Wanting to See That Way

Wanting to See That Way

Guard the military schools closely, and keep up the school spirit with vigor, because your prize kiddies are escaping right out from under your noses, folks. But they have to damn near kill themselves to do it.

William S. Burroughs Jr.

SPEED

My junior year of high school, fall of 1985, I didn’t a have a ride home from band practice and I asked Briedi, a flag twirler, for a lift.  “Sure.” I took the chance on Briedi because she lived in the direction of my house and I thought she was beautiful with her curly brown hair splashed on her shoulders and her freckled nose. I really did not knowher well but she always said hi and smiled at me. I think she did so because Alicia Martin, who sat in front of me in English, thought I was a crack up and she was Briedi’s friend. It may have been that I wore a Led Zeppelin shirt and she liked them. You never can tell. Briedi wore her short skirted twirler uniform in our school colors of red and black done up with sparkles with brilliant black tights that glittered in the South Texas fall sunlight and outlined her thighs and her twirler calves like bas-relief.  Those shimmering-in-sunlight tights held all the possibilities in the world. She had all those mystery curves that I was beginning to really like, soft ‘S’s’ I was longing to do something with, just had not had the opportunity.  Those shimmering-in-sunlight-tights held all the possibilities in the world. I was still getting over Dungeons and Dragons, yet she talked to me as though I was part of her clique even though I was not part of any, much less hers. She ran with the more “popular girls” whom I did not know at all except for Alicia. 

After light conversation about band and Alicia, as we pulled up to my house she asked a question– a deciding factor, an unforeseen happenstance, a fatal instant–Briedi asked, as I was about to get out of her hip little brand new Fiero (another thing that separated us– her parents’ money). “Do you Party?” she said, and yes, the word ‘Party’ had a capital ‘P,’ and had never been asked that before surely not by a girl who, in my naive view was a “Miss,” not a “girl.” I said “love to,” not really knowing, but knowing it meant getting high.  “We should get together sometime and do just that.”  Then she asked if I had the Led Zeppelin album with the guy with sticks on his back on the cover and if I would lend it to her. I ran to my room to grab the tape, was back out the door handing Briedi the cassette. You just never know.

After that ride home and that eternal question asked, I felt that was the secret.  Make life a Party. The adults led by their example as it seemed my memories of good times with family during my childhood involved the consumption of booze by the adults, particularly my family in Mexico, my father, all of them, my grandfather and uncles all listening to corridos, sometimes a live conjunto, and beer bottle caps littered the concrete floor. I remember going around sipping beer from all of them and they laughing at me thinking I was cute. 

 I remember stealing Fiesta brand cigarettes from my grandmother and Swisher Sweet’s tipped cigars from my father, who smoked them to wean himself off of cigarettes. I had seen an ad for a poster in the back of a comic book of a cool-ass-pancho-wearing Clint Eastwood gunfighter sociopath smoking one of those little cigars. I imagined testing the pressure of that trigger pulling that hammer back—smoking those little cigars, thinking Clint looked so cool andlooking at myself in the mirror sort of smoking, thinking I looked so cool.

I remember back in sixth grade, our health book showed how one would “see” while on LSD: this totally chaotic orange and black vision in which one could just barely make out a distorted face of what looked like a child who had grapefruits in his mouth. I looked and looked at that two-page spread painting, wondering how I could goabout seeing that way and realizing I wanted to see that way. Did I need LSD, to see that way? If so then I was in. Even though the book claimed taking LSD or any of the other illegal drugs was a terrible, crazy thing, that double spread said it all, one just needed to read between the bindings.

Sixth grade was also the year we got the warning about LSD dosed hand stamps being circulated around. I, of course, was hoping I would find one of these magic tickets to seeing in that double spread way.  That year we were made to watch a video about just how bad drugs were featuring an interview with a kid in an asylum who thought he was Superman, thought he could fly, the tragic result of LSD. Us kids thought it was pretty funny watching this burn out jump up and down on his institutional cot in his barred windowed room and we got yelled at by Ms. Joshu for giggling.  

The adults were showing us this and as a kid one must always beware, for one never knows when adults lie or why they say what they say. They seem to have ulterior motives and their words never seem to match the examples they set.  Mom saying go outside and play, but when I tried to get her attention from the TV, with glazed eyes tells me she is too busy living vicariously through the lives of others in soap operas and to leave her alone. Kind of like one of the clichés of how to tell if your kid is on drugs—they would rather spend time alone. And there were the hippies I remember seeing sitting in the grass in the summer of 1979 up at my cousin’s house in Chicago and they sure looked cool and peaceful and happy and I had heard they were into drugs and they were adults. The video was right about one thing—the music sure liked to talk about drugs and it was adults singing the songs about alcohol, LSD, cocaine, heroin, andmarijuana. Tell us not to hit each other, but every night on the TV news adults bomb other adults and even children. They have the death penalty as a way to rehabilitate those who color out of the lines, told to share and on the news we see starving people on the TV as we dine on our TV dinner. Same with the drugs–don’t do drugs and theygot TV, chocolate, war, porn, sports, booze and money, tobacco stains and stale coffee brains running on empty in a frozen wasteland of consumption and gluttony.  But who am I to judge, but then again, who are they? 

This anti-drug video showed very nicely, how rock and roll was inciting kids into the drug culture and there was a scene of high school kids standing around a Camaro listening to the Boston song ‘Smokin’ doing just that cut with a close up of the 45 of that song spinning around a turntable like the beginning of the sitcom Happy Days and the kids looked happy and cool and were listening to this rockin’ song and were somewhere out in the country away from the adults.

I heard from Briedi, not too long after the question, about kids going to party at an abandoned house nicknamed “the Hellhole” and I imagined the kids standing around in the Hellhole smoking pot listening to cool music coming from someone’s car, being happy belonging, and I knew when given the chance, I would take it.

Hellhole

It was after a football game and I was riding bitch between Richard and Lori. We listened to a tape of Ozzy Osbourne and smoked a pinner joint on our way to the Hellhole. Ozzy sang about flying high again. Briedi was going to be there. A bunch of band people were going to party there. We were out in the country on Glasscock Road around 5 mile line. The grapefruit trees in their orchards stretched their naked begging arms to the night.

        “There it is” Richard said.

The Hellhole was a half burned out house surrounded by trees. It  sulked in the darkness.

        “Wow” I exclaimed.

Lori nodded her head. “Party, man.”

There was a pentagram on one wall that seemed to be the center that held together the “Hellhole.” There were some other kids there and cars were hidden under the boughs of the overgrown trees sheltered from prying adult eyes further by the rampant, wild brush. In what must have been the living room, on one wall, a pentagram in red spray paint stood out, starkly centered amidst the other miscellaneous graffiti. In another room, someone threw a bottle against a wall and it shattered. No one seemed be worried about taking care of the Hellhole for future generations. Someone passed me a joint as I was hoping Briedi would show. I hit the joint and noticed the point of the pentagram plunged straight down.

Flashes Forward and Back

Yeah, Yeah, Spring break 1991 had begun and I was high, spinning without moving on my bed, watching all sorts of spectacular colors dance around my eyelids, so unlike anything in that long ago health book. I had eaten two hits of the pink gel LSD that Gary had scored. Kim, who should not be on acid yet, is, entered my room laughing to herself. I started to sense something in the air drawing us together, an acid vibe of pure infantile need. Her eyes were reflectingmirrors in the candlelight and I didn’t think there was any need to put up a fight and she had me by the hand. I was sitting on the edge of my bed and she unzipped her pants with the loudest zzZZZIIIIPPPPP I had ever heard and she started masturbating furiously in front of me and the shadow of her hand in the candlelight was hypnotic and I was transfixed forgetting what this hardness is for and Nine Inch Nails was on somewhere, and Kim was as beautiful as everyone else, as usual, and we ended up kissing, falling into the abyss of our two very high eyes and we are melded and she was inside me I was inside her and this sex began that is going to scar us forever even though we believed we were sort of strangers trying not to be and it is funny, aside from sad and tragic irony, that at that moment in time, I knew that somehow I would never see Kim ever again.

I have retreated away from the maddening crowd and am in my closet alone with only a candle and my dirty clothes, which seem to be breathing in the flickering light from the candle, for company. I could still smell Kim on my hands. I was on the ol’ reflective-introspective-hypersensitive part of my LSD trip and I am back in my junior year of high school, fall of 1985, wanting to see this way . . .

~ by epiphanypoint on May 10, 2009.