A Glimpse Of Light

Lost In Austin

I was sitting in the Liberty Lunch, pretty fucked up already, nursing a squat 12oz. bottle of Red Stripe beer that was rapidly getting tepid. I didn’t even like Red Stripe, but I was drinking one. The bottle was sweating, and every time I grabbed it I could feel the beer inside getting warmer. It was humid as hell.

Back then, Liberty Lunch had no roof on it, and as I stretched out at the table, trying to un-kink some of the muscles in my back and legs, I found myself gazing up at the firmament, spread out above me like a big black tarpaulin with a bunch of little holes poked in it, letting light through. That in turn reminded me of an old Bruce Cockburn lyric about kicking the darkness “‘til it bleeds daylight.” I was very much in the darkness then, figuratively and literally; but to that point I hadn’t been doing much kicking. In truth, at times I felt as if I were sinking fast, like a stone.

As a distraction from my thoughts, I turned and watched two lesbians do the bump and grind with each other on the dance floor, just off to my right. They were moving to the music of the local reggae band up on stage, who were doing a lame cover of “Get Up, Stand Up”. I had been mesmerized by the band for awhile; mainly by the lead singer, who was about 5’ 7” and had long, unkempt white-boy dreadlocks down to his knees, almost. As he sang he prowled the small stage, swinging his hair around for effect. It was interesting for about five minutes.

Anyway, these girls dancing next to me were real lesbians, not the kind one saw in R-rated movies, all soft and pretty and desirable. Like a lot of guys, I found those sort of cinematic depictions of otherwise normal hetero girls suddenly overtaken with the compulsion to do each other to be pleasantly compelling, in their way. But these girls weren’t anything like those. Nope. These were the real thing, going at it in earnest; and I realized that – up close like that – lesbian sex was the opposite of titillating to me. I eventually had to look away.

I left the bar pretty soon after that, stumbling down West 2nd Street into the darkness, without much of an idea of where to go or what to do next. It would be a couple more years before I did get some kind of idea about that, but that is not really the point. The thing is, I learned something that night; or had something re-enforced I knew already. That is, sometimes things that look real good from a distance or from an obscured or distorted viewpoint, don’t look so great when you see them clearly and up close. Myself, I had been following a dream I had for years, a dream of living high and wild and more-or-less outside the rules. It was really a dream of being free, or at least what my idea of free was at the time. I had taken just about every wrong turn one could take in pursuit of my dream, and now here I was. This is what my dream had led me to. . . being high and stupid drunk on a dark street in Austin, with no place I really wanted to go, nothing I really wanted to do, no one I could go see and tell my troubles to.

I think it was around then that it occurred to me, I might want to start thinking about having a different kind of dream.

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