.

It Could Be Worse, And Will Be If You Don’t Stop Crying

Not a bad beer, actually.

Right now I’m drinking a protein shake that I ruined by putting in some sort of green algae superfood powder.  I tried to make it more healthy, but I made it too healthy.  Now it tastes like shit.  Like a chocolate, metal, and grass smoothie.  I can taste every one of the essential whatevers in it.  The traces of Boron.  Copper.  Molybdenum.  Chlorophyll.

Fuck it.  At least I’m not actually eating grass.  I’m not having to eat grass because the Cossacks have burned the crops and raped our cows.  So it technically could be worse.  See how I fixed that?  “It could be worse” is like a magic wand.  Now this shake is delicious!

That’s at the core of my survival mechanism.  “It could be worse.”  Instilled in me from my parents.  And I guess one more thing I should appreciate them for.  I don’t know if it’s a Lithuanian thing.  Seems like it.  I’ll ask some friends.  I’m pretty sure it is.  At least from the war refugee crowd and their off-spring.

It was the closer for any shit storm my family had to go through.  Somebody would say, “It could be worse,” and we’d call it a night.  Clock out.  At least now you could brush your teeth and go to bed.  I imagine it’s a form of gratitude.  At least some distant cousin of it.  It doesn’t work so good in jail.  But sometimes you can use it in a hospital emergency room.  Tie up the evening’s festivities with an “It could be worse.”

“The more you bitch, the more God will give you something to bitch about,” was another of our cozy sayings.   I still stand by it.  It seems to be true.  At least in my personal experience.  I don’t know if it’s some cosmic truth.

Like “Nobody likes a pants-pisser in their bomb shelter.”

As insensitive as that one may sound.  There’s some folk wisdom there, albeit of the rough-hewn and gnarled variety.  Basically, panic begets more panic.  And then nothing gets done.  To fix things.  You have to keep your head and not cave into The Fear.  That’s how they made it through the war in Europe.  That’s how they made it here when they came.  They didn’t shit themselves.

They Didn’t Shit Themselves;  An American Success Story.

Anyway, it’s a tradition I’ve tried to uphold.

It’s a lot easier now that I’m not drinking my weight in beer. You know, deftly navigating my ship, The Rocinante, through the Stormy Seas of Destiny.

And holding my mud.

I’ve actually gotten a little braver without alcohol.  It’s taken some time, and then even more time to see it, but I think I’ve made progress.

It’s not like I’m ready to hold the pass at Thermopylae, but I don’t have to drink a six pack before opening my bills anymore.  Or need to drink eight beers to prime myself for the next beer run.  And now (may the heavens tremble at my might) I can kiss a girl with no beers at all.  I mean for me.  She’d still have to be hammered out of her skull.

So yeah, it’s nice, this whole not being too-drunk-to-deal-with-it-all deal.  And, no matter how terribly I may being dealing with it all, at least I’m not dealing with it drunk.  Because chances are my sober fucking-up would look like water-walking compared to my drunken version.

Of dealing with it all.

It’s an advantage a recovering alcoholic has over the normal person.  No matter what our shortcomings, if we stay sober we always have some golden straw to grasp.  Right?  At least that.  At least I’m still sober.

Have some normal person throw that one out.  See who golf claps him.  Big deal.  Shut up and have a drink.

Of course, there’s always the chance the recovering alcoholic will succumb to his/her fear, and then totally destroy their life in a final drunken death dance.

And that, my friends, is where the normal person regains the advantage.

By not doing that.

When things get tough.

Lucky fuckers.  That’s a good advantage.

However, if I do manage to stay sober, well then…I’ve shaved the house’s dice, haven’t I?  C’mon lucky seven, Daddy needs a new pair of pants.

He’s crapped this pair.

(See what I did there, Pauly?  Craps.  Pair of dice.  Pair of pants.  Nice, huh?  I like it)

I don’t know how many of my readers are in some sort of recovery, most probably only from last night’s barf-a-thon, but it’s one of those things ex-addicts and ex-drunks have to do.  We have to be grateful we’re not fucked up on our choice of magic carpet ride.  You take anything for granted long enough, be it a relationship, a car that runs, or some money in the bank, and chances are that something…is going to slip away.

Sobriety is just one of those things.  If you don’t pay enough attention, she can slink off.  Her high heels clacking away into the night.

I really don’t want to go back to drinking.  So I try to be grateful.

I figure that life can be hard enough just regular.  Look, in my own half-assed, duct-taped way, I try to work a program.  I pray to the Unifying Intelligence That Binds Creation, meditate on the perfection of The Silence, contemplate the goodness of all souls, work to be less selfish, admit when I’m wrong, try to be a good listener, help when I can, surrender when I can’t, lift weights, stay away from grains, and get enough Molybdenum .

Basic stuff.  And for the most part, I live a life filled with a lot of wonder, laughter and joy.

But sometimes… old demons stop by the pad and ask to use the bathroom.  Next thing I know, they’re camped out, ordering pizza and pay-for porn.  They’re not leaving anytime soon. Then I find myself treading shark-filled ocean, trying to keep my lips just above the water line.  I’m barely making it.  Barely.  And I’m not even drinking.

The last thing I need right then is a bowling ball necklace.

Let’s see how I do with crippled critical thinking.  After I impair my judgement.  Enough to tap into some creative problem-solving.  Become a drunken genius.  Now I can save the day with a master stroke.  Employ some bold solutions.   Just the thing for delicate problems.  A sledgehammer.  And the blind faith to use it.

So yeah.  It could be worse.

And if you’re drinking to solve something, all you got to do is keep it up.  And you’ll see.

Because it can always get worse.

And probably will.

So cheers to that.

Sorry for the buzz-kill.  I’m out of here.

–By the way, this fucking shake is growing on me.  It’s got a weird tang to it.  And I appreciate that from a chocolate shake.

.

Stopped crying.

Shemp Hair Blues

A Lithuanian with great hair

He had taken some old bills, like the ones for his phone, utilities, a few from credit cards, and splattered them with his own blood.  They were nicely matted in brushed aluminum frames.  I’m sure he was trying to make a statement somewhere among all those statements, but I didn’t get it.

I did get that this art opening was only serving wine.  And that wine gave me a headache.  Had enough of those already.  Speaking of…

My date went from bloody bill to bloody bill, giving them her full aesthetic attention.  Judging them individually by some measuring stick in her mind, she’d nod at one then move on to the next.  Pause.  Stare.  Scrutinize.  Appear to discern something.  Smile.  Nod.  Move on.

Something about the whole act smelled like rotting baloney.  She was too earnest.  Too intent.  My Fraudulent Pantomime Meter was going off, reading “Total Fake-out.”  She just wanted to be seen appreciating the work.  To look like she gave a flying fuck.

I suspected this because that’s what I was doing.

“Very nice, see how he managed to get a clot over his cable late fee,” I pointed out.  “Pollock directed his splatter, but not this concisely.”

She nodded absently and looked over at the artist.  He was on the other side of the room, drinking a small bottle of sparkling water and talking to three women.  In his early thirties.  Mediterranean good looks.  One of those dark guys who can pull off wearing his hair in greasy dangling locks.  Like Shemp.

Very few guys can pull off that kind of hair.  I always admired the ones that could.  Guys like Gibby Haynes.  And Leo Gorcey.  And Danny Trejo.  And Iggy.

The blessed and lucky.

I always loved Shemp’s hair–the way he would curl it behind his ears after getting his nose clawed with a hammer.  Just one more thing to deal with.   Besides having furniture broken over his head, always having to flip back his greasy hair.  While spitting out splinters.

That says so much.  In other words, it’s all in a day’s work when you’re a gnarly fucker.  It’s important to keep your hair out of your eyes while your head is being pile-driven into a cast iron stove.  So you can see better.

That’s so badass it hurts.

It really hurt.  The fact that this guy had his own show at a prestigious Santa Fe art gallery.  That his work was selling.  That women loved him.  That he wasn’t drunk.  That he would soon be sleeping with my date.  And that he got to have Shemp hair.

It was too much.

I excused myself and went out to my ’73 Olds Omega where five beers were heating up in the August afternoon sun.  I got in the car and lied down on the front seat.  I gassed open a can and shotgunned it down my throat.  Dropped the empty on the floor boards.  Reached under the seat and repeated.

That’ll do.  Save three for later.  I sat up and looked around.  The parking lot was full, but there were no people around.  I wanted to stay there and hide.  I couldn’t bring myself to walk back in.

I lied back down and reached under the seat.  Pop.  Pish.  Gluggity-gluggity-glug.  Thirshhhhhhh-tee!

That one did it.  I recovered my intrepididity and rose up from the car seat.  Resurrection.

Back inside, I saw her talking to him.  No surprise.  Sometimes I just know how things are going to go.  Especially when it’s bad.

I circled the perimeter for a while, looking at his work.  What a bunch of shit.  Anybody could do this.  Sure he does some origami with some of the bills.  Whatever.  You can learn that from a book in the library.  But who has the nerve to present this mess to a gallery director?  Not me.  The gall.  The balls. 

Great.  We’ve established he has bigger balls.  More bile to swallow.  To go with the red dot by the $1,200 piece.

Finally, she waved me over.

Here we go.

She introduced us.  I took his hand, then bent down and kissed his onyx ring.  I don’t know why I did that.  It was just one of those spontaneous things you do while buzzed, then wonder about later.  I meant it as a gag, but here’s where it turned terrible–he received it.  He actually took it with a slight nod, all papal and shit.  Acting like it was appropriate.  What a motherfucker!

She noted the exchange.  Oh shit.  I clicked my heels and bowed, extending the gag.  Hoping to save it.  But the damage was done.  He had diminutized me.

It was clear now that I had to beat this guy’s ass that night.  To negate that awkward little scenario.  Seriously.  Dudes have gotten on the list for less.  I ran through the whole flow chart in my head a few times.  It always came back to beating.  After all, this was a major clowning.  He played me like a wash bucket bass.  In front of her.

He’s already better than me in everything.  That was hard enough to stomach.  Now this.  And I’m not even including the Shemp hair.  That’s just running the shank through all four gears.

Hmm…superior to me in every way.  Not enjoying that fact.   I should fix it.  Let’s see, he’s better than, in all things…ah… except perhaps in a mutual exchange of pain.  I might be able to endure more of that.  I might be better there.  I may best him in the ability to suffer.

Well, we would just have to find out.  We would have to exchange pain.  And before the crowd thins out.

Unfortunately, I lived by a strict warrior code, one that prohibited me from throwing the first punch, unless I could totally get away with it.  But this ran a little deeper.  Sucker-punching the artist at his gala opening is not going to win you any style points.

But successfully defending yourself from an over-sensitive, temperamental, thin-skinned effete, one who was over-reacting to some constructive criticism while being called out for false-flagging Shemp, was something else entirely.  Now that was a chapter I wouldn’t mind having in my bio.  I could see it.

I must make it so.

“Love what you’ve done here.  Instead of wasting money on a shredder from Costco, you used your mail to clean up after your menstruating dog.  And are now getting paid for it.  Fucking brill.  Mastermind caper you got cooking here.  I hope this scam is multi-level marketed, because I want to sign up for the seminars, Shemp.”

Except I didn’t say that.  I just looked at him.  And thought about things.  Wondered if goading him into a fight was the right thing to do.  What if he warranted the hair?  What if he had the holy power?  He looked fit.  The last thing I wanted was to be hitting on some guy’s head with a brick while he straightens his hair.  Plus, you could never get a good grab on that shit to whiplash the neck, something we in the trade called Bull-whipping.

“Don’t make trouble.”

That’s what I heard in my head.  Very clear.  Very loud.  It seemed to come from somewhere else.  Believe me, it didn’t come from me.

What?

Then again, like in case I didn’t get that something else was talking to me, “Don’t make trouble.”

I got it.  Clearly.  I was a little spooked, to be honest.  One time I heard something like that while washing dishes at The Natural Cafe, right before I was going to say something bad to the prep cook about a girl that worked there.  Something said, “Shut up.”  Distinctly.  Enough to make me shut up.  Not fifteen seconds later, that girl came in and hugged the prep cook.

“I’ll see you at home.”

“Okay, love you.”

Oh shit!  I had no idea.  Yeah.  That was close.  Good thing I…alright already, disembodied voice from beyond.  I won’t make trouble.  But don’t blame me if things get really boring.

“I like your work,” I forced out.

“Thanks, I like yours.  I read your column in The Reporter.  It’s some funny shit.”

I couldn’t believe it.  I had a crappy little column in the weekly paper.  I didn’t think anybody read it, much less liked it.  And here was both, in the same dude, and a dude with awesome Shemp hair.

Lightning 180 flip in my attitudey.  Feelings of brotherhoodship and good-fellowing welled up in me.

I couldn’t believe that I had been planning to beat up my only fan.  That would not have been a savvy career move.  Besides, he’s such a cool dude,  liking my writing and shit.   Making all this magnificently insane art, while looking all greasy.  And shit.

He turned out to be a decent yog.  Funny too.  We joked and bantered back and forth for quite a while.  He had a dry sense of humor.  I figured out that whole regally-receiving-the-ring-kiss was just him playing along.  He was just playing it straight.  With a more subtle touch than my inebriated mind could appreciate at the time.

What I did appreciate was that although all these artsy fartsy types were trying to draw away his attention, he would return to our conversation.  He didn’t blow me off to talk to some of the hot, semi-hot, or hot-enough-after-eight-beers women that were trying to glom on to him.  Which included the creature that rode up with me.  That really showed class.

When I invited him out to the Omega for a hot beer, he declined, telling me he was a recovering alcoholic.  Oh wow.  Poor dude.  Now I really wanted him to succeed in art.  Since he basically had nothing left to live for.

We wound up staying there until things wound down.  A bunch of people had decided to go to La Casa Sena for dinner and he invited both of us to join.  No fucking way I could afford that.  I begged off with a lie about having to write.

“I want to go,” she says.

“Go,” I say.

So she went.  She took the upgrade.  It’s not like I couldn’t see it coming.  I have a gift.

I can’t say it didn’t feel bad.  But I wasn’t pissed.  In light of recent events, I was wary of being pissed–being pissed about stuff I probably didn’t understand.  I could give it a rest.  At least until tomorrow.

Anyway, I don’t know if they ever hooked up.  I don’t know what happened to either of them.  To be honest, I can’t even remember the dude’s name.  He was just the guy with Shemp hair.

And he had what I wanted.

…

Note: None of the people in this story actually exist, including the author and Shemp.  However, any and all accusations of slander and libel will still be reviewed carefully by my attorney.  As I’m sure, by yours, as well.

Rita of El Rito

Is that just a mirage?

“God has a very big heart, but there is one sin he will not forgive! If a woman calls a man to his bed, and he will not go.”

— Alexis Zorba

The whole drive up I was sweating the liquor store situation.  Did they have them in El Rito?  Would they all be closed by the time we got there?  That would be a severe drag.  I would be stuck up there with this woman I hardly know, in a place I’d never been, and not have beer to make sure everything was going to be okay.

If I had beer, I could deal with anything.  Without it, it seemed like I couldn’t.  I know.  Nutty.

This situation was made for beer.

I had agreed to spend the night with a woman I hardly knew, which was hardly new, but she was friends with my boss.  So I could see shock-waves if this whole deal got ugly.  It’s not like I could leave her at some Travel Lodge with nothing but a fake name and number.

She used to come into the photography bookstore I worked at.  I was a shipping clerk who packed boxes all day for the mail order part of the business.  She was a photographer and would drive down to Santa Fe to show the owner her latest work.  We never really talked.  I’d smile and say hello, and basically try to keep my distance so she wouldn’t smell the beer coming out of me.

She was cute enough, a curly-haired, skinny little brunette, but she seemed a little prissy–a little too wholesome for my taste.

One day, she just came up and asked me drive up and spend the week-end with her.  Wow.  What do you say?  Yes, of course.  Always.  That’s the Zorba law.  And my law.  Look, if you didn’t like her before, finding out that she likes you, makes you like her now.

Enough for sex?  Cross that Rubicon when it’s time to get the ankles wet.

She picked me up after work to save the wear-and-tear on my Olds Omega.  She told me on the ride up that she had inquired about me to the owner of the bookstore, and that he tried to dissuade her from pursuing anything.

“He said you were a nice guy, but that you were a little… wild.”

I wasn’t too thrilled when I heard this.  I knew what he was trying to telegraph to her.  That whole italicized “wild” shit.  Drunk, he meant.

“Oh did he?  Huh.  Well, that really hurts.”

“Are you?  Too wild?”

“That depends on for what .”

I looked down at my watch.  I’ll tell you what, if there’s no open place to buy beer in this one-horse town you live in, you will see some wild.  Wild desperation.  I should’ve brought a backpack full of beer.  It  just seemed like bad form on a first date sleepover.  What was I thinking?  This is exactly the kind of date you can bring a backpack full of beer to.

It’s a slumber party.

Everybody brings treats.  You get the popcorn and the movie, and I’ll bring eighteen tall-boy cans of Guinness.

Major fuck-up.

Now I had to play Coy Boy and coax out some hard facts.

“So will any stores be open in El Rito?  You know, so we can stop at to get like potato chips and snacks.”

“Oh don’t worry, I have plenty of snacks for us.”

“Great.  That’s great.  Well that’s a load off.”

We drove in silence for a while.

Telephone pole.  Telephone pole.  Telephone pole.

“So do they have…like a convenience store there, or some sort of mom and pop type place?”

“There’s a little family-owned place.  They have some groceries.”

“Groceries and…soda?”

“Yes, and some beer and wine.”

Oh sweet fucking glory!  Holly-Rolly thank you, Mother of All Good Things, for being so merciful to your wretched children!

“That’s cool.”

I took a deep breath.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.  Look at the passing scenery.  Wait.

“What time do they usually roll up the welcome mat?”

“I’m not sure, around eight or nine, I think.”

It was now 7:30.  There could be a big difference between eight and nine.  I don’t get people like this.  If I lived out in the sticks, I would know what time the place opened and what time it closed–every single day of the year.  I’d know which holidays they observed.  What shift the grandma-who-closes-the-place-whenever-she-needs-a-nap works.  I would have her schedule, and plan accordingly.

All I could do now was will the car forward, faster.  Before the little abuelita’s eyelids get too heavy.  I stared out the window.  What the fuck was I doing here?

The fall sky can make certain parts of Northern New Mexico look extra bleak.   Slate blue with smeared chalky clouds.  Long shadows.  High altitude light illuminating a coyote fence, a crumbling adobe wall, some tires stacked by some siding, a cluster of trailers.  No wonder heroin is so big up here.  If I lived in Truchas or Chupadero, I’d probably pick up a habit.  On top of everything else.

Something to make staring at water dripping into a bucket more fun.

I love New Mexico.  I think it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth.  But there are parts of it that suck.  Not just Albuquerque and the State Penitentiary, either.  Some of the smaller, sadder towns.  They seem to suffer from a crushingly depressive malady.  Big sky fever, is what I call it.  I don’t care if it’s the Russian steppes or Kansas, anytime you have a really wide expanse of sky, melancholy is going to oppress it.  The sheer vastness dwarfs all human activity, and relegates it to the junk pile of eternity.

Telephone pole.  Billboard for Indian Casino.  A dirt field.  Orange filter making everything look extra sad.

Think about death.  Think about it for everyone, especially the people you love.  All dead.  We are all going to be dead.

“You’re awful quiet.”

“Just thinking about death.”

“Oh.”

We rolled into town just in time.  The little mom and pop store that sold beer was still open.  Thank you, my sweet Lord.  Once again, you have delivered me from my own evil.  I got two six packs, hesitated, then got two more.  I didn’t care how it looked.  Fuck bad form.  Good form just leaves you dying of thirst.

When we went back out to the car, I could see her trying to fight down the eyebrow that was trying to raise itself.  Not to fear, darlin’, there’s a new fiesta in the making…as we speak.

All that oppressive melancholy and dread I was experiencing earlier, seemed to have lifted.  Maybe it was the sun finally going down that did it.  Certainly, having two dozen loyal troops, standing by to bodyguard me, made me more intrepid.

Let’s see what kind of weirdness we can cook up with this situation.  New chick.  Always weird.   But you can always make it more weird than that.  That’s kind of your specialty–taking an already weird situation and making that look normal in comparison.

Okay, so maybe at first I was apprehensive that maybe this chick was not my type.  But she obviously likes me.  Isn’t that my type?

Interesting change of attitude.  A radical pivoting of point-of-view.  And I hadn’t fired down a single beer yet.  It’s all about morale.

Regardless of my new-found positive attitude, the date went the way in was supposed to.  It was a disaster.

Not at first, but let’s not forget who was piloting this barge.

We ate cheese and crackers while looking at photos she had taken.  They were pretty good.  At one point we had moved to the couch.  That’s when she told me about the guy that broke her heart.  How she mourned over him for years.  All the pain.  The self-doubt.  The loneliness.  The bitter tears.  The savage loss.

The major boner-kill.

Forget it.  This mission just got scrubbed.  Condition No-Go!  Condition No-Go!  Yes, I was younger then, but old enough to already be haunted by plenty of ghosts.  I wasn’t exactly eager to pig-pile on top of all that pain.  I also didn’t want Rixon’s warning to be right.  I may be a drunk, but I’m not wild. 

Now I had to evade capture.  Duck and dodge.  Play the clock.  Play the gentleman.

What is it about that, that makes women act more horny and wildly available (definitely my type) than they ever would if you had given yourself the green light?  It’s an amazing thing.  Except you can’t fake it.  Playing hard-to-get doesn’t work.  You have to really have sincerely decided not to sleep with them.  Cosmic Irony knows if you’re pretending.  So do the women.

But, decide to do the right thing, and every form of succubus that ever crawled into a bed, seems to take possession.  It’s strange.  I don’t always try to do the right thing, but when I do, everything in Creation will try to get me to stop.  I wound up fooling around a little, then stopped short.  You’ve gone far enough.  Time to balk and back up.  I put it in reverse.

Well, all my back-pedaling started to hurt her feelings.  I could tell when she said, “All you’re back-pedaling is hurting my feelings.”

How do you explain a sudden outbreak of conscience?  I was pounding the pups, just shot-gunning them down, hoping I could impair my judgement long enough to excuse any transgression from my previous vow.  But I couldn’t seem to get there.

I kept seeing a very lonely person.  Someone needing somebody, and knowing that I was the last fucking somebody they needed.  She was getting all hurt that I wasn’t engaging more, and I couldn’t seem to pull away fast enough.  For both our sake’s.

I kicked myself for not buying two more six packs.

She went to bed that night while I stayed up looking through her monographs.

That next morning we had an uncomfortable breakfast at El Farolito.   After that we walked around an empty field for a while.  We came across a dead crow and she took a picture of it.

“Our love,” I said, trying to make a joke, but it fell like doom in a German opera.  By then, it was clear nothing was ever going to happen.  We were just hanging out, killing time–trying to make it seem like it was no big deal.  Like this was all we ever expected.  Just walking around taking pictures of rotting carrion.  Not talking much.  Waiting until it seems it’s been long enough.

Those minutes are murder.  Long, arduous ticks.  You start to envy the dead crow.

Eventually, it was decided it was time.  It was a quiet ride home.  Despite my gallant knight routine, or because of it, she was hurt and angry.  I can’t blame her.  I should have declined her invitation in the first place.  But who does that?

I later heard from the owner that she really hated me from then on.  Actually, I heard that from several people.  She wasn’t shy about broadcasting what a bastard I was.  She didn’t spare the stink-eye either when she came into the bookstore.   Maybe it wasn’t for what I did or didn’t do that week-end.  Maybe it was just for the person she saw.  A drunk unable to cope with painful feelings–his or anyone else’s.  It didn’t matter that I didn’t totally mislead her.

I had misled her enough.

And for that, Uncle Zorba, I know a woman will never forgive you.

Ain’t love crazy?

Mr. Fix-It Real Good

I’ll have it back to you as good as new!

I had locked myself out again.  There was only one solution, to put on a sap glove and punch out the glass.  Cheaper than a locksmith.  Besides, it was only a small pane.  Except it was not.  It was a singular big pane disguised as individual small ones by the faux frames in the door.  A cloud burst of double-paned weather-rated safety glass came raining down on me.  What a surprise.  What a clever decorating device.

Well okay, now you know…don’t ever forget your keys, and that what looks like little individual panes of glass, thanks to some bullshit phony frames, could be connected to a motherload of glass, and that punching it out is not cheaper than a locksmith.  You can conclude that and learn from it.  Can’t you?  I found out ten years later that I couldn’t.

One of the best things about being sober is not having to fix as much stuff.  I don’t just mean abstract stuff like relationships and credit ratings, but actual stuff, like car doors, furniture, windows, televisions, bathroom fixtures, and heirloom china.  Stuff that costs beer money to replace.  And it always needs to be replaced.  Always.

Tough shit for someone who’s been the proverbial bovine male in the china shop his whole life.  Never fully at ease in this material dimension, I was perhaps, I’m saying perhaps, self-medicating.  Any natural clumsiness was now aggravated by the constant ingestion of central nervous system neurotoxic zombie juice.  Even sober, anything less durable than an AK-47 or lead ingot doesn’t stand much of a chance under my sustained proximity.  Just dig me after a few forties of malt liquor and shot or three of whiskey.  Hey, hey, hey!  I can find a way to break sand.

While drinking, I was a one-man wreckage machine.  Just add priceless family keepsakes and I’d churn them out into a stream of broken junk, swirling in a wake of pissed-off people.

Things were worse around my friends.  Those miscreants had a blatant disregard for property and unhealthy ideas as to what constituted fun, and of course applied coercive peer pressure for me to participate .  Honest.  I never wanted to run wild, destroying stuff.  Except for always.  While other kids had posters of sports heroes on their walls, I had ones of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.  I remember moping around grade school all grumpy because I wasn’t allowed to sack or pillage.  I made up for this in later life, in spades, of wall putty.

My friends and I liked to drink beer and rough house.  Pushing a friend’s head into a door jamb was one of the few ways we knew how to comfortably express our affection.  The more love in the room, the more collateral damage.  You never knew when a karate kick would miss a groin and land on a trophy case or computer monitor.  Shopping for sliding glass doors on a Saturday became almost a tradition.  “Hey Manny, let me have the single plate, and some new runners.”

Then, as you all know by now, there was the gunplay.  More Spackle.  More airline tickets.

That shit added up.  The cost of operating an alcoholic was not cheap.  There was always somebody to pay for something.  It was either that or try to fix it myself, and that was always problematic since I’ve never been much of a handy man.  Anything with more moving parts than a bottle of beer baffled me.  If it couldn’t be fixed by repeated chops from a tennis racket, it was time to throw it away, and do without.   Being drunk doesn’t lend itself to any painstaking problem solving.

I preferred a more action-oriented approach.  The idea was to reduce what was originally only slightly damaged, back to its molecular components, in the hope that it would somehow rebuild itself, perfectly.  You know, in response to the tantrum I just threw.  Cup handle won’t stay glued?  Throw it against the fridge.  See if that works.

“So if it belonged to your great-grandmother, that means it was really old, huh?  Like some kind of antique type of thing? ”

Whether through accident or anarchy, the physical world crumbled at my touch.  Especially cars.  I could disintegrate your car interior just by sitting in it.  I’d be trying to roll down the window and notice I’m twirling a useless handle in the air.  I don’t know how I pulled that ashtray out so that there is no human way possible to re-insert it.  Radio knobs?  Please.  I might as well have just pulled them off as soon as I got in.  Cigarette lighter?  Throw it out with the knobs.  Ignition broke off, but now I don’t have to look for your keys to start it.  Rearview just snapped loose.  “Here, save it for somebody who does coke.”

What’s wrong with all this shit?  Why can’t anybody build a car for a modern drunk Neanderthal?

Car doors never failed to fail me.  I was always having to climb in and out, NASCAR style, because the fucking things wouldn’t open anymore.  I don’t know of many ways you can close a car door wrong, but apparently I knew a good one.  Opening one, too.

I went to visit some friends in Northern California.  They picked me up from the airport.  I was drunk, of course, because I was traveling–through space and time.  They drove up to the white zone for loading and unloading of passengers only, no parking.  I opened their car door and superfuckingfantastic, broke it.  A very Herman Munster Moment.

“Really sorry about that.  Hey, this is going to be a wild weekend, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Later on they let me borrow one of their cars (I know, crazy) to make an appointment.  As I was getting on the freeway I saw a bum dude hitchhiking.  Always willing to help out a fellow traveler through space and time, I pulled over.  He ran up, opened the door, sat down, and couldn’t shut it.  Who’s this?  A kindred soul plagued with the poison touch?   I got out of the car and we tried to close it.  No way.

I finally had to drive with the passenger door sticking out a right angle.  I dropped off my long-lost brother at the next on ramp.

“Sorry about your door, bro!”

“Yeah, it happens…to me…always.”

“Me too,” he said, then held up his cardboard sign.

We looked at each other and nodded.  Yeah, he knows.  That was kind of a neat moment, but now what the fuck?!  How am I going to drive all the way home with this door sticking out?  I’ve been pulled over for less.  Fortunately, I wasn’t drunk.  The morning maintenance shot I drank had ceased to smooth the edges of this harsh reality.  But, now it wouldn’t spike a breathalyzer either.  It was one of those bad thing/good thing things.

Still, I’d rather not have any discourse with armed lawmen, especially while driving someone else’s car.

“I can’t seem to find their papers, Officer.”  Fumbling around the glove box, finding a hash pipe and a chunk.  “What’s this?  Holding out on me, were they?  Oh, you saw that too.”

“Please put your hands on the dash.”

Yeah, always better not to even get started.  I chose speed over stealth and just burned it home, hoping that the wind would shut it closed.  Every time I took a left turn people behind me would start braking for the body they expected to roll out.  They’d drive up next to me, honking.

“Your door is open!”

Really?  Which one?  Oh, this one next to me, bending like an airplane wing?  Got it.  Smile and give them a thumbs up and hope it satisfies them.

It was a nerve-wracking drive home, but I knew a more awesome time awaited me when I returned the car dog-eared.  “I didn’t do this one, guys.  It was my spiritual twin.  I gave him a ride.”  They looked at me and shook their heads.  What sort of vendetta does this guy have with the doors of our vehicles?

I hate them, for one thing.  Flimsy fickle bitch doors.  So how many beers will a new one cost me?

I was perplexed.  What is this with the doors?  Always some broken door.  What is the Universe trying to tell me?  There must be some metaphysical meaning, something symbolic going on, but it’s beyond me.  Jim Morrison?  Am I to learn something from Jim Morrison?  Do I need to be more groovy?  More Lizard Kingy?

Yes, that’s it.  There could be no other conclusion.

It’s fitting that my last good piece of physical wreckage before getting sober was a broken door.  I came home to an apartment I shared with my buddy, Spike.  I was wavering in and out of a black out.  I forgot my keys and didn’t want to wake him up, so very logically, I decided to punch out a small pane of glass in the door.  Sound familiar?  Not to me.  This time I didn’t bother using a sap glove and just shot my fist through.  The whole door shattered.  Fucking faux frames.  I never learn.

That was the final straw for Spike.  He drove me to rehab the next morning, and you know the rest.  My last drink was a Coors Silver Bullet I stole from him while he packed the car.  I’ve been much better since.  Stuff around me, too.  As for fixing things, I’ve added sincere amends to my fix-it kit, along with the duct tape, Bondo and Spackle I still seem to need.

So I guess, the big lesson here is that sometimes the solution is punching out what you think is a small pane of glass.  I can’t come up with any other conclusion.

And thanks, Spike.

Cuddling Catcus in The Desert of Love

Proceed With Caution

Black Sabbath was playing over the stereo.  On TV, the German 6th Army was surrounded by the Russians, and was freezing to death.  I was drinking a beer and looking at the socks on my feet.  All was well in the world.  The only way it could be better was if there was some female company there to enjoy the perfection of that moment.

There was a knock at my door.  Not a cop knock, or a drunk buddy knock, but a tippy-tap chick knock.  The Universe.  I jumped up and put on some pants.  A lost little girl on her way to Grandmother’s?  Or… just a cop knocking like a chick, to get me to open up.  I paused.  If it is the cops, I’ll just have to pay for the lock anyway.  I slowly opened the door, hoping for a mystery dream date.

It was the biker chick who moved in next door.  It made sense that she’d be the woman The Universe would send.  Great sense of humor, The Universe.

I had already decided I didn’t like her when I overheard her jaw at the two hayseed meth addicts that helped her move.  “Hey Fucker, watch it!  I won that mirror at the fair!”  “Where the fuck is my lighter?  Did you steal my fucking lighter?” “Dalton! I swear if you break that, I’m gonna break your face!”  She was personality-challenged, and she didn’t have the looks to make up for it.  Hopefully she’ll want to drink all my beers, too.

“Got a beer?” she asked, taking off her buckskin jacket and throwing it on the chair that served as my hamper.  She wore a leather vest, revealing a beef jerky-textured cleavage formed by two flattened and freckled breasts.

“Yeah sure,” I said, “But I’m kinda low, I might have to make a run pretty soon, and that’s going to be iffy since my car doesn’t have any brakes.”  This didn’t seem to register.  She stood looking around at my apartment.  She had straight black hair that hung-down like the Land O Lakes Butter maiden.  But unlike the Land O Lakes Butter maiden, who is hot, this woman had rugged features that were probably etched deeper by frequenting smokey and boozy environs.  A harsh life had scoured any softness from her face.  She looked hard.  Prison time and honky-tonk hard.  I don’t generally go for chicks that look tougher than me.

She didn’t waste any time getting under my skin.  “Wow, this place is thrashed! It smells weird in here. Hey turn the music down. What’s this shit you’re watching?”

I looked at her amazed.  Mom, is that you?  I wished the cops had come instead.  I could turn down the Sabbath, they’d run me for warrants, and then leave.  This buzz-kill was going to be a little trickier to get rid of.  I went over and gave a token dial-down on the volume.

“To what do I owe the honor of this occasion?” I asked, getting a beer from the fridge, but not before stashing two in the vegetable drawer.

“Oh, I don’t know. I was bored and I heard the music,” she said, taking the beer.  She flung back her hair and tilted the bottle.  I watched her drain half of it in one pull.  Six ounces in three seconds.  I figured I should just start walking to the store now.

“My name is Toni, but everyone calls me Tehachapi.”  She held out her hand.  I shook it.  It was a firm handshake.  Great.  A cornball handle and a manly mitt.  Sweet deal, all around.

“Well Tony, would you like to have a seat?”  I pulled up a milk crate.  “That’s okay, I’d rather lay down here.”  She flopped on my mattress and started to kick off her boots.  She took out a pack of Marlboro Reds.  They were in a tooled leather purse with beaded suede fringe.  A swap meet purchase, I imagined.  Probably the same vendor that sold her that silver and turquoise lighter holder.  “Do you have an ashtray?” she asked, already lighting up.

“Ah yeah, it’s totally cool to smoke in here,” I assured her.  I handed her an empty bottle to use.

This is so bad, I thought, on so many levels, I don’t know which one I should fixate on.  Maybe I should just focus on the fact there’s some sort of a representation of a woman on my bed.  That has traditionally been considered a good start for me.  Perhaps if I drink a lot of beers, in a very short time, things will somehow improve.  I cracked a fresh one and sat down on the milk crate.  I looked over at the TV and watched troops pull a field artillery piece through the snow.  This was going to be hard.

“My name is…”  Hold it. Real name? Lives next door now. Fake one won’t help. “…Marius.”

“What is it?”

“Marius.”

“That’s a weird name.”

“Yep…It sure is.”

I looked over and saw a German soldier running through the rubble.  A sniper bullet caught him and he went down dead.  If it could only be that easy, I thought.  She pointed to my bookshelf.

“Hey, you got Scrabble!  I loved playing that with my Grandma.”

“Yeah well, I don’t really play it anymore.”

“I’m not very good with spelling, but I’m good at coming up with words.”

“That’s hard to pull off,” I said, “That’s really awesome.”

She killed off her beer, and set the bottle down on the floor.  “That was good. Got another?”

Ok, I need to be called away to some emergency.  What kind of emergency happens at 10:30 at night?  Loads, but I can’t think of one right now, not one that would need me hanging around.  I have eight beers left and that was going to be pushing it even flying solo.  Now this thing happens.  Well, I can’t let her lap me.  I slammed my beer and got up and got two more.

She began telling me about herself, but somehow I already knew it.  Alcoholic parents, abusive marriages, kids taken away, some stripping, some prostitution, drugs, county jail, rehab, bartending, carnival gig, transporting meth to Indiana for her biker boyfriend, state prison, rehab again, and now collecting welfare and selling Mary Kay.  It was a depressing saga, and I was fairly immune to those by then.  Her story curb-kicked anything I had resembling a high into shit-smeared bummer.  Oh, and she’d never even been to Tehachapi.

The liquor store was inevitable.  I told the Old Maiden of the Iron Horse to kick up her heels while I rolled on down to the store.

The car really didn’t have brakes.  I had to rely on the parking brake and my psychic hunches about when lights were going to change.  It was a good thing I was an intuitive, or it would’ve been crazy dangerous.  I coasted to a stop at Owl Liquors, but I overshot the drive-thru and had to get out of the car to order from the window.  The ride back was uneventful, except for the car wreck going on in my mind.

“Where the fuck is your remote?” she asked as I walked through the door.  I told her it was a long story, and that reaching up to change the channel was a good ab work-out.  I put the beers in the fridge and added two more to the vegetable drawer.

We drank and she talked some more.  The drunker she got, the flirtier she became.  The flirtier she became, the drunker I needed to get.  I prayed for a deus ex machina to descend from the sky and save me.  I kept bringing up what an early morning I had ahead, but she kept on yammering and beating her eyelids at me.

“Why don’t you come lay down next to me and make yourself more comfortable?  You’re all hunched up,” she says.

My ass had deep x’s imprinted in it from the milk crate, but I wasn’t about to make myself more comfortable.  It seemed like I couldn’t impair my judgement fast enough to keep up with events.

“I like being hunched up,” I told her, “I think I was a cathedral gargoyle in a past life.”  I started to tell her about how my grandmother spilled an entire pint of cognac in her purse at St. Patrick’s Catherdral, but she interupted with, “Hey, do you want to fuck?”

Oh God. Panic in Detroit.  Things around me began to stretch and distort.  The lines in the room started to point upwards at crazy angles, like in German Expressionist set design.  I couldn’t remember the last time I said no to that question.  I didn’t think I knew how.  I was going to have to learn fast.

“Yeah I’d love to except that I don’t have any condoms, and I’m having an outbreak, and I’m a little confused about my sexuality these days, and I don’t want to rush things, and I’m too drunk, and I have a girlfriend.”

“Well then scaredy cat, just come over here and cuddle with me for a while.”

Could this really be happening to me?  I tried to wake myself up.  No, still here.  The problem was I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  I know.  I’m lame like that.  Was it time to fake a seizure?

“Oh, if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s cuddle,” I said.  I slowly got up.  I wanted to be a fly, or a pencil in a cup, or a ball of dryer lint, anything but me right then.  I laid down next to her.  She burrowed her face into my armpit, and just like that, she was out cold.  The Universe.  Nothing like adding a little drama with a last-minute save.

I looked down at her.  Her face seemed to soften.  I pictured what she looked like as a young girl, back when she had no idea how bad things would get.  That made me feel even more sorry for her.  I found myself feeling bad because I didn’t even want to love her.  But, I wanted somebody to love her, eventually.  Nobody’s life should be non-stop bullshit, and if it is, they should at least have one partner in crime.  Would it kill me to let her pretend for a while?  Clearly I’m not averse to doing things that could kill me.  Besides, I was drunk.  I had the all-purpose excuse already in my back pocket.

I leaned back. I thought about war on the Eastern Front.  That was hard.  This should be easy, well…easier.  You’re just holding another human being.  Fucking relax. I listened to my clock tick for a while, and then remembered the beers in the vegetable drawer.  I wondered if I could get to them without waking her up.  She started to snore as my arm fell asleep.

Chaos Junkie

Burn Baby, Burn!

When that thing went off in my hand, brother, I saw a white light.  That was all I saw.  For a few seconds I freaked.  Is this what death is?  A blank white screen for all eternity?  Then I heard Tom screaming, saw smoke and blood, and felt better.  I wasn’t going to have to face a blank screen, yet.  There was more colorful chaos to witness.

I could only make out what was happening in intermittent glimpses.  My perception seemed to be strobing.   I was blinking back and forth between some vast eternal void and the aftermath of the explosion.  White light to smoke and gore, white light to smoke and gore, and so on.  There was a low-pitched hum in my head, like I had been hit over the skull with a tuning fork the size of a garden rake.  That was a peppy little fuse alright, a real go-getter.  It burned down to the stick, quick as a lick.  Ka-pow!

It was 1979.  Tom and I were teenage delinquents.  We were hanging out at my Dad’s house.  He was away on a business trip so we decided to drink all his scotch.  It was Sunday night and we were bored.  I remembered I had a box of what were essentially quarter sticks of dynamite that I had smuggled from Mexico as a little kid.  Let me tell you, you’ve never sweated a border crossing like an eleven-year-old sitting on a box of junior dynamite in the back of his parent’s car.  To me it was worth it.  These “firecrackers” were so much more dangerous than anything the other kids had, they would elevate my status as a mayhem-maker to royalty.  Even big kids would know I meant business.  They were to serve as a sure-fire cure for boredom for many years.

They certainly cured our boredom that night.  We were inside my Dad’s bedroom, and I was flicking the lighter in one hand, while drunkenly holding the Tijuana TNT in the other.  The lighter was out of gas, so it was totally cool to be doing this.  What wasn’t cool was that a spark from a dead lighter could still ignite a fuse.  My Dad’s roommate, a Vietnam vet, sleeping in the next room, didn’t think that was cool either.  The blast opened up my hand into a hamburger pita.  The lighter turned into shrapnel, and peppered my neck and face.  Blood and bits covered my Dad’s walls and water-bed.  Tom had been blasted instantly sober, the roommate pissed himself, and I wound up in the emergency room.

There is nothing more dangerous than a bored drunk.

It was never enough to just get drunk.  I liked to keep things exciting, and it seemed like destroying things, in whatever manner, a great way to do it.  Admittedly, there were at times… consequences, but if you live in fear of those, you have no business drinking yourself insane.  Shoot things, set them on fire, blow them up, throw them out the window, take an ax to them, run them over with your Mom’s LTD, but for God’s sake, make something pay for the fact that you can’t sit and enjoy a quiet moment.

When I was nine years old, my parents turned me into the Camarillo Fire Department for being a pyro.  They caught me recreating a viking sea burial with my G.I. Joe and a burning raft of popsicle sticks in the toilet.  Joe was on his way to Valhalla when they forced the bathroom door open.  A more enlightened set of parents would have recognized my love of history, appreciation of ritual and custom, and would’ve encouraged me to become a cultural anthropologist.  Instead, they ratted me out as a fire bug.

A fireman sat me down and told me gruesome stories of all the people he saw burned to death as a result of little boys playing with matches.  He took my name down and said that if there was any fire in a five-mile radius of my apartment complex he would come looking for me.  He then gave me a tour of the fire truck and turned me over to my parents.  That really sucked.  I was sufficiently penitent.  I decided to take up shoplifting as a hobby until the heat from this rap cooled.

I liked to create chaos around me to equalize the pressure of the chaos inside me.  Whatever was happening didn’t seem like enough.  Maybe it was from watching westerns as an impressionable child, but no drunken party seemed complete until firearms were discharged into the ceiling.  I remember kissing a girl goodnight after a particularly noisy celebration, the sounds of nearing sirens wailing in the night air, the other partygoers scattering in panic around us.  It was a dramatically romantic way to end the evening.  “Be careful,” she said.  “Put money on my canteen,” I told her as I closed the door.  I thought about her while I hid under my mattress.

Thank God I had my buddy Marko to serve as the voice of reason in my life.  (My friends who know Marko got that last joke)  We were a bad combination.  Together we became a machine that produced, and then acted on, very bad ideas.  Besides having a dangerously extensive knowledge of chemistry, Marko liked guns.  Me too.  What’s not to like about guns?  Especially in the hands of crazy people.

For awhile we lived in his mobile home out in the sticks of Santa Fe.  We drank a lot, and often got bored.  You can imagine the results.  Since we took such a casual approach to firearm safety, we didn’t get too many repeat visitors to the old homestead, especially girls.  Poor us, all lonely, drunk, and armed to the teeth.

On New Year’s Eve, 2000, when our society was about to plunge into Mad Max apocalyptic anarchy because the date on people’s computers couldn’t go that high, Marko and I were excited.  Finally, a society more suited to our talents and abilities.  We saw an opportunity for fast-track advancement.  Once the system collapsed, all rule of law would dissolve in the individual’s desperation to survive.  We had been practicing for this moment all our lives.

For months we had been stockpiling guns and ammo, along with canned tuna and baked beans.  We had a medical kit with bandages and medication for pain. We also had five gallons of medical-grade grain alcohol to tide us over until we could liberate more.  Since we had no goods to barter, we decided to become raiders.  We would run around with guns, taking other people’s stuff, especially their beer.  That was our greatest concern with the breakdown of civilization as we knew it, not being able to get beer.  Since this was already our greatest concern, weren’t too worried about adjusting to a world gone savage.  In the meantime, our ids would have some room to stretch out.

When the ball dropped at midnight, Marko was already passed out on the couch.  I was sitting in a recliner.  I picked up my shotgun, and still sitting, pointed it out the open door and pulled the trigger.  I blew a hole through the screen door I thought was also open.  Marko didn’t even flinch.  “Happy New Year, fucker,” I said, cocking another round. “To a brave new world!”  I yelled, and shot through the previous hole.  This time he rolled over and said something that sounded like “Monkey time,” and was out again.

Y2K turned out to be a big disappointment.  The date on everyone’s computers just went to 2000.  Banks stayed open, police showed up for work, utility bills arrived right on time.  Our hopes for establishing our very own empire based on extortion and white-slavery were dashed.  With the money spent on ammo we could have put ourselves through massage school or learned to sell real estate, but that clearly wasn’t meant to be.  We ate the tuna and beans, drank the grain alcohol, and eventually used up all the supplies in our first aid kit.  The only apocalypse we’d get to participate in was the one of our own creation.  Monkey time?

We felt cheated.  The hippies got to have their Summer of Love.  They had Woodstock before Altamont.  Marko and I never got our Altamont.  We were never going to have our environment adapt to us.  It was the first time I lost all hope.  My earlier adventures in Central America had also taken a lot of steam out my engine by then, and I was getting pretty tired of the noise.  Maybe a little peace and quiet wouldn’t be so bad.

That summer I made my first stab at getting sober.  I went to a rehab, and stopped drinking for a couple of years.  Things quieted down for a bit.  The problem was that I never really fixed what was bothering me.  I never made peace with the quiet.  I figured it was enough to just stay dry, but I was getting restless, and I never did get rid of the guns.  I was flicking the dead lighter in one hand, with dynamite in the other, convinced a spark couldn’t start anything.