Liz And Me

The night air was fetid. It was thick with humidity, and infused with malodor. One’s olfactory senses were assaulted by a combination of smells – from rotting vegetation, to chemical refining, to the byproducts of cattle production. It was late spring-early summer, and we were parked on a grassy spot alongside Dishman Rd, out among the rice fields and canals and farms (and chemical refineries) out west of town.  We were in the front seat of my 1971 Buick Skylark … sky blue, with a white textured vinyl top. Fat Firestone 60s, raised white letters, and chrome mags.  We had the stereo playing on the auxiliary; but with the engine (and air conditioner) off, it had got a bit stuffy inside the car, and we’d rolled down all the windows in hopes of capturing a refreshing zephyr blowing across the nearly treeless, nearly featureless landscape.

But, no luck. The air that night was still, and there did not seem to be any sort wind to speak of. Just a sticky, moist blanket of humidity, which quickly enveloped us, once the windows were down. Along with it came various aromas, wafting in; the dank, vaguely sulfurous smell of nature decaying part of itself, and the stench of men and their processes, working steadily to decay the rest of it.

I will have to admit, at that moment my mind was mostly elsewhere, and not dwelling much on existential ideas or the nature of decay, or of mankind’s role in all of it. I was seventeen years old, near the end of my junior year in high school, and I was sitting in the front seat of my car with my girlfriend.  Her name was Liz, and she was fourteen almost fifteen. A freshman.

Liz and I had been hanging out in the West End earlier that evening.  It was a weeknight – a school night – and after a time we determined that no one else in our peer group was out and about; so we rode around aimlessly for awhile, drinking beer and maybe smoking a doobie or two, listening to music on the 8-track player. I had picked Liz up around 7:00 that evening, after dinner. Her (single parent) mom thought I was just the greatest, a wonderful guy for her youngest daughter to be dating. I told her Liz and I were going to the library to work on a research paper, and she smiled widely and bussed me on the cheek as we went out the front door.

As always, Liz looked great when I picked her up that night. She was one of those girls who did not spend a lot of time on makeup or hair preparation or picking just the right outfit to go out in.  But, she didn’t need to.  She just looked good, naturally.  She would hit the makeup a touch, drag a brush once or twice through her straight, shoulder-length brunette hair, and throw on something, whatever – on that particular night, flared Levis, white Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and an off-white, rather sheer peasant top, with (after we left her house) no bra on, underneath. She was of medium height, and slender, with everything else on her in even proportions. She had the nicest, heart-shaped backside, which I never got tired of looking at when she was lying on the living room floor watching TV or something. Liz was mostly of mixed British ancestry, except for her paternal grandmother, who was from France, a WWII war bride. So Liz had a little of that French thing in her, and … ooh la la. She always looked like a million dollars to me. We had begun dating midway through my junior (her freshman) year, and she would be my steady girlfriend through the rest of my high school days, and even for awhile after that.

I loved practically everything about Liz. She was mature beyond her years, and beautiful. Smart, and funny. Quite limber. She liked to drink, and get high. In other words, Liz had almost all the things one would want in a girlfriend.

About the only thing we did not agree on was music. I had and have a fairly wide range of music I will listen to, but at the time I was in my rebellious, teen-aged phase – a phase I have not entirely grown out of, to tell the truth – and my main musical focus was heavy blues rock, the Rolling Stones and all their various descendents. Meanwhile, Liz favored the sort of folky, sensitive singer-songwriter types. She would put up with my Aerosmith and Foghat and Trapeze and Savoy Brown and the like for awhile, and then I would in turn try to tolerate a moderate amount of Dan Fogelberg and James Taylor, etc. Or - another one I just now remembered - named Jimmy Spheeris. Kind of a folky hippie, a real navel-gazer. Boy, did he suck ass. I used to cringe when I heard him coming on over the stereo. But, I would hold my tongue and force a smile, while meanwhile trying to keep my brain from turning to mush. It is funny, how much really crappy music a guy will listen to, in the name of love. Or in the name of lust. Whichever.

The one area of truly common ground Liz and I had, musically, was Todd Rundgren. I liked Todd a lot, since his Nazz days; and I was pleased and surprised to find out Liz was a huge fan, too. There is no explaining it, but who cares? We had something we could listen to together, and both enjoy. Maybe Rundgren was our number one lowest common denominator?

Anyway, that’s what we had playing in the 8-track in my car that night. Todd Rundgren. Something/Anything? probably. We had it turned up fairly loud. Even with the windows down, we were unlikely to be bothering anyone with the noise. The place where we were was ground zero for taking one’s date “parking”, as it was called then. One of the main attractions was that the area was sparsely populated. Also, it was just outside the city limits; so while I guess it was still technically within the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the city cops, one hardly ever saw one out there. No county cops, either. Nice.

While we had Rundgren playing – hopefully something like “You Left Me Sore”, although I really don’t remember – we were meanwhile heavily engaged in the time honored sport of blind teen-aged lust, there in the front seat of my car. Without going into explicit detail, I will say we’d been at it for awhile, we were both somewhat less than fully clothed, and we were engrossed in attempting a difficult and rather complicated gymnastic maneuver, just about the time I looked up and saw the flashing red and blue lights out of the back window of the Skylark.

“Goddamn! Fuck!” That was all I could get out, but it was enough to spur us both into quick and furious action, untangling ourselves from each other while Liz got her blouse back on in record time, and I pulled up and zipped my jeans. Just then the Beaumont cop poked his head and flashlight into the driver’s side window, and asked us just what the hell we were doing.

I mumbled something about just talking and getting some fresh air, and I thought I saw the slightest sympathetic smile flicker across the cop’s face. I sure hoped so.  All I could think about was the half gone lid of Maui Wowie in my glove box, and the half-drank 12-pack of Budweiser on the floorboard between my girlfriend’s feet. My 14-year-old girlfriend, that is.

The officer walked around to the passenger side and asked Liz to get out of the car. Sometime in the midst of the earlier goings-on she’d flipped her sandals into the back seat somewhere; but now, not wanting to draw any further attention to the interior of the car, she got out barefoot, and walked across the rough gravel and detritus on the road’s shoulder to back behind the car, where the cop wanted to question her. I watched her intently. She didn’t freak out at the prospect of being questioned, and she didn’t flinch at all walking barefoot across that gravel and caliche and roadside flotsam and jetsam. I felt a sense of intense pride welling up in me. She was very fucking brave.

Liz told me later the cop asked her some basic questions – her name and age, where we’d been that night, did she know me and was she there of her own volition, etc. After that she walked back across the rough ground to the passenger side and got back into the car. The cop came back around to my side. He said he could understand us just wanting some privacy to talk and enjoy the night air, and he appreciated it that we were good kids, and not out doing anything illegal. He said he hated to bother us at all, but up the road a farmer had a cow get out, and it was running around loose out there and had almost been hit by traffic a couple of times already, and had we seen any loose cattle going by?

“No sir, we sure haven’t,” was all I could come up with at the time. “Well, if you do, please report it,” he said. “Now, y’all have a good night.” With that, he walked back to his cruiser, got in, and drove off down the dark road, into the night.

Liz and I sat in silence for awhile, kind of stunned. Eventually, she told me how badly it hurt her bare feet, walking around out there; and I told her I knew it hurt her and I knew why she endured it, and I thanked her. I told her that cop was nice not to bust us, but I couldn’t figure out why he felt compelled to make up the story about a loose cow as an excuse for checking us out. He was almost apologetic about it. It was weird.

We went on like that for awhile, and drank some of our by then warm beers. I didn’t think either one of us would be in the mood for romance anymore, after all that. But after awhile, Liz moved over and got in my lap, and we began kissing. Tentatively at first, then more deeply. It wasn’t long before I was fully engaged again. I was thinking about how much fun Liz was, how most girls would have been completely undone by the cop’s visit, and would have asked to be taken home right away. Not my girl. I was thinking about this and just beginning to slide my right hand up under her blouse, when I had the strongest sensation we were being watched by someone, or something.

I don’t know where that sense comes from. My guess is it originates in the brain stem, where all the primal instincts reside. Anyway, the hair was standing up on the back of my neck. I don’t know if she sensed this or not, but right then Liz pulled back from me a little bit. I had turned a quarter-turn in the front seat, to the right, so that Liz could sit in my lap. The driver’s side window was behind me, but Liz was straddling me and looking directly at it. And her eyes got really big and scared-looking. All I could think about was the Zodiac killer, or that guy up in Texarkana they never caught. Either way, we were history, Liz and I. Two young lovers, alone in a car out in the sticks, just enjoying life and each other … only to have their lives senselessly snuffed out, by some mutated serial killer.

That is what I was thinking in the time it took me to wheel around and see for myself what terrible thing was at my window, come to murder me and my baby. My brain stem was in overdrive by then, and as I was turning I was also trying to figure out a way to put myself between whatever the horrible thing was and Liz, to find some way of sacrificing myself to give her at least a chance to get away. All this was going through my mind, along with a large jolt of adrenaline, when I turned around to confront our attacker.

And what I saw, of course, was a fucking cow. Or rather the big, stupid-looking head of one. Part of it was sticking through my window, and that bovine-looking motherfucker just stood there, looking bored, and chewing his cud or whatever, staring at us.

Just then, Liz let out a scream, or more of a yell, really. Either way, it startled the steer, and he banged his nose pulling his head back out of my car. Pretty goddamn funny, though I’ll admit it was a few minutes before I could come down off of my fight-or-flight buzz, and really laugh about it.

But I did. We did. After we watched the ass end of that cow as it clip-clopped on down the asphalt road into the darkness, following the same path the policeman had awhile before, off into the night … after that, we laughed. We laughed really hard about the events of that evening; we laughed together, from down deep. I don’t know what-all Liz was laughing at exactly, but in my mind it was funny on a couple of levels. Most prominently the visceral one – seeing that cow jerk his head out of my car in fear was really fantastic. But also, I was thinking that maybe some greater force, or existential being, or maybe even Jesus or one of those guys, was really, really determined that Liz and I would not have sex that night, and went to these hilarious, ridiculous lengths to ensure we did not. And, if so, he/she/it got its way, too. After that second jolt to the senses, we were done for that night, lustfully speaking.

But it’s the funniest thing, maybe the funniest thing … sitting there in my front seat together, collapsing in laughter into each others arms, laughing about this totally retarded thing that happened to us – I don’t think I ever felt closer to Liz than I did on that night. My feelings for her were deeper than even if we had actually made love. Soul deep.

It was too bad we didn’t get to reach the zenith of our mutual physical attraction that night in my car. Though there would be other nights, a lot of them, it was always a negative to miss the opportunity.

On the other hand, we got a terrific story out of the deal, one that I (and I am sure Liz) have told and re-told many times. Including me. Here. Now. So, one cannot say something positive did not come from it.

Everything has a bad side and a good side, I guess. Depends on how you look at it.

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Let's Make A Deal

I will never forget the time this guy Lynn and I figured out how we were going to make the Big Score. Get rich, and tell everybody to fuck off, baby! I got mine!

Actually, our plan would net us $15,000 for roughly half a day’s work, if it came off. My share of fifteen G’s wouldn’t have put me on Easy Street for life; but for a poor, struggling college student, c. 1981, it would have been a nice little chunk of change. There were many ways I could have used spent that money.

I was about to give up on college by then, anyway. I’d made the Dean’s list my first couple of semesters, but after that I had started sliding, for various reasons; and I was about to go on academic probation, if not suspension. I’d been hit by a shit-rain of personal setbacks, and had got deeper into the hardcore partying lifestyle at and around the school, and my academics, such as they were, took a backseat to everything else. In fact, presuming we made the big score, my nascent plan was to ditch school altogether, and take off for the Caribbean. Find a quiet island somewhere, establish myself, and then just go as far as my money would take me. I didn’t plan beyond that – I figured nature or my guardian angel or whatever would take care of me when the time came, come what may.

It is probably needless to say, but things didn’t come off exactly as we’d planned. If they had, I’d probably either be dead by now – dead, but at peace; either that, or I’d be sitting on a beach on St. Kitts, where I would’ve been the last 30 years, happily wasting away in the bright sunshine.

Anyway, Lynn was a guy I knew in college. His girlfriend was friends with my girlfriend, and so on and so forth. Both girls, Lynn’s girlfriend and mine, were little sisters to a fraternity that Lynn was a member of.

What was I doing hanging around with these PKE’s? Or with any other fraternity, for that matter? I was then, am now, and probably forever will be an extremely un-Greek-type person. There was no active animosity against the fraternity/sorority thing. It just wasn’t my style. My indifference didn’t stem from some sort of rejection, either – I had been rushed by two fraternities; the Sig Epp’s, who were pretty seriously trying to get me to join, for some reason, and the Sigma Nu’s. If I’d been inclined to join any of them, the Sigma Nu’s would have been probably been it. They were by far the funkiest fraternity on the campus at the time, in some ways pretty close to the Animal House model. But I already knew most of those guys and partied with them already, so I really didn’t see the point in formalizing the association. Plus, I didn’t want to join anything where I would be compelled to go to meetings and shit. Perform civic duties. Fuck that.

My dad and my brother were in fraternities. SAE’s. So its not like I wasn’t familiar with Greek thing. I guess I could’ve pledged SAE at UT as a legacy or something. Not that I was inclined to . . . but I didn’t go to UT right off, anyway. I wanted to work pretty much full time and start college locally, then after a couple of semesters, once I’d got a feel for it and had saved up some money, I’d transfer to UT. It wasn’t that hard to do in those days.

In the meantime, that summer between high school and college, I got involved with this girl I’d met down at the beach. She was still in high school, a year younger than I. By that time I’d moved out of the house and into my own place; and once school started up again, this girl would stop by my apartment every morning on her way to high school, sometimes in her cheerleader uniform and shit, at like 7:15 a.m. She would let herself in and make sure I got up in time to make my first class out at Lamar U . . . by climbing in bed with me and inducing me to perform all sorts of unnatural acts with her, all of this before 8:00 in the morning. It was a pretty good deal, I thought at the time. I didn’t care about her all that much, it was very much a one-way affair. I am not proud of that, but sometimes you find yourself in a situation where, no matter what you do, it looks like you are going to get the better end of the deal. You can either fret over it, or just enjoy it. Maybe it is some kind of cosmic payback for all the times you’ve been fucked over in the past. Whatever. I chose to enjoy my little situation, even though I knew it might not be exactly noble of me.

Anyway, that whole summer and fall was a fond memory, of me and this high school cheerleader girl, cavorting around and having fun; until somewhere in there, among all our goings on, I’d forgot to protect us properly. It was near mid-semester when she let me know she was knocked up.

********************

Like I said, my original plan had been to screw around matriculate at Lamar U. for a year, then transfer up to UT. Getting a schoolgirl pregnant kind of fucked that all up. Anyway, by the time I would’ve got to Austin, I looked kind of like Duane Allman, maybe; the only fraternity I would’ve been fit for by then was if they had a Rastafarian frat, or maybe one for Deadheads. I assume they didn’t, and I never made it to UT as an undergrad, anyway. And I was destined to go through college as an unaffiliated independent. Fine with me.

The frat little sister I was dating was named Carla. She was a part-time receptionist at the same law firm I interned at. Sweet, dark-eyed Port Arthur girl, half-Cajun, half-Hispanic. She was slender and had long, dark hair and was tall and leggy and gorgeous. And, she was wild as hell.

Naturally, I was immediately in her thrall. We started dating, and it seemed like almost every time we went out, it turned into some kind of disaster – one time, she passed out and started turning blue at a Parliament-Funkadelic concert at The Summit; a few weeks later, I got pulled over at the beach by the DPS for DWI (I wasn’t drunk, which they finally figured out); somewhere in there, she fell in the Neches River and nearly drowned during a radio station sponsored raft race; and so on.

But we were so attracted to each other, we just kept at it. Maybe we were both terminal then. I probably was; and if you are in a terminal mode of some sort, it is bad juju to get involved with someone in the same frame of mind. The two of you will tend to feed off of each other. You’ll be in this tight embrace, thinking you are having a great time, not noticing the downward spiral you have fallen into.

It was so weird dating Carla. I felt like I was along for a ride I had no control over. If you asked me at the end of it if I’d loved her, I would have said I didn’t know. Sometimes I think I really didn’t even know her. We were fucked up too much of the time to really develop any kind of a lasting relationship. As soon as something went really wrong – in this case a screwed up cocaine deal that nearly got the both of us killed – we were destined to shatter. And we did. Into a million little pieces, it seemed like at the time. What is odd is, I find myself at times thinking of her wistfully. Rather like thinking fondly of a near-miss train wreck. Nostalgia can be a strange thing.

To be honest, there are a lot of things I don’t remember from that time. I doubt Carla does, either. That may be a good thing. We were just fucked up all the time - me, Carla and her best friend, Cathleen, who was pretty hot, and had a boyfriend named Lynn, who may have been wilder than the rest of us put together. All I do remember is a lot of fun, right up to the day it stopped being fun, almost forever.

********************

Lynn was friends with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy . . . I forget how far down the line he was removed, but anyway the guy at the end of the chain was a big cocaine dealer – a distributor, actually – out of Galveston or Houston, I forget which. Lynn’s friend said there was a quantity of coke being ferried into Sabine Pass on a shrimp boat, an offload from a much larger shipment anchored out in the Gulf somewhere. There had been some problem with organizing a plan to get the shipment from Sabine Pass to further down the chain of distribution. Lynn related to me this proposal as it was presented to him. Someone was needed to pick up the cocaine in Sabine Pass and then take it to a storage facility in League City or Dickinson somewhere, where it would be delivered to some guy who was a big-time street dealer in Houston. That guy, assuming everything was in order, would hand over a bag of cash that would then be delivered back to Galveston, where the delivery guy would receive his cut, again assuming everything was in order. And that was it.

Lynn said the payoff was $15,000. He said if I would drive he would give me $10,000, and he’d take $5,000. That seemed awfully generous; and there were other questions I had about the whole thing, but something – probably the thought of 10 G’s in my hot little hands – told me to forget my reservations, and just agree to do it.

When we got to the Coastal dock in Sabine Pass that Saturday morning, it was barely light. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of the ocean. It was 6:30 a.m. or thereabouts, and the sun wasn’t quite up yet, but it was already hot and sticky.

I could hear noises coming from the Western yard next door, where a big semi-submersible was being refitted. Apparently they were running extra shifts to get it done. It is kind of funny, in retrospect – that was at the height of the early 1980’s oil boom, and people were working frantically to get rigs up and operating out in the Gulf. Within three years, the whole thing went bust, and these same docks were surrounded with out of service rigs everywhere, it was like a fucking graveyard.

I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. I was aware of the acid in my stomach churning with nervousness as Lynn and I stood out on the dock next to my Trans Am. I could hear the girls talking and laughing in the car, and then – just faintly at first – I could hear the churning of an engine, somewhere out on the water.

Shortly, a big shrimp boat came into view, chugging into the dock. It had been out on an all-night trawl somewhere, out in the Gulf. The boat was Vietnamese, but as it neared the dock I could hear conversation in Spanish and, sure enough, there were Mexicans on the boat, too. Pretty unusual at the time, it seemed to me. As soon as the boat was tied off, Lynn recognized someone on the deck and went right over the gunwale and onto the boat. As I watched with some apprehension, Lynn and this guy disappeared down an interior stairway to the hold.

I had initially been pretty gung-ho about this deal, but as it got nearer I began to have some trepidation. It bothered me that I was relying on Lynn for everything. I liked him well enough, but he was absolutely disorganized, and his personal life was a mess; yet he was organizing this complicated drug transaction? It had been his idea to let the girls come along, for the ride. I thought it was a terrible idea, but I got outvoted on it. Now here we were down on this dock, with my partner and some dealer down in the hold of a boat, retrieving our haul, and it suddenly came over me we were totally out of our element. Just some fucked up college kids, and now we were dealing with the real thing. The Vietnamese on the boat were watching every move I made – basically trying to get a cigarette lit in the stiff wind – and I was thinking that to us, this was kind of a lark, but those guys were dead serious. And even if we got out of this situation intact, I couldn’t imagine who or what would be waiting for us at the other end.

My good sense was finally kicking in, but way too late. My partner was down in this boat somewhere, and he’d made who knows what kind of commitment to some drug overlord I had no idea of. But there was no way, nowhere to run by then. We would just have to ride it out, and hope for the best. But I resolved right then and there that, come what may, I’d never put myself in a situation like that again. If I got a chance not to.

Finally, Lynn and his buddy emerged from the boat. Each had two large, brown paper-wrapped bundles, about the size of full grocery bags. They hurried across the dock and I popped my trunk. It was a tight fit, but they got the bundles shoved in there, and I quickly shut the trunk again. Lynn’s friend hurried back to the boat, which was already beginning to back away from the dock. Lynn and I jumped in the car, and I fired up the Trans Am and we got the hell out of there. We hadn’t said a word to each other, the whole time.

********************

We left the docks in Sabine Pass and pulled out onto Highway 87 and headed west, along the coast. It was a straight shot – from Sabine Pass to High Island and then down the Bolivar peninsula to the ferry. Probably 50-60 miles altogether. I could drive it in my sleep.

The section of 87 between High Island and Sabine Pass was washed out by a storm sometime in the mid-1980s, as it had been many times before. Only the last time, the DOT or whoever decided not to rebuild it again. There had been talk of maybe raising that section up, like a causeway, but there were environmental concerns, not to mention it would have been crazy expensive. So the whole section of road – thirty miles of highway, or more – had basically been abandoned to nature.

You can still drive it, but it would be a good idea to have a four-wheel drive with plenty of ground clearance. Whole sections of the pavement are still there, but much of the old road is covered by loose sand, some of it quite deep. The whole place is part of a nature preserve now, so maybe it is just as well.

Still, I miss being able to just drive that road. The beach in Chambers and Jefferson County never was really developed, and once you got past McFaddin Beach, it was basically desolate, all the way to High Island. Especially on an overcast, gloomy day, it was bracing to ride along that road for miles, the open ocean in clear view on one side, the black clouds roiling up over the flat grasslands of the coastal plain on the other. I’d be in my car, listening to the stereo, cruising along, completely surrounded by my two favorite things in nature – the ocean, and rain. It was so comforting, about the closest one could come in this world to feeling like being back in the womb.

I wasn’t feeling comfortable at all that day, driving down Highway 87 toward High Island in the morning sun, with two loud, chattering women in the back seat, a partner in the front seat who insisted on changing the music on the stereo halfway through every song, and enough cocaine in the trunk to get us all put away for multiple years.

We talked about what to do next. We weren’t due in League City until 3:00 that afternoon, which meant we had 5-6 hours to kill in the meantime. We could either stay on the Bolivar side and hang around at the beach or something, or go ahead and cross the bay on the Galveston ferry early, before the traffic, and hang out on the Galveston side.

We opted for Bolivar. We felt more comfortable with it. I don’t know what we would have done in Galveston, but I knew of an unoccupied-for-the-weekend beach cabin in Singing Sands at Crystal Beach, and I knew where the key to it was hidden. I felt a little better after we decided to head for the cabin at Crystal Beach to chill out for a few hours, before doing the rest of our deal, on the other side of the water.

We got to the cabin about 8:00 a.m., and sure enough, I found the key. While I went up and opened up the place, I could hear the girls and Lynn messing around in the screened in area underneath the cabin. Once I opened some windows and turned on the water, I laid on top of one of the double beds in the large main room, and thought how beneficial it would be to get a few hours of sleep. I hadn’t got much the night before. I was laying there on my back, just drifting into that nether land between wakefulness and sleep, when Carla came upstairs and said they were going for a walk along the beach. I told her to go ahead, I needed a nap. So she kissed me just hard enough to arouse me a little – on purpose, I think – and then flip-flopped on out of the room and down the stairs outside. I lay there, temporarily distracted by impure thoughts; but before very long I fell into a deep, restful slumber.

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Say You Will

As it happens, I found myself walking alone along Crystal Beach Tuesday night, around 10:30 or so.

The girlfriend and I and a few friends of both of ours had come down to the beach for a couple of days, to relax a little, and celebrate Independence Day.  The rest of the crew had settled into the cabin we rented, and had begun listening to music and drinking cocktails. I intended to do very much the same. But one thing I always have to do when I first arrive at the beach – as soon as possible – is reconnect with the beach itself … re-introduce myself to the wind, and sand, and waves, and ocean. I told the others to go ahead and start mixing drinks (which, actually, they had already started doing), and I’d be with them shortly – I just needed some fresh air.

My girlfriend, Lea, is still fairly new, but she is going to be a good one, I think. She pretty much likes to be anywhere I am, bless her. But she already knows there are certain times it is better to let me alone for a little while, and that this was one of them. More than probably most people, I require – in fact, thrive on – my alone time.

So there I was, walking barefoot along the edge of the water, in a pair of canvas shorts and a Bob Marley Legend T-shirt, flip-flops in hand. I was walking alone, but the beach was by no means empty. A lot of people had showed up for the Fourth, and there were people drinking and listening to music and shooting fireworks and even a few bonfires.

Most people are laid back and friendly at the beach, probably more than in their everyday lives.  Hell, I am pretty sure that is what draws many back down there, again and again.  Anyway, a reasonable looking guy walking down the beach alone has zero chance of getting very far before being invited by one stranger or group of strangers or another to have a cold one, to stop and listen to some music, even to sit by the bonfire a bit, and join in the fun. I had several invitations on my walk that night, and I accepted every one. My intention was to go with the flow. Very much like body surfing … I intended to let the wave catch me and pick me up, to let the unique energy of the Bolivar Peninsula guide me and carry me along that night on my walk. I am sure most beaches have their energy, but Bolivar is special … partly because I have spent a large chunk of my childhood and adult life there, sure.  But the place is special, anyway. Took a direct fucking hit from Hurricane Ike, and looked like a bombed out beach on some no-name WWII South Pacific atoll. Left for deader than fucking dead. Lost forever. Gone.

And within two years, one would hardly have known there was any hurricane at all.  The houses and businesses came back, the people came back, and the unique energy of the place came back, too.  If you do not believe in miracles, neither did I. Until I witnessed this one, first hand.

As I walked along, after having stopped to talk and drink with a couple of different groups partying down on the beach, it occurred to me I had been doing this very thing I was doing now – just drifting, waiting for the Crystal Beach culture to pick me up and carry me along – for nearly 40 years. Amazing. So many good times, and an endless supply of stories and anecdotes and just slips of memories.

After an hour or so of doing my thing down on the beach, I headed back up to the cabin. By the time I arrived, it appeared several rounds of drinks had already been gone through. I poured myself some Early Times over ice, and dumped in a couple of ounces of water to smooth it out. Then I went and sat by Lea on the sofa, and began to ease my way into the ongoing revelry.

***************

    I don’t want to feel this way another day, it’s killing me
    I don’t want to be the one you try to mess around
    I could never see the reason in the way you looked at me
    Baby, you’re the one I want, so come on, ’cause I need you now

    Say you will
    Say you’ll stay with me tonight, girl
    You won’t be sorry …

I was 22 or 23 years old, sitting out on the open part of the deck/veranda that wrapped around three sides of the beach cabin, with Diane, my girlfriend. We had been out there for awhile. It was night time, maybe close to midnight, maybe after. Who knows? We’d been partying that day for hours and hours, since noon, at least. In fact, there was a party still going on at a beach house down the way – some friends of ours – and we had been there earlier. But an hour or so prior she and I had decided to come back to our cabin.

The deck on that cabin was excellent for stretching out on at night, and looking at the sky. We had dragged a couple of chaise-lounge lawn chairs out there, and had been laying back, watching intently for shooting stars. We’d only seen a couple. In late summer, August and September, one could see hundreds in just a couple of hours. But it was early July, and the action was slow.

I had turned on the stereo, and a song Diane really liked came on (“Say You Will”, by Blanket of Secrecy). She reached over and put her arms around my neck. Just then, something really bright flashed by in the sky. We both turned in time to see something large and bright and moving at a very high rate of speed streak low across the shoreline and go several miles out over the ocean, before crashing into the water with a splash, leaving a brief afterglow.

“What was that?!” my girl asked.

“I don’t know, Jesus! But hey, can you hand me another beer?”

Diane reached over and unhesitatingly plunged her hand into the ice and melted ice water in the cooler on the other side of her chair, and pulled out a cold Miller Lite, and handed it across to me. I loved that girl passionately, for a lot of reasons. Just one of them was the way she handed me a cold beer.

Her song had ended, but she pushed the volume even higher when the next song came on, some dweeb Englishman singing about being blinded by science. But it had a good beat, I guess. It got my girl all worked up, that’s for sure. Which, in turn, got me worked up.

We quickly forgot about the celestial anomaly we saw that night. A UFO crashing spectacularly into the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Galveston/Crystal Beach was one thing. My baby, Diane, getting herself all worked up over some Thomas Dolby song was something else entirely. We quickly retired to the privacy of the beach cabin to enjoy each other in the way people have been enjoying each other since all the way back in the olden days, back to when Adam and Eve used to get it on, in that sub-Saharan savannah back in Africa, where we all come from.

    If the sun refused to shine
    I don’t mind
    I don’t mind,

    If the mountains fell in the sea,
    Let it be
    It ain’t me …

***************

Lea looked at me and laughed. She has the most beautiful smile, and I spend a lot of my time trying, in various ways, to elicit it. Just because I get off on it so much. Luckily, it is pretty easy for me to do – for some reason, she thinks I am hilarious. I reached out to the coffee table in front of us and picked up my drink, and took a sizable sip of sweet Kentucky bourbon mixed with a little Ozarka water, and some ice. It felt so good going down, it gave me a bit of a shiver. Just then Lea kissed me in the ear; and when I smiled, our friends laughed.

It was nothing, really. Just a random moment, in a random cabin, on a random road, on a random night. Down at Crystal Beach.

Crystal Beach – the magical place where both kids and grownups come to play, and laugh, and feel good, and just let the beach culture wash them over, and – at least for a little while – carry them away. One day, when I grow up, if I ever do … I want to move down there.

And then stay.

    maggie and milly and molly and may
    went down to the beach (to play one day)

    and maggie discovered a shell that sang
    so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

    milly befriended a stranded star
    whose rays five languid fingers were;

    and molly was chased by a horrible thing
    which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

    may came home with a smooth round stone
    as small as a world and as large as alone.

    For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
    it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

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;

Under The Big, Black Sun

It was 1983 sometime, mid-morning, but edging toward noon.  I was laying on my side in the queen-sized bed, my head dug down into the cool, goose down pillow laying underneath it.  I was in the bedroom of my apartment at the time.  It was time to get up, I guess.  Half of me wanted to get up, half of me didn’t.  I was hung over as hell, which was one reason I didn’t want to.  I’d gone out the night before with this girl I was seeing and some other people we knew, and we’d hit the whiskey pretty hard.  And then we hit the MDMA sometime after that.  More than once.

My . . . what?  I didn’t consider her as my girlfriend, not really . . . My then current female companion, I guess you could call her, was sitting across the bedroom, slouching across an armchair, looking stylishly disheveled and a bit like Anita Pallenberg, circa 1968, before the rot set in.  She was eying me accusingly.  “Get up, lazy ass.  I want to go to the beach today.”  I rolled over onto my other side, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while she was mildly vilifying me; but she continued with the nagging, “You’re so lazy . . . you’re so lazy . . . you have a lazy life.”

“I’m lazy?  R-i-i-i-ght,” I was thinking to myself.  This chick was a borderline speed freak, and she stayed up to ungodly hours, chain smoking cigarettes and watching the dreck that passed for all night television programming in those days.  And that was about all she did.  Oh, she did make herself available to me when I wanted, and she seemed to participate in the subsequent goings-on with something approximating passion, which is probably why I had kept her around as long as I had.  But I always knew she was just temporary, that she wasn’t long for my increasingly dark little fucked up world.

She was right about the me being lazy part, though.  I had lately been overcome by a powerful lethargy I could not shake.  It dominated my life for months.  My limbs felt inordinately heavy, and I would sit and think for minutes or even hours before deciding to do something as simple as getting up to go turn down the air.  I had lost interest in the things I used to be interested in, and I’d neglected most of my friends and family for months.  And I never really wanted to go out and do anything anymore, at all.

I still don’t know exactly why I’d become so lethargic; but I suspect some of it was the onset of temporary clinical depression.  And also the fact I was shoveling down unknown quantities of alcohol and pharmaceuticals every night, and well into the next morning.  That may have had something to do with it, too.

And now, this tweaker chick I was dating said she wanted to go to the fucking beach.  Great.  Understand, going to the beach was something I would normally be ready to do at any time, at the drop of a hat.  The sand and the ocean and the waves had powerful meaning for me, and had a spiritual and intellectual and emotional hold on me as basic and primal as the church I had been born into and had given my lifelong adherence to (with varying degrees of devotion over the years, mind you.)  I went to Mass when I was in the mood to, and thought I probably should. I was always ready to go to the beach.  But on that morning, my girlfriend’s insistence that I get up and take her was more annoying than anything else.  I rolled over in the bed, away from her, so I could lie there in peace for awhile, and think about it.

By that time, this girl and I had been together  a few weeks, I think.  Maybe a month, or two.  I’d met her one night in a bar my crowd and I frequented in those days.  Just a dive, really.  A place to drink and play pool and shuffleboard, and not much else.  It was not a place one immediately thought of if one was looking to go out and score some acceptable if temporary female companionship.

The night I hooked up with my speed freak girl was an exception, I suppose.  I’m not 100% sure, though; because I don’t remember any of it.  My friend Tony had to recount the whole romantic story for me.

***************

“You were playing shuffleboard, and kicking ass,” Tony said.  “Seemed like every third puck you slid hung over the edge at the other end.  Those guys were bluffing you, saying they weren’t hangers, and you challenged ‘em every time, and won.  You were out of your head, and playing like a demon.  Winning tons of free beer.  It was awesome.

“Somewhere in there this chick just kind of showed up.  I don’t know where she came from.  She wasn’t all that attractive to me – kind of skinny, and her hair was long and straight and almost stringy.  Tits, yes, but nothing really to make a big deal about.  She had on a pair of worn out jeans and tennis shoes, and a baseball undershirt with dark blue sleeves.  Three-quarter cut.  Nothing to get your attention, really.  But she stood there alongside the shuffleboard table for awhile, admiring the way you played.  And before long I guess you noticed her admiring you, and after that we could tell from the look in your eyes what was going to happen next.

“Sure enough, before long you had your arm around her, and she was drinking some of the beers you’d won, and smoking your cigarettes.  It wasn’t that much longer until you guys looked like you’d been together for years.  I didn’t get it.  Not your usual type.  If Diane had seen her, she’d have laughed, right before she kicked you in the nuts.  The guys and I thought it was funny … Mike said you’d finally found yourself one that looked like Tom Petty, with tits.  Ha ha.”

I was a big Tom Petty fan back then.  I’d got into him soon after his first LP came out.  I’d come across it by chance.  He and his band were basically unknown at the time, at least around here.  They recorded for Shelter in those days.  The Tulsa scene.  Some of the band’s early cuts employed Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour as background vocalists, Twilley and Seymour playing Flo and Eddie to Petty & The Heartbreakers’ T. Rex.  It sounded really good and different at the inception, both retro and new at the same time.  You’ll have to take my word for it . . . but anyway, this chick was better looking than Tom Petty with mid-sized knockers.  And I wasn’t fucking her because she bore a resemblance to one of my rock ‘n’ roll heroes at the time.  I wasn’t that screwed up.  She was a decent-looking chick, okay?  Starting to show the effects of persistent drug use, yes, but … she wasn’t great, but …

In retrospect, though, through fuzzy recollection, I can kind of see how my friends made the Tom Petty connection.  She did kind of look like Tom Petty, in a certain light.  Tom Petty, with tits.  Maybe I really was that screwed up.

Oh, and the ‘Diane’ my buddy Tony referenced was a girl I loved, the true love of my life to that point, a beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous woman I’d had an on again, off again relationship for nearly two years by that time.  Diane was nothing like the somewhat torn and frayed skag I’d hooked up with playing shuffleboard.  At the time, Diane and I were in one of our “off again” phases, I guess.  But I don’t want to get off into that, here.  Anything to do with Diane is a whole different story.

***************

Me and the Devil was walkin' side by side
Me and the Devil was walkin' side by side
Ooh, I'm goin' to beat my woman until I get satisfied

While my girl sat there telling me what a lazy-ass I was, I started drifting off into reverie, if not quite outright sleep.  I could hear the dude downstairs’ stereo playing.  The Police.  The rather haunting sounding opening bars to “Wrapped Around My Finger”.  That album hadn’t been out that long, but dude (his name was Doug or something) played the fuck out of it, all the time.  Including when he was fucking his girl, which I could hear sometimes, the sounds coming up through the floor between us.  He also beat his girl to that song.  I could hear that sometimes, too.  He swore he didn’t, and she swore he didn’t, but I could hear it, sometimes; the girl’s piercing wails of pain stabbing through my mind, and my heart.  After that, every time I heard that Police album I thought of Doug’s girl crying in pain, and me upstairs, doing nothing about it.  Unable to do anything about it.  It made me hate that LP after awhile, which was okay, because I never liked The Police very much, anyway.  Back then, some retarded Rolling Stone critic went so far as to classify them as “punk.”  Fucking moron.  Andy Summers could play a little bit, okay, but come on . . .

It was kind of hot and sticky in the apartment that morning.  I’d decided that spring to save money to buy a truck, a Silverado I liked, so I scrimped wherever I could.  I’d taken to setting the air conditioner’s thermostat at 78 or 80, and turning it off altogether at night.  I usually just wore a pair of gym shorts around the apartment most of the time, anyway – no shirt, no shoes.  I’d leave the windows open in the evenings.  In the early part of spring, it was a workable plan.  But as it got on from April to May, and then into the first part of the summer, I knew I would have to shelve my plan before long.  It would get too fucking hot and humid in the apartment, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.  Or, alternately, it would make me drowsy-sleepy during the day and, as my girl said, lazy.  Before long I would have to shut the windows for the summer, and crank the A/C down to 72 or lower, and just let that motherfucker run, for months on end.

***************

Your mind might think it’s flying, baby
On those little pills
But you ought to know it’s dying, baby
Because speed kills

I finally got it together enough to get my ass up out of the bed; and take a shower, ice down some beer, and pack up the truck.  All because Amphetamine Annie wanted to go to the beach that day.  It pissed me off that I was coerced into taking her, but once I got down there, I was fine.

It was an average summer weekend – not too crowded, but far from empty.  We secured a good spot to park and set up, not far from where Swede’s Rd. (Crystal Beach Dr.) emptied onto the beach.  I set up our lawn chairs and cooler and this 8’ x 8’ canvas canopy I had, for shade if it got too hot.  I was up in the bed of my truck, setting up the external stereo speakers, when my girl walked over and asked me to slather her down.  So I stopped what I was doing, and proceeded to cover the parts of her body not covered by her bikini, which was by far most of it, with a thick coating of Coppertone Savage Tan, the kind with coconut oil in it.  I was aroused a little by the sight of her barely dressed and all oiled up, with the sun glinting off of her.  But my girl sensed it, and got out of range before I could do anything about it.  I shook my head and went back to setting up the stereo.

Once I’d got everything the way I wanted it, I settled down into my lawn chair and did just about my favorite thing in the world to do – I got pleasantly smashed, and contemplated the ocean, and the waves, and the horizon.  And eventually, I slipped off into a daydream . . .

It was 2011.  Mid-summer weekend day.  I’d been out working in the yard earlier, but now I was lying on the sofa in the living room, half watching a ballgame on the television, and half dozing/daydreaming.  It was a pleasant feeling, to lie there and know I had taken care of my weekend around-the-house obligations, and now could snooze and half-ass watch a baseball game, with no guilt or recriminations.  The guilt would have been self-inflicted, as would have the incriminations, by then.  The soon-to-be ex-wife had moved into a townhouse with my youngest son, and my older son and I were left at the house, on our own.  And he didn’t give a shit about the yard, or household chores in general, obviously; so the only person left to bitch at me about putting off doing what needed to be done around the house was me.  And I was rarely in the mood to do it.

As I lay there between innings of the game, staring at the ceiling and pleasantly zoning out, a car commercial came on the TV.  I don’t remember what brand of vehicle it was for, but they were using music in the background that I found out later was from a then popular pop song.  I’d never heard it before that.  Some European-sounding female singer, singing to music that sounded vaguely like electronica, or maybe trip-hop.  To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure I knew the difference.  But anyway, this music was going on during the commercial, and I was barely aware of it, or of the commercial itself.  Then the Euro-girl sang a lyric that just jolted me to attention:  “You’re so lazy, you’re so lazy, you have a lazy life.”

It is startling how strong a memory trigger popular music can be.  As soon as I heard that lyric, I was transported back 28 years, laying around my hot apartment with this kind of pretty but admittedly Tom-Petty-with-tits-looking chick, who was eating amphetamines like candy and babbling a bunch of shit I had no idea of.  Trying to get me to get up and take her to the bed and service her, which wasn’t that hard for her to get me to do, normally.  But I felt almost too lethargic, too lazy, to even stir myself for raw, jagged sex with this terminal junkie . . . even though having a junkie for a girlfriend had been my lifelong ambition, for quite some time.

The whole period I was remembering was one of the worst and most difficult of my life.  But here I was, nearly three decades on, remembering the surroundings and events and the speed-addled chick I was sleeping with wistfully, almost.  In some ways, no matter how much I reflect and try to work things out . . . there are some parts of me, and some things I have done, that I will never understand or be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.

I’d misheard the song lyric in the car commercial, of course.  The girl was actually singing something about an amazing life.  But it hardly mattered.  Once I heard it the way I heard it, well, it was going to be that way in my head forever.  Up there in my mind with the lethargic days, the drug taking and the listlessness and the settling for a tweaker girl who vaguely resembled a rock star.  With the appropriate female accouterments, of course.

Sometimes, I think it really is an amazing life.

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