A Long, Long Ride

There was this girl I knew back then named Stacey, but everyone called her ‘Spike’. I met her in a 7-11 down from my first apartment. I was 19-years-old and had just moved into the place and had walked down to the corner store my first night to buy a six-pack of Miller Lite longnecks and maybe celebrate a little, and I heard this girl in the store say, “I want that motherfucker, right there.” It was a little startling to hear a woman say something like that, back then; and I looked up just in time to see this girl looking/leering at me, all long, streaked butterscotch hair and a sweet face. She was quite pretty, but actually she had started on the way to losing her looks to decadence, I could see that; and that pretty but decadent look was just irresistible to me back then. She wanted me to take her home that night, so I did.

    It’s been a long, long ride
    I don’t know where I’ll sleep tonight
    Under the stars
    Or maybe in your bed, alright

‘Torn and frayed’ … ‘torn and frayed’ … That is the phrase that kept running through my head, as she bucked and scratched under me that night, while I was meanwhile losing myself in her, and in the drugs and sex and rock and roll that constituted the basic framework of my lifestyle then.

My apartment was a block from the St. —‘s Hospital emergency room, and two blocks from St. —‘s Church. I used to hear the ambulance sirens at night, as I lay in bed, and they kind of haunted me. When they came screaming down my street, they sounded like wailing, and when they went screaming away down my street, they sounded like moaning; but for a split second, when the sound changed from coming to going, time would stop … time would stop for a split second, and in that split second, all the sadness of the world, all the sadness in the world, seemed to want to come pouring in.

I heard the church bells as I lay in bed sometimes, too; tolling and calling the faithful to the weekday 6:00 a.m. Mass. I didn’t get up and go to church when I heard them, but I felt like I knew who those bells were tolling for. Not so much to entice me to Mass … they were more like a send-off, a fare-the-well, as I was just then embarking on a several-years-long journey that took me far away from the Church or anything like it; away from much of anything good and/or just, really.

Spike had smooth skin, but her cheeks were beginning to look hollow, and one could definitely see the decay setting in. She was jittery and I worried about her teeth, which she grinded (ground?) powerfully in her sleep … damn speed freak. She was modestly endowed, but oddly, I didn’t care that much about breast size in those days – as long as there were long, slender legs leading up to a proportionately sized and shaped backside, I was quite happy, and Spike had that. My dad gave me a lot of bad advice over the years, especially concerning women, but one useful thing he told me – “If you are going to date a druggie, try to find a responsible speed freak, if you can. She’ll be less trouble; and she’ll never get fat on you, either. For one thing.” Thanks, Dad.

I got so fucking drunk the night I’d decided to tell Spike we were through … she was coming over later, after work, and I sat in my apartment in the dark for a couple of hours, listening to the occasional ambulance go by, while drinking strong Jack Daniels mixed with a bit of water, and listening to Live At Fillmore East over and over, especially “In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed”, which seemed really appropriate that night, for some reason.

    Against the wind
    I crossed your desert today
    Don’t care what you say
    ‘Cause, baby, I’m gonna stay

Spike didn’t take the news I wanted to break up with her very well. She ran her Trans Am into the side of a 7-11 over on 7th Street later that night, going 30+ miles per hour. Tore up the store, and her car, and bashed her head into and nearly through the windshield.

I heard about it all later on, but I was already long gone from her by then, because I’m a faithless motherfucker, or I was then, or I thought I was then. I seriously abused myself for months after that chaotic fucking night, with whisky mostly, because I thought I was such a terrible person for abandoning my junkie girlfriend like I did, so that she smashed up a really nice car (black w/gold trim, and gold honeycomb mags) and really fucked herself up, while meanwhile I carried on with pretty much every decent-looking thing that came along, there were so many … I thought I was such a terrible person for abandoning my junkie girlfriend like I did, but I think it might have saved me … but then again, maybe I should have just stayed with her, while we rode out the chaos and corrosion and everything – just sort of thrown myself across the pyre, so to speak.

I’ll never know the truth of it; but in a sense I have been on the run ever since then, all these years. Running from something or to something, I really don’t know.

What I do know is I’ve come a long way since my days with Stacey/Spike, but I still don’t really know sometimes if I am better off for it, or not. The whole experience altered my trajectory in some way, I am sure of that. And I’ll never really get back from it.

And I’ll never get home again, either. And no matter how well things are going for me – and they are going damn well right now … No matter how well things are going, I know I will always hear those sirens, singing in the night, pulling me away from warmth and comfort and love, and drawing me out, into the darkness. And one day, sure as hell, I’ll ditch my hard-won happiness, and walk away from it, and never look back. I’ll walk and walk, until I get to the water’s edge. When I get there, I’ll stop for maybe a few seconds. Then I’ll step on in, and wade out toward the sound of those sirens. They’re still out there, I can hear them … they’re still out there, just beyond the second sandbar, I think … just beyond my depth … and they are singing to me, from just out of my depth.

They are singing, from just beyond my depth out there, singing just for me …

    Yeah, I’ll comb this old beach over
    Trying to find a love that’ll stay

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    Flower child, I’m growing wild, but I dig your style
    I’m just a child, but I like drinking those cigarettes
    You love me, you love me not, you got me feeling like a robot
    I’m just a tot, I’m all in knots, but I like drinking those cigar-rottes

I picked up Stacey from the duplex she lived in, out by the university. There was a wrecked car in the yard next door, and the landscaping around there was sort of hit-and-miss, to put it mildly. The dude that lived on the other side of the duplex was a weird older guy, a writer for the newspaper or something. He kept odd hours, but Stacey said he looked out for her, in a paternal way, and she felt safer with him around there. And though the place was lacking aesthetically on the outside, it was in good shape structurally and all, and she had the small interior on her side fixed up decently. All on the cheap, you know? That was the main draw of living there in the first place. Rent was something like $75 a month, which was cheap even back then.

Anyway, I picked up Stacey that night around 8:00, just as it was turning from dusk to dark (it was late spring.) As we walked out to my car, I trailed slightly behind, admiring my date’s erect posture and effortless gait – she walked everywhere like she was a fashion model, going down the runway. I was feeling a strange mixture of pure lust, and the beginnings of an alcohol buzz; and also an odder feeling, something akin to love, I would assume … although it wasn’t love … more of a beyond normal intensity of caring for someone who you haven’t known long enough to love but who you’ve already spent a little time with and are beginning to care about, a little. Something like that. As we approached my car, I stepped ahead and opened the passenger side door for her, and she slid her fine self into my Camaro, all stylish and graceful and everything, like she fucking owned it. She didn’t own it, but that is beside the point.

She looked so awesome that evening, Stacey did. She’d taken her time with her makeup; and it looked damn good on her, not overdone or anything. She had some kind of camisole or bustier on under her top; it made her smallish breasts look more ample, in the context. She had on faded Levis worn low on her hips, with a hole in them here and there. Also, some type of muslin top, off white, sort of vaguely sheer; and these silvery high-heeled sandals, with straps all across her tanned feet and ankles.

Goddamn. She could look really hot when she was in the mood to.

Hell, I wanted to jump her right then and there, in the front seat of my Camaro, but I couldn’t do it. I was driving, for one thing. Anyway, the Camaro had a console and a shifter between the bucket seats up front, and … by then, Stacey had reached into the glove box and pulled an already-rolled doobie out of a Ziploc bag that also had a couple more joints in it, in addition to a fair amount of loose, manicured weed. Pretty sure it was Oaxacan – that was mostly what we smoked back then – and by the time my over-sexed mind was trying to imagine some way to negotiate the obstacles GM had engineered into the passenger compartment of my car, Stacey had already fired up the blunt and had taken a couple of long, contemplative drags off of it. There was a quarter-inch ash hanging off of the end of the doobie, and just before it dropped onto Stacey and/or my vinyl upholstery, she reached out and caught it in the palm of her hand. It was still smoldering, but she calmly opened the window on her side, and tossed it out. I think it just made me love care about her even more.

We were on our way to the Sigma Nu house, for the frat’s annual TGIO (Thank God It’s Over) party, held at the end of each spring semester. It was an annual tradition; and although I wasn’t into the Greek thing (and neither was Stacey), I had friends in that fraternity, who were pretty cool to me; so I had a kind of affinity with those guys.

Besides, it was a kick-ass party. They had live music, and the local Budweiser distributor backed a reefer truck full of kegs into the back yard of the frat house, right next to the portable stage set up for the band to play on. Those Sigma Nu guys kept the music and beer flowing all night long. My kind of party.

But really, the whole reason Stacey and I were en route to this shindig in the first place is because the fraternity boys were magnanimous enough to open the party up to everyone on campus, not just the frat and sorority types. The school would start buzzing in anticipation weeks ahead of time. The party was scheduled for just after the last of final exams, so everyone – Greek or not – was ready to fucking cut loose by then. There would be an interesting mix of partygoers … your requisite number of hopelessly deluded nitwit Greek types, as well as seemingly out-of-place stoners … but also a mix of (relatively) normal students, and a smattering of stone fucking crazies, too. It was great to see the Greeks hitting the bong and running around loose on MDMA, and the stoners dancing to the music and talking about the applied physics exam. And everyone in between, pretty much all of them, laughing and enjoying themselves, in some state of inebriation.

Stacey and I could pass for frat/sorority in that hazy setting; but I suppose in truth we fell somewhere between “normal” and ”batshit insane.”

And as that particular night progressed, it seems we began to veer off markedly toward the latter.

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    Leave us alone and we’ll come home
    Wagging our tails behind us
    Oh, my dear, down on the pier
    Where cops are shooting cops and acting kind of weird

I woke up suddenly in the darkness, on my back. I was outside. The temperature out was balmy, and the firmament above seemed incredibly bright, incredibly clear. I lay there for a moment, taking it in. It was quiet. I felt like I could see every star in the sky. And every planet rotating around every star, and every moon around every planet.

It crossed my mind briefly that this would be the perfect way to be born. Instead of coming abruptly into the world after being forcibly thrust from the warm, dark comfort of the womb, pushed out for a long, slimy ride down a dark, scary tunnel and then into the bright lights, where a bunch of alien-looking motherfuckers are leaning over you and glaring and probing you with shit, and then when you (naturally enough) cry out in horror at all these goings on, the biggest alien-looking motherfucker of them all slaps you – hard – right on the ass … Rather than that sort of chaotic mind-fuck, what if you could instead come peacefully to consciousness, lying on your back in the soft grass, in the dark, in the quiet … and all you could see were billions and billions of stars, as if God, and Carl Sagan, and who knows who else was smiling down upon you. And you couldn’t remember how you got there or what went on before; so, in essence, that peaceful, comforting tableau would be your very first memory.

Now, wouldn’t that be a better way to get started on a life? Better than an over lit, noisy room with a bunch of big people fucking with you and talking baby talk and shit? Damn morons …

Anyway, I couldn’t remember how I got where I was; which, I’d figured out by then, was on my back in a shallow, grass-lined ditch in front of a house on a suburban side street lined on both sides with similar houses. I had no idea what time it was, either; so I looked to my left, at the gold Armitron watch on my wrist, the one with the black glass face and the red LED readout. 3:23 a.m. it read, as it and the little piece of quartz inside it pulsed along quietly in the night. I looked to my right, and saw my trusty 1977 Chevy Camaro, all silver and gleaming in the starlight, parked neatly next to the ditch I was lying in – between it and the quiet street on the other side, which it was parallel to.

Wow. I slowly raised myself up and looked around; and after a minute or two, I had figured out where I was, more or less. I was on Campus St., which was, among other things, about a block-and-a-half from the old Sigma Nu house, and then I remembered that I had attended the TGIO party that night, like I did every year. Only, I must have got myself even more fucked up than I usually did, because I had no recollection of how I got from the frat house to where I was. Near as I could figure, I had somehow found my car after the party and was trying to get in it to drive myself home when I must have decided lying down in the ditch for awhile was a better option. And you know what? It probably was.

What had happened to my date that night, I could only guess. Stacey was faithful enough, as those things went. I never worried about her sneaking off to fuck some other dude. If she wanted to do that, she would just tell me. Anyway, she was as much into getting fucked up as she was the other. Guys would occasionally come on to her, but all they had to offer was some tired masculine idea of how wonderful they were. I didn’t have any illusions about why Stacey stayed with me. She knew I could take care of her well enough in bed, okay; but she also knew there was a baggie of hash in the glove box of the Camaro, and a stash of blue-and-clears and yellow jackets under the T-shirts in the third dresser drawer, back at my apartment.

Those other cats would flex their muscles and unbutton their polyester shirts another button or two, and Stacey would just laugh, and hold me tighter. And I would laugh, too.

After sitting there awhile in that well-manicured, comfortable ditch, collecting my thoughts, I decided it was time to get up and brush the grass off of myself. Get in the Camaro, and just move on. Just because no Beaumont cops had stopped by that evening to see what the fuck was up with me didn’t mean they still might not. So I stood up unsteadily and got my bearings, dug my keys out of the black Levi straight-leg jeans I was wearing that night, and began trying to unlock the driver’s side door of my car. That is when I heard her.

I looked down Campus St., toward Highland Ave., and I saw a girl running down the middle of the street, in my direction. Stacey! I felt a flood of emotion go through me as I saw her running toward me down that street. She was frantic, obviously. And why wouldn’t she be? Left all alone at a wild party by her drunk-ass boyfriend, to fend for herself, and she was probably hopelessly fucked up by that time, too. I suddenly felt like a dick about it, and was beginning the thought process that led to self-chastisement, as she ran up to me, crying my name. When she reached me, she enveloped me in a bear hug, sort of, and held me tight. All was forgotten, she was just relieved to find me, and could we please just go home now?

Okay, Stacey. OK, baby. I’ll take care of you … I meant it, too. But at that moment, while I should have felt relief mostly, I was mainly just confused. This girl I held so tightly in my arms that night, and who held me so tightly, was someone I knew well, obviously; a girl I had known for close to ten years. Through jr. high and high school, and now, most of college. But her name was Sheryl. It wasn’t Stacey.

Sheryl had been at the TGIO party, too; and her drunk-ass boyfriend, whoever he was, had at some point disappeared on her. She had passed out around the house somewhere, probably in the back yard; and when she came to, everybody else was either hopelessly drunk or semi-comatose, or gone, she said. And she didn’t know any of the remaining drunks, anyway.

She’d been hiding, first on the porch of the house, and then in some bushes nearby. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she’d started wandering around, looking for someone, anyone friendly and familiar. In an okay-but-not-great neighborhood, at 3 o’clock in the morning. A suggestively dressed coed from the West End, who didn’t know anything about anything, really. No wonder she was so overcome with relief at the improbable sight of me standing there at that ungodly hour of the morning, just down the street from her, trying to get into my car. She jumped out from behind a tree and came running.

I guessed at that point I was some kind of godsend in her eyes, once I thought about it. And that was cool. But, you know? She … she wasn’t Stacey.

And how could she have been? Stacey had been dead over a year. She had come around a blind curve one night, on a winding farm road outside of Lumberton. Hauling ass in that cool, black Trans Am, going 70 miles an hour. Only to find, once she got around the curve, that some drunk in a pickup was coming the other way, and he was all the way over in her lane, too.

I thought I had seen her that night, on a darkened street, running toward me. I knew it was her. I had brought her to that party, after all. But it had been two years earlier that I’d brought her to that party. I figured that out later. The girl I had brought to the party that night … I saw her running toward me, and when she got closer, I saw her red hair and familiar features. Sheryl! But, where was Stacey?

Where was Stacey? And who was Spike? I thought they were one and the same, and I thought I had loved them both. But I am not even sure of that anymore. As I move forward, further and further through time, I realize my mind, in order to save storage space, or who knows why? As I move forward, my mind slowly and quietly folds my past up behind me, and I am pretty sure it all gets deleted, sooner or later.

I lie awake at night, trying to remember; and I wonder what all, and how many, are already gone from me. And I don’t even know it, yet.

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Run Through The Jungle

    Thought it was a nightmare

    But it’s all so true

    They told me, “Don’t go walking slow

    ’Cause the Devil’s on the loose”

I had taken two spansules of synthetic amphetamine salts two hours earlier, or thereabouts … about 40 milligrams each, as near as I could figure; and I was really starting to feel them when Fred asked me if it was time to open another bottle of Popov vodka, the kind that came in 1.75 liter plastic containers, for $8.99. Cheapest drunk out there, good old Popov. I have a lot of Russian in me, on my mother’s side, but I always fucking hated vodka, even the expensive kind. So I figured if I was going to have to drink the shit, anyway, it might as well be ‘Comrade Popov’, as we called it. Didn’t taste any better/worse than Stoly to me, and I’d save a little money.

To Fred’s query, I answered in the affirmative. “Fuck, yes,” I said. “Open that motherfucker up! I need another shot of the Comrade right now, goddammit! And what the fuck happened to the sangrita, jagov!?”

Fred and I had been riding along, drinking and laughing and telling stories and yelling at each other, for about an hour. At a snail’s pace, it seemed like. We were slogging through the mud and slop and occasional relatively dry ground, deep in a large palmetto swamp somewhere southeast of Georgetown, SC. We were in a vintage Land Rover some engineer friend of Fred’s had loaned us. The kind of rig Englishmen used to tool around the African bush in; the kind you could entirely dismantle (and reassemble, supposedly) with a slotted screwdriver.

That guy was nice enough to loan his vehicle to us, although I don’t know if he would have done it, had he known exactly what we had in mind.

I looked over at Fred, in the driver’s seat, just in time to see him take another long pull off of the vodka. He was as much Russian as I was – we were first cousins on my mother’s side – and I don’t know what his excuse was for tolerating this rotgut version of the national drink of the motherland, fermented and brewed from leftover crap in a trailer house in Missouri somewhere. But he took a big hit off of it, then reached back into the game bag of his camouflage jacket and pulled out the bottle of sangrita.

“You son of a bitch!” I cried. “You’ve been hiding the fucking sangrita! Hand it over, and the ‘Comrade’.”

Fred had eccentricities. One of them was hanging around with me, since we were little kids. Another was chasing his cheap-ass vodka with a tomato-based concoction originally formulated for chasing pricey tequila. But Fred’s lifelong credo had always been something like, “What the fuck?!” And in this case, I had to agree. The sangrita just after the Comrade Popov made the latter seem, well, not quite so bad.

Fred lived in Georgetown, a nice little city close to the ocean. He was a civil engineer at a large firm there. I was spending a week vacation with him.

Right after college I had been recruited by a company that ran these large catalogue showroom retail stores. This was the early 1980s, and that type of thing was really popular then. Anyway, I guess they were going by some of my work experience, and not so much my Political Science degree, when they hired me, as part of their regional warehouse office, based in Birmingham, AL.

But, you know what? They were right. I was a natural at that job. About half of the time, I fucked around with not much to do at the regional office – testing out new products, working on ways to modify our warehousing setup to make it more efficient. Shit like that.

But I was also part of a “crisis team” that would be flown in when a warehouse operation at one of the retail outlets had failed. The company I worked for had been a large regional retailer in the South, mostly, but they had recently acquired another retailer that was more spread out around the country. They were in the process of converting a lot of the just acquired stores over to their system, which caused problems. In addition, their prototype outlet had a wrap-around ‘warehouse’ (a large stock room, really), and they hired managers locally at just above minimum wage, and helpers at minimum wage. So fairly often the whole staff would just say, “Fuck it,” and the whole setup would go to hell, and it might be a week before the regional office caught on. At that point a crisis team of young-ish regional warehousing types from all over the country would be flown in to take over operations, clean up the mess, and hire and install newer and supposedly better staff. I was on one of the crisis teams.

Most of the team members, men and women, were in their early 20s, like me. We had to fly all over the country, at a moment’s notice. Go in, work twelve hour days at whatever location required us, then go out and drink and raise hell and try to hook up with the local talent, or (less often) someone else on the team. Then get up early the next morning, tired and hung over, and do it all again.

An average operation lasted a week or so; then we’d all return to whatever office we’d come from, and try to recuperate before the next call came. This particular time I’d been flown out to a giant-sized clusterfuck in a north Georgia store, and after my team had completed its task, I asked for and got a week’s vacation I had coming. So I rented a car in Athens, and drove up to see Fred in South Carolina.

By chance, Fred was off that week, as well. It was mid-April. When I got there Fred told me we were going “hog-hunting.” I’d never done it, but it sounded fun, so I told him I as all in.

I found out it wasn’t hunting in the sense of shooting something and killing it, though. Fred’s firm had a big company barbecue every year just after Memorial Day, and the tradition was that Fred and some of his engineer buddies would go out into the marshes outside of Georgetown, in two-man teams, and track down and capture feral hogs; which were then brought to a couple of locals out there, who had heavy steel corrals set up on their properties. The captured hogs were put in the corrals, then spent about a month being fattened up on corn. Apparently the combination of lean feral pork and a month of domestic feeding made for really good barbecue.

    Thought I heard a rumbling

    Calling out my name

    Two hundred million guns are loaded

    Satan cries, “Take aim!”

We splashed through two or three or ten more deep-ass mud holes, and over several more hummocks of dead marsh vegetation, causing the vodka to slosh around violently inside its plastic receptacle, and inside of me, as well. Finally, we came to a stop, and Fred killed the engine.

We were in a clearing that looked pretty much like the last ten or twelve clearings we’d been through. But Fred pointed out to me something I hadn’t seen at first. In the heavy undergrowth across the way, if one looked hard enough, one could see a kind of tunnel bored through it. Made by a feral hog, my cousin insisted.

The idea of our quarry being nearby, and the sudden relative quiet that came when we shut off the Land Rover, just made all the other things going on in that swamp more noticeable to me.

The weather was hot and sticky, and the place smelled of rotting vegetation and decay. And the mosquitoes were having their way with us. But fuck it, we were on a mission. Fuck the heat, fuck the decay, and fuck the fucking mosquitoes. Fuck the humidity, too.

Fuck it all. Down a few spansules of crank, slam down some cheap vodka, climb in an all-terrain vehicle (true meaning of the term), and make a run through the jungle.

And don’t look back.

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My cousin and I were crawling on hands and knees, commando-style, through the underbrush and mud, down the same trail a hog had made some time before. We were a sight to see, I’ll bet. Fred had us decked out in camouflage fatigues and Gore-Tex, which kept us somewhat dry and protected from the elements, and somewhat protected us from the mosquitoes; but it was hot as hell in that get up. I was sweating tons, and some of the craftier mosquitoes were still finding their way through, anyway.

Fred was ahead of me, “on point” as it were. He had black cork on his face and forehead, and a large Ka-Bar bayonet in his teeth. Fred had been a Marine once. I tended to forget that. I thought the big knife clenched between his incisors was a bit much, but he said you never knew what might happen walking (or crawling) the point, and he wanted to be ready. It seemed to me he was reverting back to his active duty days a bit, out in this swamp.

I was about the most un-military person you could find, but I’d spent a fair amount of time out in the woods, too, in the past, pursuing my own agenda; so I wasn’t a total stranger to privation in the wild, or to stalking a quarry for dinner, either. I had a Bear Mfg. lockback knife in a leather sheath on my belt. It was a 5 ½” knife – 5 ½” folded, that is; with a 5” blade. I’d spent the previous evening sitting in Fred’s camp, sharpening my knife with one of those Lansky kits, the kind with stones of different gradations of coarseness. If one took one’s time and gradually sharpened with stones from coarser to less coarse, one could get a knife pretty fucking sharp. I ventured mine was about as sharp as a blade of that heft and thickness could get. I felt, if it got down to it, that hog might get the best of me, in the end; but he’d damn sure remember me for awhile.

Our basic plan was to run the hog down into his lair, and then jump and, well, hog-tie him, and drag him back out of there. It seemed like a crazy-ass plan, to me. The feral pigs in that area were often 200-300 lbs., with hooves and tusks. Between us, Fred and I were about 350 lbs., but a big hog would outweigh either one of us individually by two times, at least.

That is why teamwork was so important. We’d been crawling for maybe 1/8 mile (it seemed like longer, but I doubt it was) when we came to an open area under the overgrowth. Fred stuck out his arm to stop me, and then quietly pointed to the other side of the clearing. It was pretty dark, but eventually my eyes adjusted, and I could see a decent-sized sized hog, resting on his side in the leaves. He was all black, and looked lean and mean. Nothing like what one saw in a feedlot. Fred started crawling around to the left. He would take on the front end, the front legs and the head, complete with a couple of smallish but still nasty-looking tusks. I slipped around the other way, to sneak up from behind. I had my knife out and unfolded by then, gripped in my right hand as I crawled around. I felt like I was amped up on max adrenaline, and ready for whatever happened next.

Suddenly, Fred leapt onto the head of the hog, just as it was rising up to see what the fuck was going on. He had the front end of the pig momentarily immobilized, but I knew that wouldn’t last. As quickly as I could, I jumped across the back of the hog, landing across his hips, with his hind legs in front of me. I grabbed the knee/elbow of one leg with my left hand, and I quickly and – I thought – pretty deftly sliced into the back of the hind leg with the knife in my right hand, about halfway between the hoof and knee, just like Fred had showed me how to.

It was basically the same concept as clipping a bird’s wings. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a wounded mallard hen once, out in the marsh. We brought it home and – long story, but we ended up with a bunch of wild mallards as pets. To keep them from flying away we would take just a couple of feathers out of the wing on one side of each mature bird. It made them feel unbalanced in the air, and after awhile they would quit trying to fly at all. What Fred had instructed me to do was knick the tendon on the back of one of the pig’s hind legs. He didn’t want me to slice it all the way through – that would injure the hog grievously, and render him lame. The trick was to just nick the tendon – or the hamstring, I suppose – enough so the pig wouldn’t try to run for awhile, at least long enough for us to get him out of there and to a pen somewhere.

I knicked that pig with surgical precision, using my Bear Mfg. lockback knife as my scalpel. Then I quickly wrapped the cut leg in cloth, and tied the back legs together with nylon rope, then duct-taped them together on top of that, for good measure. Fred had meanwhile done the same up front, and just like that, we had caught us a wild feral hog. We rolled it onto a tarp, and then Fred grabbed one front corner and I grabbed the other, and we dragged that big boy on out of there, all the way back to the clearing where the Land Rover was.

The tarp and the slick ground in the swamp eliminated a lot of drag and resistance, but still, it was close to 300 lbs. of dead weight we were dragging out of there. That burden, coupled with the heavy gear we were wearing and the heat and the humidity, really began to get to me. But we kept after it, and finally I saw the clearing ahead. When we got to it, we dragged the hog around to the back of the Land Rover, and then, on ‘three’, we heaved him up into the back. All that was left to do was bring him to a friend of Fred’s trailer, about ¾ miles away, where we would deposit our porcine friend into a corral. He could recuperate and fatten up there, before being dispatched to his final destination. In other words, mission accomplished.

Before we got into the Land Rover to go, I sat on a hummock for a few minutes, to catch my breath. Fred seemed relatively at ease and nonchalant, but I was still on fire with adrenaline, and at the same time beginning to feel fatigued. I’d been pouring sweat, and my heart had been pumping. I felt like I’d just finished an intense thirty minute cardio workout, which, in fact, I basically had. I was fucking worn out, but I felt good, too. You know? Along with all the sweat, and all the lactic acid flooding into my muscle fibers, a lot of endorphins had been released into me, too. I felt … good. Fucking great, actually.

I looked across at my cousin, who was sitting on the tailgate of the Land Rover, looking off into the distance of the swamp somewhere, contemplating who knew what? And at the same time he was idly stroking the hindquarters of the feral hog lying mostly quietly in the back of the Land Rover. When I looked up, Fred had been looking off into the distance; but then he sensed me looking at him, and he looked over at me with the oddest look. Maybe I had surprised him out there. I don’t know. May he didn’t expect me to do as well as I did; or, more importantly, once we had decided to do this thing, maybe he was a little surprised that I went at it with such gusto, and with no fear. Maybe he was surprised, after he’d jumped on the hog’s head, to look up and see his wayward cousin, the one who drank and drugged to excess and was by most accounts totally irresponsible … maybe he was surprised to see him, right there and right on time, on top of that fucking pig and cutting him where he needed to be cut, with no hesitation. Just taking care of fucking business, as dependable as he could be.

If he was surprised at that, he shouldn’t have been. Fred and I played racquetball together in college, and in our junior year we completed a mighty upset of the defending champions, who were much better players than us, and much more serious about racquetball and just about everything else than we were, and we won the intramural doubles championship, against all the odds. We were a terrific combination, actually. We trusted each other implicitly, for one thing. Fred was the tactical player, making precision shots and returns; while I was the one who dove headfirst into the walls, trying to make saves … and who bent several rackets, and had nearly a dozen pairs of goggles broken by return shots because I’d got too close to the fucking wall, just doing my thing. I think my style of play amused Fred, but he respected it, too. It helped us win; and anyway, it was the only way I could ever play.

Fred should have known that would translate over to hog hunting, and just about anything else I tried, especially with him. We didn’t see each other as much as we had as kids and in college, so maybe he just forgot.

It was nice to bask in the tacit approval of my lifelong friend and cousin, who I respected so much. But that really wasn’t why I felt so good that afternoon, sitting out in the middle of a palmetto swamp in the middle of fucking nowhere South Carolina.

It was late afternoon, and the shadows had begun to lengthen across the clearing we were sitting in. The sun and the shadows cast by some nearby tallow trees were dappled across my face. I had looked up then, and just about all I could see was blue sky. I was physically spent, but in a good way. Unlike about 99% of the people I knew, who lived and worked and loved and died and never once had any real idea what it was like to be at the mercy of the elements or truly out in nature, if even just a little bit … unlike them, I knew. I’d had the opportunity … to be out there, in the open. To sweat and labor and risk injury, in order to do something worthwhile and, well, great. How many of my co-workers knew what it felt like to have a wild animal under them? An animal who meant no good, who could and would do harm, if given half the chance? How many knew what it felt like to subdue this wild thing, with one’s own hands, and feel the fight go right out of it, right under one?

And then afterward, how many would know the tremendous amount of sympathy and even empathy one would have for the quarry one had just hunted down and subdued? I remember reading of the respect and even reverence the Native American buffalo hunters held for the noble animal they hunted. I don’t think I really understood that when I read about it, back in school somewhere.

But I understood it that day in the South Carolina swamp; at least a little bit. Fred had been idly stroking the hog lying in the back of our truck, comforting it, almost. Now I pulled myself up, and went over and sat next to my cousin, and did the same. That hog was getting some mixed signals that day, for sure.

He would be fattened up and then killed and butchered, soon enough. But I felt like I had some sympathy with him, by the end of our day together. I felt like I shared something with him, if only just a little bit.

We all have our day coming, we can be sure of that. Just like that hog, and everything else walking around alive on this planet. But we don’t think about that. I am sure the hog wasn’t thinking about it, even in the predicament he found himself in at that point. We don’t spend much time thinking about our end, because we are not made to. What I think I realized that day, if I didn’t know it already, and what that hog and all his brethren knew down to their bones, is that we are here for one thing – to feel alive.

Alive! The rest of it is just mundane details.

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Shrimp Boat Blues

My friend David and I were riding down the beach highway one spring evening, in his 1970-something Toyota Celica. We had the windows down and the stereo turned up, but we were pretty quiet, otherwise. Pensive. We were headed southwest down the Bolivar Peninsula from Crystal Beach proper, in the general direction of Port Bolivar and the ferry landing. But we were really only headed to a bar about halfway between the two beach towns; and as we rode along, taking in the atmosphere all around us, we felt happy and at peace. It was April or early May and it hadn’t got really hot yet, so the night air was pleasant and breezy. We were headed to a beach dive where some other friends were already getting started on that night’s partying. And we were both 21 years old or so, and didn’t yet give much of a fuck about anything. Carefree.

Anyway, we were going along like that when we saw this guy walking down the side of the highway, headed in the same direction we were. He had his thumb out, and was trying – unsuccessfully – to get someone to stop and give him a ride.  For whatever reason, Dave pulled over to the side of the road and motioned to the guy, indicating he should hop in the car with us.

So the dude slid into the back seat, what there was of one in that Celica. He was a young guy, probably only a few years older than us. Short and kind of stocky, but muscular. His name was Herve or Jorge or something like that. He said he was from Guatemala, I think, and he was working on a big shrimp boat/trawler that was docked in a small cove across from Bailey’s Fish Camp in Port Bolivar … and could we take him there?

Port Bolivar was beyond our intended destination, but it wasn’t that far out of our way; so we told him yes, we would take him to his boat. It was a ten minute drive, and along the way Dave and I peppered our passenger with questions about shrimping, what it was like to go out into the Gulf every day, and like that. Herve seemed pleased we were so interested in the fine details of his occupation, and the trip passed quickly, while he filled us in on what went on in a shrimper’s life.

When we got to Port Bolivar, our hitchhiker directed us down a shell road off of the highway, on the Galveston Bay side. The road wound around for a bit, between some decrepit-looking trailer homes, past a rusted out boat or two up on racks, with high sea grass and shell and sand all around. Finally, we emerged into a small cleared area paved with seashells, and before us was a small, man-made inlet off of the Intracoastal Canal, with a few docks lining it here and there. There was a shrimp boat at one of the docks, a big boat, and Herve told us that one was his.

I had been a habitué of that area for most of my life, and was familiar with most everything in the vicinity of Bailey’s, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen or been aware of that little inlet before. In the evening light it was rather beautiful. It was protected from the bay and there wasn’t much wind, so the water was as smooth as glass. There was high grass on the levee on the far side, and beyond that the Intracoastal, and beyond that Galveston Bay. One would occasionally hear a tugboat pushing barges going down the canal, and be able to just see the top of the boat’s stacks, over the grass on top of the levee. The evening light played off of the smooth surface of the water, and like everywhere else in Port Bolivar, one heard seagulls all around.

Herve walked us over to his boat. We could tell he was proud of it. The captain and the rest of the crew were staying somewhere on dry land while they were in port, but Herve lived right there in his workplace. He was insistent about showing us his quarters, too; so what could we do? We climbed aboard and then walked around the front of the wheelhouse on the main deck and came to a stairwell which went down into the darkness, into the hold of the ship. Herve told us his crib was down there somewhere, and Dave and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.

Dave started down the stairwell with me right behind, and our new friend followed behind me. I had the briefest thought flash across my mind – that maybe we were too gullible, and this guy Herve was really luring us into his killing chamber, where he had chainsaws and axes and shit, where he could do his grisly work in private, down in the hold of this boat. Later on, David told me he had almost exactly the same thought, that Herve might be hiding an axe behind his back as he headed down the stairs behind us, just waiting for the right moment. I asked why he didn’t mention it at the time, and Dave said, “Well, you were between him and me. I figured once he started chopping on you, I’d have time to run and try to find a way out of there.”

Turns out our concerns were baseless. Herve showed us his small berth below the wheelhouse, then he went into the captain’s cabin and came back out with a cold six-pack of Molson’s, in cans. We headed back up to the deck, and Dave and I sat down on a gunwale and started popping open the beer, while Herve ran up a small set of stairs into the wheelhouse. I don’t know if anything could have seemed more incongruous at the time, but the next thing I knew, we were hearing Transformer-era Lou Reed – in all his androgynous, junkie, glam rock glory – boom out across this peaceful cove, while meanwhile a flock of herons took off in the opposite direction from the levee on the other side of the inlet.

Herve came back down the stairs and grabbed a beer. He told us they had a kick-ass stereo system on the boat; which by then we could hear for ourselves.  I saw two huge weatherproof speakers mounted up on the sides of the wheelhouse, which I had missed before.

It was so weird, and cool at the same time. Here we were, down at Bolivar, in some cove I’d never known about before, sitting on the deck of a shrimp boat, drinking Canadian beer with a Guatemalan fellow we’d just met about 30 minutes before. And all the while, Rock And Roll Animal was playing at top volume, rolling out across the natural landscape and displacing the placid quiet of the inlet with what I consider to be Lou Reed’s finest solo work.

I am tempted to say it was bizarre; but what it was, was fucking awesome.

I loved my life so much back then. I loved the way I lived it … just drifting through it, really … going with the flow.  Because of that, things like the shrimp boat thing would happen from time to time. With no warning, out of the blue.

Just a minor, forgettable experience along the way, of no consequence whatsoever. But it made a lasting impression on me. As I sat there on that boat, cracking open my second Molson’s and just beginning to feel the faintest hint of the start of the beginning of a nice buzz, Reed's “Rock And Roll” was playing, and Steve Hunter’s (or was it Dick Wagner’s?) epic guitar solo in the middle of the song was reverberating off of the water and all around the darkening cove. Jesus, I thought. Does it get any better than this?

The answer is, no, it doesn’t. And, it’s funny. I was as happy there in that spot at that moment as I would have been doing anything else, anywhere else in the world.

Some men are born to greatness, to achieve great things, to garner great wealth, to ascend to great fame. These things are held out as ideals of accomplishment, and who am I to ever question it? But the thing is, I only know what I know.

Somewhere along the way my DNA got crossed up or something, and as I grew to manhood I realized I really wasn’t all that interested in achieving great things, or earning great wealth or fame. Some men are born to greatness, some are born to admire great men.

Me, I don’t care much about either. I‘m just out looking for great times. You can keep the rest of it.

Absorb The Losses

It was after my friend John was killed that I think I first realized, I mean really realized, just how tenuous everything in life is. All the good things, anyway. Innocence, happiness, love, success. Mine is hardly a unique experience, but after that realization, my final loss of innocence, I never really believed in a “sure thing” again. Or in security. In happy endings, an end to all troubles, sustained success. What I finally really did then, after my friend died, was begin to grow up.

At some point, after one falls from grace, one decides how to live with what one is left with. Or does not decide. Myself, I do not recall ever having made some conscious decision, or having had any epiphany about how I should conduct myself in the aftermath. Rather, I can look back now, thirty years on, and realize that for whatever reason I just kept going, and never truly slipped into cynicism or despair; instead, I began to take each thing as it came, and each person. I began to value laughter and good times, and not take them for granted anymore. I learned how to get by when times were lean, waiting for when the times were good again. Rather than wallowing around thinking about how unfair it all was, I learned that what was most important – above all else – was to just keep moving. When one was always moving one was sometimes alone, even lonely; but better that than sitting around in a slough of despond, just waiting to go under. How I ended going down the path I did, in the manner that I did, I do not really know. Was it an accident? Nature? Nurture? Providence? It was probably some of each.

But I found a way to keep moving, that is the thing. To put it simply, after my friend John died, I began to think like a wolf. Not a lamb.

Oh, and here’s one thing: This guy named Robert, one of the closest friends I had, was sitting on my living room floor one night, basically in a drunken stupor, rocking himself back and forth. He kept mumbling something over and over. At first I ignored him; but then it began to get really annoying, so I moved closer to hear what it was he was saying to himself. He was saying, “Absorb the losses. Absorb the losses.” Over and over again, like a mantra. At the time, I asked him if he would please shut the fuck up, I couldn’t hear the stereo. Later on, sober, I asked him about it. He did not remember the incident at all, or where the phrase he was muttering came from, or why he felt specifically compelled to employ it as an incantation that night, shit-faced, on the floor of my apartment. Who knows? We decided the words probably came to him from God, or at least from one of the Muses. Personally, I think he was facing his demons that night, whatever they were, and it was the only thing he could come up with at the time with which to defend himself.

We laughed about that night and his drunken, nonsense phrase for a long time; but to be honest, I kind of adopted it, and I have used it more than a few times myself over the years. I found that whenever I did, it seemed to ease my burden a little. . . if for no other reason than it brought thoughts of my friend back to me. Absorb the losses, yes.

The death of my friend John was one of those losses I needed to absorb. It was a tough one, I don’t mind saying. It took me awhile to even begin to think about how to go about starting to absorb it. I sometimes think I still have not, entirely.

And then there was my friend Robert. He was one who liked to wade way out, into the deep waters, confident always in his ability to stay afloat. And one day he just got fucking swept away.

The demons got him in the end, I guess. Absorb the losses.

____________________________________

Standing In The Light

My cousin Fred is pretty fucking big.

He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, tops. And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all. He is just one of those people who exude bigness. When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.

Fred is just plain big, in some ways. His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive. According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who was crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/dick size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time. Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.

Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids. Not as close as brothers – we didn’t spend enough time together for that – but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are. Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me. He is about my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.

One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin. Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred. It was probably Spring Break, I know we were around 18 or so. One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too. Along the way, Fred OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin. No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on. At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state. “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party?” “How many beers do you think he had?” “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself, that would be kind of nasty.” Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head. It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room. But Fred hardly stirred. A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven. Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredward, or sometimes Freddy if I was in a rush. But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead. He seemed to like the nickname all right. Not that it mattered, we would’ve called him that regardless.

Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean. That was an early spring night around that same time when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula, and a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke. If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow. At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours. The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality. I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all. People who were there still talk about it wistfully. Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand. Meanwhile, Fredward went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d see in an army surplus store. I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did. Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck. He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such. Conversation starter. Fred was always thinking ahead like that.

I was with him the day his sister died. She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home. She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on. And probably a majority of everyone else on that highway that day. Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically. We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did. When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first. We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere. We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock. But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass her friend had been driving, we knew what had happened. I don’t know my immediate reaction, I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated. So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass. Even though they were essentially D.O.A., Fred’s sister and another girl were life-flighted to UTMB. So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston. By the time we got there, his sis was long gone. I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened. We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional, but Fred’s voice never broke. I admired him a lot for that. His little sister has been gone now 31 years, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly. Too much, too soon.

Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean. He’s a civil engineer. We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call. Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by. I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?” Yes, I told him, maybe worse. That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong. But, he can see it all the way from fucking South Carolina. Fuck.

While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night. He laughed and said some of it is in the pitchers mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown. The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that. What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting. Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.

Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remembered her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad. I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamt up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.

But I didn’t dream her up, and I feel like I will see her again someday. On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes, as we stand together there on the beach. I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh. Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio. I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves. The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.

Yes. From my dreams to God’s ears.

No one hears his lonely sighs
There are no blankets where he lies
In all his deepest dreams he flies
With sweet Melissa

________________________________

Over Under Sideways Down

Did you ever have a dream that kept you awake at night? And then kept you awake many nights later, just thinking of it, even though you hadn’t actually had the dream again?

Got a curse I cannot lift
Shines when the sunset shifts
When the moon is round and full
Gotta bust that box, gotta gut that fish

I’d been haunted for weeks by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was out there, just beyond the sightlines of my consciousness, driving me to distraction. And it would not let me peacefully sleep.

There was no peace where I lived. Some cosmic thing had gone awry, and nothing worked like it should have. I was having dreams and premonitions. It was no good. The light was getting smaller and smaller. It felt as if the walls were closing in. Only one thing could have saved me, and I’d just swallowed the last handful of that. What I really needed . . . I needed a girl to wrap her arms around my head, and bring me back down to a human speed. I needed a girl with the words to soothe me, and slow down my racing mind and heart. I needed a place to go where I could rest, and get some peace from whatever the fuck it was that came at night and fucked up my equilibrium and everything else.

But what I needed, I could not find.

I remember one time my brother and I were sitting out on the beach in the middle of the night, watching the lights on the horizon and listening to the waves. I don’t think we’d said anything to each other in quite awhile, maybe hours; and in fact, I wasn’t even sure he was conscious anymore. It was probably 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I looked over and I thought he was slumped down in his lawn chair, but it was pretty dark, and hard to make out. Being slumped over in his lawn chair was not all that unusual in those days, but I wasn’t sure. He was far enough away from me that I could have yelled at him and he might not have heard me. He wasn’t really that far away – maybe ten yards or so – but between the wave action and the stiff onshore wind, he might not have heard. I chose not to yell. I was straining my eyes, trying to see him move or something, and it was giving me a headache. Then, all of the sudden, the big light came.

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

I was restless, and could not sleep.

That was unusual for me, especially in those days. I always fell asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow, no matter what. People who knew me used to marvel at this, and I came to recognize it as a gift. No matter what external thing was going on, I had been programmed so that as soon as I got horizontal and closed my eyes, the natural narcotics kicked in and, before you knew it, I was in la-la land.

Charge me your day rate
I’ll turn you out in kind
When the moon is round and full
Gonna teach you tricks that’ll blow your
Mongrel mind

That particular night, I was in my old apartment, the first one I had after I moved out of my parent’s house . . . and I found myself up at midnight, pacing the floor. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me; but I couldn’t stand it, and I needed to talk to someone. I didn’t call the girl I was dating at the time. She was nice and all, and enjoyed a good time, and we’d been going out a few months by then. But there was no deep emotional connection there at all. I needed to talk to someone who knew me, who was ready to jump down the rabbit hole with me at a moment’s notice and help me try and figure all this shit out.

After thinking about it awhile, I called Callie. Callie was a cousin my age who I’d grown up with and thought of as a sister, kind of. She was my confessor and confidant in those days. I called her and told her I couldn’t sleep – it was probably 1:00 a.m. by then – and I told her I was going crazy and I needed her to listen to me and tell me what the fuck was wrong and help me get everything back on an even keel. That may sound like a lot to ask, but Callie was special . . . and she’d saved me before.

In her usual assured manner, Callie said she’d be over in 15 minutes or so – we were living in the same town then – and she said we’d go for a ride and talk about it and work it all out. Very calm and matter-of-fact, she was – and I immediately felt better, like things were in good hands.

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

I thought I was falling in love with this girl named Angela. She was a particular friend of mine. Very pretty, and she had a perpetually upbeat outlook on life. Always cheerful. That is something that can be taken for granted in a friend, but on the other hand it can be so fucking valuable, just having someone positive around when one really needs it.

Another good thing about Angela was that she was in pharmaceutical sales – she was some kind of district rep – and another thing besides a positive outlook that can be valuable in a friend is having one who usually has boxes and boxes of sample prescription drugs stacked up in her living room at any given time.

Angela had it in her mind that I needed to be taken care of. Perhaps I was projecting that at the time, I don’t know. Anyway, she thought I needed to be taken care of, and she thought she was just the one to do it. She may have been right, too, but damn, it just seemed too easy to me. There had to be a catch.

The first time I thought I might be falling in love with Angela was the night she gave me a baggie full of sample amphetemine capsules, 50 mg a pop. In truth, I preferred the tabs, which gave one a quick jolt. The capsules were supposed to be for time release.

But of course there were ways around that. Angela said to crack the caps open and then wash them down, or even mix them in a drink. Instead, I was eating them like Pixie Stix and then washing away the acrid aftertaste with wine or beer. Worked like a fucking charm, from the get-go. The first few days I was getting an hour or two of sleep here and there, and I kept forgetting to eat. After awhile I leveled off with it, and I rode the buzz for a good long time. Then, when I felt like maybe I was starting to burn up the circuits, I weaned myself off of that shit. Speed can be a wonderful thing, but you have to always keep in mind that it can’t go on for too long. You have to always have in mind when and how you are going to kick. But for awhile, it was a nice little ride.

I remember when I was in college, some of the people I hung around with started getting into opiates. I was afraid of those, but it was fascinating to watch someone you knew descend into that netherworld.

My best friend at the time was this guy named Phil, and Phil had got into heroin. He wouldn’t shoot it up – he was as afraid of needles as I was – but someone showed him how to mix it with his weed and smoke it. So he smoked it. I don’t think the effect was as direct or as powerful as from shooting it into the bloodstream, but still, when Phil smoked that shit he’d get this certain look in his eye only a junkie gets, and you knew he had got himself knee deep into the Mexican brown again, some kind of way.

We were sitting around his place one day, getting high, and the fucker mixed up his stash and we ended up smoking one of those heroin-laced doobies. I could feel the difference almost right away. And, wow, I realized I was made for that stuff. Just fucking wonderful. Somehow or another I managed to keep myself away from it after that, even though it was all around me. All I can guess is I was being looked out for; and thank goodness for that.

Meantime, Phil had got himself a habit, and it went on for awhile, too. When he finally decided to get off the stuff, he didn’t go the conventional route of detox and withdrawal. He kicked “city style”, withdrawing from the heroin while taking handfuls of prescription narcotics to ease the sting. Damnedest thing I ever saw, and it worked, too.

I thought about Phil and his “city style” practically the whole time I was with Angela. That was a swirl of bennies and Seconal and Darvon and Xanax and I don’t know what-all else that went on for nearly a year, I think. Pretty much ended when she was fired from her job, for consuming more of the samples than she distributed. She eventually ended up in the loony bin. As for myself, I walked away from the wreckage; with psychic scars, and some lessons learned.

Phil ended up dead, but that is another story.

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

I woke up with that weird sensation you get when you think someone is watching you. Someone was, too.

I was in bed at the beach cabin, in the old cabin, the one down at Emerald II. I squinted one eye open and could make out the form of someone sitting at the end of my bed. Once my eyes started to focus a little better, I looked again and realized the person looking at me was my cousin Mark. He was sitting at the foot of my bed, dressed in jeans and a Dickinson High School hoodie, drinking a Coors Light shoved down into a plastic coozie that advertised something or other. I looked at my watch on the fake bamboo nightstand. It was 7:30 a.m.

A bunch of us had been staying down at the beach for several days, and on the spur of the moment Mark had decided to come join us for a day. He was a sophomore in high school, like 15, or 16. It was a pretty weekday in the spring, and he had left his house early, then decided to ditch his classes, get some beer, and drive down through Galveston and across the ferry to our cabin.

He said when he got there, early that morning, everyone was asleep; so he decided to start drinking his beer while he waited around for us to wake up.

I really didn’t know Mark all that well. He was younger, and I never spent much time with him growing up. His older brother and I had been pretty close, though. So, he was family. And he had apparently reasoned that a few hours of partying on the beach was worth all the trouble he was probably going to get into later. I could definitely identify with that ethos. So, as much as I wanted to just go back to sleep that morning, I forced myself not to. I got up and started drinking beer with Mark, instead. Back then I had a strict rule about drinking before 8:00 a.m., but this was a special circumstance, so . . .

The night before, we’d been partying and things sort of dissolved into chaos as the night went on. I really don’t remember much about it. I remember coming to in the middle of the night on the beach in my lawn chair, with the blanket I kept behind the seat of my truck wrapped around my upper body. The onshore wind was strong, and the surf was really choppy. I looked around, and about 10 yards off to my right I saw my brother, also sitting in a lawn chair. He was not moving much, and I could not tell if he was awake or not.

I was still pretty groggy, trying to process information and wondering if I was really on the beach, or just dreaming I was. It was really dark and hard to make anything out. That is when, suddenly, everything lit up.

I saw my brother kind of jolt awake in the periphery of my vision. We both watched intently as a large halo of light floated above the ocean, maybe out at the first sandbar or so. And, no, it wasn’t a fucking flying saucer. What a fucking joke. It was a natural light. We just didn’t know what the hell it was.

I don’t know if it really happened or I imagined it, but afterward in my recollection there was also a voice, and a figure in the light. My brother said he did not remember any of that, just a very bright light. It was weird, I felt like I had not seen the figure or heard the voice, either; but somehow it was imprinted on my mind to remember that I had. To this day, my brother and I do not talk about that night much; we apparently saw two different things, and there is no way to resolve it.

Not to mention, I began to discount what I thought I saw to myself, right away. That next morning, sitting there drinking beer with Mark, I started to think about it again. The figure in the light was so improbable, and the words the voice said were so impossible, that almost right away I figured it was my mind playing tricks on me. I never have been able to completely convince myself of that, but for the most part, in order to live normally (well, more or less), I have put the event entirely aside.

It is just lately that I have been awakened at night, with those words from the light in my head again. Goddamn it! Once that happens, I can forget sleeping anymore. And all the pills in the world cannot make it go away.

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

Callie picked me up, and we drove down Interstate 10 in her Cutlass 442 in the middle of the night, headed more-or-less in the direction of Jacksonville Beach, on the Atlantic Ocean, at the eastern terminus of IH-10. I’d always wanted to go to Jacksonville Beach, for the surfing.

Along the way we talked, and I told Callie about the stuff that was bothering me, and about the vision I had that I’d put out of my mind, but how now it was back to haunt me. I told her what the figure in the light looked like, and the words the voice had said to me.

She was quiet throughout, which was not unusual. Callie was a terrific listener. I would unburden myself to her, and while I was talking, she would never say a word. She would just listen. If she had anything to say about it, that came later. It was one of the things about her I loved so much.

On this night, after I’d told her my terrible secret, and why I could not sleep at night anymore, I stole a glance over at her, in the driver’s seat. I wasn’t looking to see if she had a reaction so much as I was wanting to see her calm, beautiful face. For my own reassurance, more than anything else.

When I looked over, I could make out most of her face, cast in a greenish glow from the dashboard lights. I could see she had been crying, that there were tracks of tears down her cheeks.

Goddamn it! I’d made Callie cry. All because of my stupid bullshit. I resolved right then to just shut the fuck up about the figure in the light and the voices I’d heard, maybe forever.

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

By the time we got to the Atchafalaya causeway, I could sense the pre-dawn glow all around us. It wouldn’t be long until sunrise.

We pulled the Cutlass off the Interstate at one of the exits off the causeway, Henderson or Whiskey Bay or one of those. We eased down the ramp and turned down a state highway for a bit, until we found a good spot near the river to pull off the road. Callie put the car in park and turned off the engine.

I heard her unclip her seat belt and turned to see her pull back the console and slide across the seat to where I was. I put my arm around her as she leaned into my shoulder and grabbed my other hand in hers. Then we sat there like that, in silence, and watched the sun come up, rising slowly up over the great river and swamp.

I told Callie that I felt like it was a new day, and that everything would be different now. Whatever had happened before was done. I had been changed.

I will always remember that night and morning with a sort of bittersweet fondness. Telling my cousin all my troubles, and then testifying to her at sunrise, about how I was changed, and how everything was different.

But it wasn’t different. Not at all. And what I will remember more than anything from that night was Callie’s silent tears, after I’d told her what I had seen and what I had heard. About how I had denied my vision, and turned and walked away from it. And how I had refused to listen to the message that came with it.

She knew. She knew even she could not save me, not after that. Callie had been crying that night, silently and to herself, because she knew I was fucking doomed.

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

I remember, I remember
What life was like in the yard
‘Cause you can’t ever think about dying
And it just makes a person get hard

I keep wondering if my friends feel like I do
I don’t know how someone could stand it
To go through what I’m now going through

So every night we party
And every night we get too high
And I put myself so close to death
‘Til I think that I ain’t gonna die

And I realize just a little
Why sometimes I like to feel like dirt
It’s the only thing in this day and age
That can make me feel close to the earth

But if I ever get to heaven
If I ever reach that door
I will ask them why I had to go through this life
When I just couldn’t take any more

But everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell
Everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell

_____________________________________