Band

A Basic Problem existed from the beginning between Spook the trumpet player and four other members of the band. The problem didn't exist between Spook and the two other horn players, Flash and Wolfman, because these three had been together for so long that they were like brothers. In fact. Spook and Wolfman had the same mother and father. This basic problem led to his being called Spook. I will illustrate the problem: The motel room was located in Jackson, Mississippi. Spook, who was so thin it sometimes took two full-grown men to see him on a clear day, had just flown in from the East Coast for this job. He knocked on the motel-room door. Wolfman opened it, put his arms around Spook in a hearty abrazo and placed in Spook's mouth the stem of a pipe (made from the thighbone of a steer) that had been stolen or bought somewhere between Elko and Mount Rainier the previous spring. In the pipe was a small silver-blond nut of hashish, brought all the way from Turkey by a diminutive drummer carrying an overweight set of tabla.

"Tremendous rush coming down here," Spook said, sucking on the pipe, holding his breath and trying to talk at the same time. "Every other seat on the plane was occupied by some kind of Government agent or other. Mississippi must be the place where they have their most secret installations. I've seen garbage trucks heading for Mississippi and always wondered why. [Suuuuck!] Now I know. The nuclear reactors. Powered by [Ssssuuk!] garbage. Cheapest way to control things: hoard power. Garbage power." He passed the pipe to the drummer, known as Squinch because one of his eyes always stayed closed--the result of an old street-fight wound. "Glad to see you're still alive, Squinch. Heard you had a serious operation. Mind if I see the scar?"

Squinch rolled up his sleeve, revealing a large red-and-blue tattoo of an anchor with the legend Mom underneath. "Got it free from this huge spade fag who gave it to me for fucking him in the ass," Squinch said, relighting the pipe. Ray Charles was singing When I Stop Dreaming.

"I assume there has been terrible oppression in these parts," Spook went on. "Are we armed and dangerous? Are we on many secret lists? Has the black cloud carried the sun away?"

"I think we're pretty cool," Flash, the alto player, said. "Right now I'm stoned smooth out of my skull, if that's what you're babbling about."

"Not talking, eh?" Spook said conclusively, sitting down on one of his suitcases. "I guess I'd better go back to New York, then." He got up from where he'd just sat down and picked up one of his cases, leaving the rest behind. He walked toward the door, but C8, also known as The Hawk and The Thresher, pulled him back in.

"You ain't goin' nowhere, Spook, you crazy motherfucker. Now, get that goddamn trumpet out and play us some notes." C8 pushed him onto the couch and laid his trumpet case in his lap.

"Can't play. Mouth's too dry. No busts yet, huh? Well, there were at least fifty agents on that plane and I wasn't too cool. Reading Wallace Stevens the whole time. Dead knock-off for some kind of subversive sex-crazed dope fiend. They know all the tricks."

"Are you speeding?" Cherokee, the lead singer, asked.

"Couldn't risk it, Cherokee," Spook said, unsnapping his case, looking at the trumpets inside, one silver, the rest lacquered brass, one cornet, one Flügelhorn, lots of silver mouthpieces, rags, oil bottles, cleaning springs. "Love to be speeding right now. Dog-fucking-tired. But you know: too many evil dark agents, too much paranoia. Reading Rilke the whole way. Or was it Rimbaud? What if they searched me? Got a copy of Finnegans Wake in my bag. What if they found that? I'd never see the light of day again. Cards at the bookstore they make you sign when you buy that fucker. Driver's-license number, voter's registration--everything. And if you don't drive in this country, you're automatically suspect. The foul industrial complex may be bad for the lungs, bad for the eyeballs, bad for the liver and possibly even the heart--but out here, well, it's like back in the seventeen hundreds. We're right now on the very farthest perimeter of civilization. I saw the woods when I came in. Bears, snakes, probably crazed bearded woodsmen with antique shotguns ... who knows? Can't take any chances, though. Are we armed?"

"We're ripped," C8 said, "and you're wigged, Spook, you spooky old coon. How's that girl you was with up there?"

"Nancy Ann Burner? Ronda Jo Billings? Diamond Lill? Priscilla Messenger? Dale Evans? ... All great Vassar coeds, all slick as fresh cream. Which one would you like to know about, Hawk?"

"He's wigged, all right," Cherokee said. "Take that pipe away from him. He doesn't need it."

But Spook wasn't always like that. In fact, most of the time he didn't say a single word. Sometimes he would go days without saying anything but key names and song titles (and usually he left those up to the other members of the band). But when he talked, no one understood what he was talking about.

A basic problem existed with the whole band. Motel rooms were the problem. They had tried $200-a-night luxury penthouses and "a buck two-fifty" dumps on the outskirts of nowhere. They had slept in doubles, singles, triples, purples, duplexes, complexes, cabins, courts, high-rises, low-rents, seaside, lakeside, riverside, backside, outside, mountain, desert, plain, salt flat, tundra, forest, downtown, uptown, midtown, small town, big city, with color TV, black and white, built-in alarm systems, lawn sprinklers, hot and cold running coffee, free breakfast, no breakfast, swimming pool, cesspool--they had slept, fucked, shit, nearly died, recovered, shot smack, gone off the deep end on acid, bathed, dressed, rehearsed, fought, been busted, bored, tired, sad, ecstatic--they had lived in these motels for 3287 more-or-less consecutive days and nights with only brief intervals at home. Nine years.

And if anything became clearer, it was that the motels were all the same. Getting a motel room was strictly a holding action. Sleeping in one was a negative act; it was nonsleeping. Eating in one made you hungry. Drinking in one made you sober, more aware than ever of the essence of motelness. Music in motels increased their basic silence. The water in their bathtubs dried you like the desert sun on a bare bone. Dressing in one made you stark-naked. Crying in one made you happy and laughing in one could break your heart. The band spent a lot of time just sitting in motel rooms to keep from growing older, like science-fiction space travelers can do going faster than the speed of light.

But the problems were obvious. The years piled up, the trace elements of madness in the systems of the players were mainly made of dangerous chemicals, high-powered weapons, childhood ideas that stuck.

"Where're we playin'?" Spook asked, late at night in Jackson, after talking himself out of leaving, talking himself out of fear, exhausting his week's supply of words.

"L.A.," someone said, a disembodied voice in the silver-blue clouds of hashish smoke. Perhaps Ray Charles said it:

So darlin' please don't say naw to me, Until you've heard my story, You just might like my story girl.

"L.A.," Spook said, the two sounds completely without meaning for him.

"The big time," another voice said. "Capital Records. Whiskey A-Go-Go. Bacon death. Sudden death. Painful death. Semi-demi-quasi-pseudo death." The voice was his own.

"We're going to L.A.," Wolfman said, Look:

Steady Rain And The Big-Assed Jug Heist

Coagulating into one expanse of darkness, the massive storm clouds hunched over L.A. and fouled the already ugly land. After a few weeks of this, the moisture was inescapable. And months later, in the spring of 1969, even those who had fled in cars to their hilltop homes came sliding back into the city as the seeping water undermined those hills.

Under a hissing and crackling neon sign, seven members of a Texas rhythm-and-blues band and their manager moved about in a slow frenzy through the limited space of a double room of the motel. The fact that there was only one bathroom was putting everyone on edge. When they got up, they were already in bad spirits from sleeping in a room meant for two people. They were kept awake all night by Deacon, the organ player, who had brought a girl from the club and, behind a couple of Preludin 75s, made a terrific racket, rolling around on the floor with her and bumping her bare ass against the other bodies until well past dawn--though nobody ever noticed the sunrise because of a cloud cover so dense and oppressive that people all over the city were beginning to walk stooped over, as if the sky were an actual weight on their shoulders.

"Severe body-image disturbance," Spook mumbled, searching for a dry towel.

"What the fuck's he talkin' about?" C8 asked, fumbling the powder out of a (continued on page 86)Band(continued from page 82) Biphetamine capsule, spilling it on his knee.

"Estoppels, preclusions," Wolfman said. "You know, man, plain ole jive-ass literary bullshit."

"Never saw a literary bull," Flash said, standing stripped to his socks in the closet, pushing clothes around.

"Anybody got any more deodorant?" Cherokee hollered. "Turn down that goddamn television."

"That's the radio," Deacon said, "playin' my man Sly's new thing."

"Well, fuckin' turn it down," Cherokee said. "Who's got the deodorant?"

"An armpit by any other smell," Spook said, "might make the difference between a gold record and a mere hit. We might, in fact, consider including an armpit on our first record. Maybe have a group armpit photo or something."

"Ain't gonna be no first record if we don't get our asses in gear," the Mineral, their road manager, hollered at everyone in general.

"Ain't gonna be no record if C8 doesn't bring his bass line down a couple of octaves instead of speeding so fast he can't even put a bottom down," Squinch was playing the bitch.

"Get off my ass," C8 said. "Mind your fuckin' drums."

"Spare me your fuckin' grief, Kemah," Squinch snapped.

As they searched for lost articles of clothing and jewelry among the scattered records and instruments, piles of money and drugs strewn on every open surface--as hair drying and combing took place in a tangle of seemingly disembodied elbows and as some attempted in vain to find a free patch of carpet to stand on while getting the other leg into a pair of pants--Squinch, the fireheaded, leprechaun drummer who never missed a stroke, kept on talking about C8's sound until they finally got into a fight that culminated in C8's eating the remaining black ones instead of sharing them with Squinch.

But Squinch was so high-strung that anything could set him off. Next to music, his appearance was his greatest concern. Around 3:30 in the afternoon, he'd begin fooling with his hair, spraying, setting, combing, until it was perfect. And when it wasn't perfect, he wouldn't work. Once, on a gig in Bossier City, Louisiana, a bird flew in through the door of the club, up onto the stand and right into Squinch's hair. This freaked him so badly that he jumped around, whooping and hollering for half an hour. He had to be taken home. It destroyed him.

Spook took so long in the shower that Flash, who was already well geared from three birthday cakes and half a pint of tequila, ripped off his clothes and jumped into the shower to wash Spook's back, scrcaming that if he couldn't do it in 45 minutes, then somebody better fuckin' well help him. Spook, who mainly tried to stay in whichever place had the fewest people, started screaming at Flash to get out.

Flash was like that, totally uninhibited. Sometimes the Spook might be taking a big piss and Flash would burst in and lean over his shoulder, saying, "I wanna look at yer dick."

It wasn't anything sexual. More than anything, Flash liked to flash people out, really jack with their heads, as he would say, in any way he could, even if it meant finding Spook reading in bed one night and sending in this chick who'd just given Flash a blow job. "Now, honey, you just go in there and give the Spook a big wet kiss." And she did and Flash popped in, saying very solemnly, "Spook, m' friend. You just gobbled mah goober!"

Wolfman was different. He couldn't even stand to be seen by anyone when he was undressed; and even though they'd found a solution to the problem of having only one bathroom, he wasn't about to jump in with Flash and Spook. But the Mineral followed suit, mumbling that, as their official road manager, he was obliged to advise them that if he didn't get his shower by seven, they wouldn't make it to the gig. On the wave of a tremendous rush from the black ones, C8 (who was so called because that was the shape of the knifemarks on his forearm) jumped in without bothering to take off his suit, whose cheap coloring began running in the warm water and dyeing everyone's feet sky-blue. As the counterpoints of purpose and confusion, direction and chaos mounted and reached heights whose precedents are set in full-scale disasters, the rain sighed and went on gnawing at the hills; and the eight men went on swearing at one another as they acted out the elaborate ritual of grooming both the outsides and the insides of their bodies. But they managed to get themselves clean and things settled back to the routine hysteria of locating the proper chemicals to take before venturing into the hideous and dangerous world beyond the door.

This was the band, then, stone whiteniggers out of backwash Texas towns between Houston and Louisiana, who grew up learning the important things in life: to avoid work, to have a good time and get as high as possible on whatever it took; to get money, as much of it as possible, as fast as possible and in any way possible. Their oldest member, Squinch, was pushing the underbelly of 30. Spook was only 20. But they all had two things in common: They were all full-bore rhythm-and-blues musicians with a monster sound and they had come to L.A. with the promise and the hope that they would make the big time. Connections were set up. Contracts were in the works. And so far all they'd gotten was the broadside of a record-breaking rainfall.

At a quarter after seven, the eight men stood under the narrow awning outside the room, squinting at the rain, which was exploding into a fine shrapnel of drops as it hit the asphalt parking lot and washed out onto the Strip. Brightly colored sports coats, freshly starched Hi Boy shirts, patent-leather boots covered by sharply creased bells, cuff links and tie tacks as big as eyeballs and shining like raindrops even in the failing neon light were all part of the illusion that kept the motel manager from recognizing the rip-off. Only the silent black maid, who had given up trying to decipher the disaster behind that door, knew the truth.

The snow blue Cadillac, carrying the band at close to 90 miles an hour toward a night club on the swampy outskirts of L.A., also suffered the misfortune of having in tow a U-Haul trailer seven months' overdue in Conroe, Texas, and paid for only by the signature of its captor, C8. Its driver on this night, known as the Mineral for his daily habit of eating about 20 vitamin capsules, which were sent to him in monthly supplies by a company that claimed Olympic teams used them, held a brown belt in karate and had some limited training in jujitsu, Kung Fu, savate and thumb wrestling. He, like C8, stood close to 6'4" and had that look that grows on athletes who have been separated from their sports, a surface softness under which one suspects the vestige of a great strength. Squinch, who had a temper like a leaf spring and courage that had been worn away by years of street fighting and contemplating his approaching middle age, was in the habit of starting fights just to see the Mineral kick somebody's head across the street quicker than most people could clap hands. The Mineral was a goodlooking, outgoing and very dangerous man who, with his broad smile and mellow baritone voice, could talk tenpenny nails out of a pine plank, as he demonstrated later that evening, when the club owner decided to pay the band half of what had been agreed upon.

But the Mineral's negotiations took so long that C8 had time to get pissed by the fact that it wasn't some poor North Side peasant trying to make a buck but a rich West Coast fag. Because C8 was the kind of person who couldn't wait. If he decided he wanted something, then he couldn't rest until he had it, whatever it was. He needed that Cadillac so much at one point that he and some local Houston boys threw a brick through the window of a 7-Eleven, took the checkwriting machine and lit out. Then they (continued on page 166)Band(continued from page 86) broke into some factory office for blank checks and spent one Friday cashing hot checks: And all of a sudden they were rich. C8 got the Cadillac and down payments on just about anything else he wanted. But he was smart enough to stop cashing in after he'd gotten what he wanted. The others went right on with the machine until they got caught.

C8 was a large boy, 28, and he'd developed an impressive gridwork of muscles that covered his body like a suit of armor when he was a kid back in Kemah, Texas. He'd quit school in the third grade to load those shrimp boats that chug in and out all day long, run by four-and three-fingered old-timers who barely had time to lean back, hawk up a giant was of sputum and send it wobbling out over the oily salt water, and whose sole advice to the youth there abouts was "Get thet education, boy. They cain't take thet away from ya." C8 had rocked way back on his heels--barely an adolescent but big and strong, making a buck now and then arm wrestling down at the bar, where he wasn't supposed to go because he was underage--and delivered his own projectile across the trajectory of the old men's, allowing as how he'd prob'ly dew aw-right without that edge-yew-kay-shun.

On this night in L.A., all that muscle had long ago gone to a thick cushioning of jellylike tissue infested by minute pockets of fat. He hawked grossly from deep in his smoke-blackened lungs and spat a good 20 feet across the posh club, submitting in the same breath, "I say we break the fag's kneecaps and take the fuckin' money."

But a little brainwork by Wolfman and Spook refined this. They simply backed the trailer up to the loading dock and relieved the club of every unopened half-gallon bottle of booze in stock.

Dawn found C8 and Cherokee standing in the parking lot beneath the sizzling neon sign, so drunk they didn't notice or else just plain didn't care that they were soaking wet. Each cradled an empty half-gallon Chivas bottle in his arms and giggled in high weak waves of exhausted hysteria, mumbling in that way only the oldest of friends can understand in such a stupor. The never-ending need was each day to get a little higher, to go just one step further than the day before in whatever direction and in every way possible.

Certain things were dictated by being on tour, by the traveling of a band. The Old French word bande means "bond, tie, link." Related to bandit, from the Italian verb. But put any group of people on the road and see what happens. At home people get together and work hard at settling; they drive out the mobile, vagrant spirits. Possibilities are shrunk purposely in order that certain things may be accomplished, in order that certain prohibitions be maintained. When they venture away from home, they are subject to the whims of loose and ancient spirits that inhabit those roads on which they travel. The bonds and restraints are left behind. There are 360 degrees on the compass. They can be divided into an infinite number of possible directions. The nomadic band is open to these infinite possibilities.

Add to this a hearty, animal background, the prime sense of a man who never made it past third grade, whose whole life is founded on the most sensuous profession, the making of sound, sound meant to move somebody--a man who has no question in his mind, who is certain of himself, who has never asked what he would die for, who went into the Service not because he was willing to die for his country but because he wanted to kill for his country. Give this man a gun and let him have no fear, not of other men nor of animals, not of accidental death or bodily harm or mental disintegration, not of failing manhood, nor of education or law or the beliefs of others. Show him pain. Then give him pleasure so that he knows both sides of the coin. And as sure as he stands and breathes, he will go after pleasure with purpose and determination and attain it by whatever means he deems necessary, notwithstanding hell-fire or the hand of God.

A man doesn't have to be evil to do what the band did.

The Lone Ranger Eat and Get Gas Wax Museum

These nights repeated themselves in flickering sequence, blurring and running together. And through brute force, with desperate urgency, there was always some last-minute way of peaking out above the previous day's record. Allnight acid marathons flash by disconnected, mere images, poorly remembered by all. Somewhere a girl offers herself bodily to the band as a receptacle out of which to eat ice cream, off of which to bounce their wildest fantasies.

At some point, holes broke through the canopy of bundling clouds and the expectations held in L.A. faded. The rain, having devastated the area, finally relented and the band moved north under it, instinctively migrating with bad news, turning east at Interstate 80 for the cross-continent drive home.

Somewhere along the line, Squinch had picked up a trashed-out Deuce-and-a-Quarter only to learn that it used a quart of oil every 50 miles. With his trunk touching the road because it was full of two-gallon oilcans, he hopskipped and limped across America. Cherokee slept almost nonstop, getting up only once midway to urinate, and then, without a word to anyone, resuming his position slumped in the front seat of the Cadillac next to C8, who ate black 20-milligram Biphetamine capsules and drank Tres Equis Cerveza Clara and hawked up great wads of phlegm, which he fired into the roaring highway wind, and chain-smoked the numbers Flash was rolling in the back seat and talked about where they'd been or where they were going at 90 miles an hour while he was driving mostly by the instruments, though once he looked at the road long enough to avoid plowing into the back of an unsuspecting Northwestern hayseed's new Chevrolet with the itemized price sticker still proudly pasted to the left passenger window.

One sunset on the road found them where I-80 discontinued, poised on the ridge before Wendover, Utah, where the late rays of light burned up under the low, flat-bottomed clouds and reflected down onto the infinite expanse of shallow, liquid salt fields divided by roads into perfect geometrical patches of intense pastel shades. Green trapezoids abutting on tangerine isosceles triangles and wedged together by 40-acre marineblue parallelograms all shivered like rich hallucinations as the land gave up its heat.

"What is time?" Wolfman had dropped seven small cactus thingies that seemed to be having an unusual effect on his system.

"Time is what C8's missing," Squinch said.

"Lay off him, man," Flash said. "Look at the scenery or something."

"A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future," Spook said, reciting from some far-off bit of absorbed knowledge. "In other words, I can tell you exactly what Timbuktu is. For that matter, many things are clearer than time. Plato's timocracy, for example. The timbrel, a variant of which we use every night onstage. Till, tiller, Tillich, tilt, tilth, timbale--"

"Somebody shut that fucker up," Cherokee said. "Can't we just look at the goddaman beauty of this fuckin' place without all this bullshit?"

"What is bullshit?" Wolfman said flatly, emphatically.

"Bullshit is a small green button from the peyote plant," Flash said.

"Look at them lakes out there." C8 pointed to one of the truncated triangles of water so saturated with salt that it was crystalizing. "Fuckin' far out. Anybody got any weed?"

"Let's get goin'," the Mineral said.

"You go," Deacon said. "What'sa matter, can't you even sit still and appreciate a sunset?"

"Yeah, goddamn low-life barbarian cabrón putrid sodomist creep pygmy asshole," Wolfman said.

"Why, you little--" The Mineral moved toward him.

"Lay off, Mineral," C8 said, "he's too high to know what he's sayin'."

They picked up I-80 again and pushed on under cover of full dark, stark images blasting out of nowhere and fading behind them. At one point, C8 bet Squinch he could drive for 60 seconds with his eyes closed but started drifting and ran a station wagon through a guardrail and off the road. Flash and Spook turned to watch the car shrinking behind them in a snowstorm of sparks as it slid off the shoulder and rolled onto its roof down the embankment.

"Jeezus God," Spook hollered, grabbing the seat behind C8. "You ran that guy off the road!"

"Ah cain't stop now." C8 put his teeth together and leaned all his weight into the accelerator.

"Poor fucker didn't have a chance," Flash said, still peering out the rear window to see if the gasoline was going to hit the engine block for a grand finale.

"You gotta go back." Spook seemed upset.

"Yew want us all t'go to jail?" C8 turned all the way around to face the Spook, who looked kind of pale and blue in the eerie midnight highway light. The hog began to creep off the road again and C8 pulled it back, grinding some vile substance out of his throat and spitting it onto the road. "Fuck it, man. We cain't dew nothin' for him."

Maybe it was only in a dream. In Squinch's car, Wolfman pulled out a Martin D-45 guitar inlaid with mother-of-pearl and shell and sang:

"Big 80 left Savannah Run and did not stop You oughta saw that colored fireman when he got them boilers hot you can reach over'n th'corner, mama, and hand me my traveling shoes...."

"Whozat?" Squinch asked when he'd finished.

"Me," Wolfman said, "singin' Blind Willie McTell's Statesboro Blues and pickin' the livin' shit outa this gie-tar." He wasn't so high anymore. Just feeling mellow.

"You know anything by The Uranium T-Shirt? Or The Pink Sphincter?"

"I know how to play a demented fifth chord." Wolfman strummed the open strings, producing an awful sound.

"Go to sleep," the Mineral said.

"If I go to sleep," Squinch snarled, "you'll never wake up. Goddamn motherfuckin' pigshit car's got diarrhea."

Wolfman did a perfect imitation of Joan Baez imitating Bob Dylan imitating himself singing Love Is Just a Four Letter Word.

"I always knew that fuckin' Spook wasn't your brother, you goddamn Mexican bandit faggot." Squinch said. "Any of that Coors left back there?"

"I took a leak in one of the empty cans, if you'd like something nice and hot." Wolfman ran up a two-octave chromatic.

"I'll take it!" Squinch shouted.

Wolfman popped the top off a warm can and handed it to him. Squinch swilled it eagerly.

"Tastes like you had some coffee today," Squinch said.

Only a few hours later, Squinch's Deuce-and-a-Quarter gave up the ghost of its gaskets--head and rocker cover--and began dumping its oil onto the road every 30 miles; and the hours began stretching into one solid expanse of boredom and ragged nerves. The Cadillac radio produced a steady stream of gurgling Methedrine idiocy. Kamikaze butterflies made bright-yellow explosions on the windshield at regular intervals. Alternating and continual doses of cigarette smoke, cold black coffee, lukewarm beer, soda crackers, peanuts, marijuana, speed and more cigarettes had transformed the feeling inside their mouths into something almost as loathsome as that inside their brains. And the roar of the highway wind was enough to loosen the fillings in their teeth. The pulsing white dashes on the concrete, the rhythms of passing towns and of waiting every 20 minutes while Squinch poured more oil into the car were deadening.

And at some isolated glassed-in aluminum service-station cafe along the way was an old man who appeared to be a lifelike gun-metal-and-wax statue of a real old man. When the band--minus Cherokee--sat at his counter, the old man chatted in a gentle baritone, like a big radio off in the distance. He called them boys, addressing them only as a group, asking if they were old enough to remember the cowboy shows on the radio. As they were paying the check, the wax-faced man shook each hand with a cold grip, told the boys he used to be the Lone Ranger on the radio and then showed them an eight-by-ten of himself in his Lone Ranger clothes. The photograph was dominated by a snowflake reticulum of cracks that made the Lone Ranger look as if he were standing in a blizzard that didn't even bother him, except for his eyes, which were squinting behind the mask.

By the second--or was it the third?--time the sun hit the horizon, they had smoked so many Alvin Surprises (a mixture of Moroccan weed and Lebanese hashish) and taken so many snappers that later no one was certain if they were just very high or if the sunset had really been so beautiful that it made them stop the cars along the road and get out, screaming with laughter, to roll around on their backs like dogs, kicking the New Mexico dust into the running sunlight, not caring about troopers who might come by and wonder what they kept in their suitcases or where Squinch's Deuce-and-a-Quarter was registered or by what authority C8 kept beneath his front seat a sawed-off, 12-gauge, five-shot pump and why it was loaded with double-naught shot. No one knew for sure what they were doing in the dirt and Deacon, who stole the shotgun in the first place, wasn't sure why he was carrying it. It hadn't even been loaded until he had looked up an old friend of his in Topanga Canyon who had a gun collection. They had gotten all fucked up on downers and started shooting up and down the canyon with a Thompson. When they had gotten too loose to hit anything with a machine gun, they retired to his friend's porch with the 12-gauge and spent the evening shooting raccoons, which, when hit with that size shot, disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace.

And, of course, when Deacon returned to tell the band about his adventure, no one believed him. They all lied so much and so well that half of the things that really happened were rejected as just more bullshit. But that's the way it was in those days: Some things just weren't true, even if they did happen.

Somehow, after all that traveling, even when they returned home, such as it was, they never quite got off the road in the essential way one must if one is going to live within the bounds of accepted human behavior. After you are on the road long enough, you begin to take the spirits home with you. If you go into the wilderness for long enough, you will become wild. If you start out wild, you will go home and perhaps never realize you are home--or home will be everywhere ... and therefore nowhere. All possibilities will remain within your grasp. You will not obey laws, moral codes or anything else, because you will not even know they exist.

There is another sense about music--this music, electronic spiritualism, amplified emotion. It's the same sense that comes to the operator of a recoilless cannon on the battlefield. Some people call it shell shock. After a few years of playing rock, things begin to loosen, the brain pan begins to hold a dry standing wave, the motor mounts become rigid and liable to fracture with the slightest jar, nerve endings develop calluses. Just as dope deteriorates the body components, constant sound and emotion waste the soul. A deep, low-grade infection of the spirit sets in, an infection you can sense in its victim, just as you can sense something out of the ordinary in someone who has terminal cancer.

The Chocolate Bayou Four on a Midget Incident

One of the first things they did after getting home and sleeping off the snappers, the weed and the trip was to take another trip down to Alvin and load up the boat with weed and snappers for a run up Chocolate Bayou to where the giant white hawks would be guarding their young. The house they kept was outside Alvin in one of the small wildernesses southeast of Houston. Chocolate Bayou is actually a river that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico by way of Lost Bay and West Bay along the western side of Galveston. The house was set inland about 20 miles, where few if any pleasure crafts would venture because of a twisting and erratic channel and submerged stumps that would gut a boat that drew much more than a foot.

The first few attempts to get everyone into the little boat were more ridiculous than dangerous, with C8 insisting that he be the pilot, laughing his ass off, generating a mighty bolus of mucus from his giant lungs, standing up to his full 6'4" to fire it from the boat and tipping headlong into the deep-brown water no fewer than three times before Wolfman, Flash and Spook, pulling him from the bayou, decided to hold the boat's battery hostage until he agreed to sit down and be still. But the black ones were getting the best of him. Deacon, Squinch, Flash, Spook and Wolfman were once again settled next to him in the boat designed to hold two or three people with reasonable safety, and C8, with the aid of an ever-so-small droplet of hash oil, began sputtering with his characteristic sound, like canvas being torn. As the boat, questionably afloat, began pulling away from the little dock, his stifled laughter built up so much pressure inside his chest that he started rocking back and forth in an attempt to control it. Before they were 20 feet downrange, the boat exceeded its two-inch clearance, filled with water and went down again.

At that point Spook declared that, as trumpet player, it was no good for him to swallow so much water and if he didn't get into the house and dry himself out properly with tequila and Lone Star, he might never play a high E-flat again. Deacon followed and spent the rest of the day watching soap operas while Spook read him progressively longer passages from Roethke's Words for the Wind: " 'A kitten can bite with his feet,' " Spook intoned. Deacon began giggling. "'There was a mooly man who had a rubber hat and funnier than that--he kept it in a can,'" Spook went on and Deacon had to make him stop. "'A real hurt is soft.'"

But as they got more and more stoned, it turned into a dialog.

"How did you feel about--"

"Well, I started at the thigh, you know, and worked my way up. Then I came upon a black, dark area full of curly hair and it was slightly damp."

"Uh-oh."

"And as I fondled it, it became damper. Anyway, I ran thirteen fingers up there--see, I'm odd, I got seven on one hand and six on the other, see?--and, like, I put thirteen fingers, both hands, wrists, elbows and triceps, which I was flexing at the time, which means they were expanded to my full eighteen inches, from my bar-bell work. Anyway, I had the whole thing up there and like I was playin' with her heart. Now, as I massaged her heart, her cries became more and more frantic, turning into moans. And as I squeezed those ventricles it was as if my spirit was torn from the very depths of my soul and I came--and she died, and now we're even. Djew ever try dancin' with a corpse?"

Meanwhile, with the boat on top of the water, the four crew members glided upriver with no sound, except the sucking noise of water and the dry hiss of the Alvin Surprise pipe passing from mouth to mouth. The river was flanked by dense forest, which intermeshed 30 feet above the water, forming a dark-green tunnel in which the boat moved along the still surface of the bayou, passing beneath misshapen patches of sunlight that flashed through the heavy canopy of leaves. Along the bank some mongrel dog was running, sharp shadows merging with the fuzzy edges of his movement through the silver-green tatters of Spanish moss hanging and dropping in great quantities from the coniferous frieze to the alluvium along the bayou. As the overloaded boat moved into deeper silence, C8's need to laugh subsided while he stared into the massive heavy green, with the pines pointing upward to more and more green and the river spreading its legs before him, the light coming down only in splotches, though the whole forest held the glow of day, dazzling and rich among the infinite shades of green.

In the near silence of the slipping boat, a leaf came crashing down from the top of a dead tree, heaving through the dry branches, turning and roaring, louder and louder as it neared the ground. A yellow jacket that seemed to C8 the size of a hummingbird dove, startling the boatload of people, and then droned off among the branches; but when a stone-white hawk, its wings spanning more than four feet, came past, riding a thermal above the bayou, glancing toward the canopy, seeking a way out of the endless tunnel of green, a hushed reverence that bordered on fear settled over the four dangerously stoned passengers, as if they were gliding into prehistory.

The pipe passed yet again and someone said, This's fuckin' spooky, as Wolf silently pointed to the tracks of cloven hooves in the mud along the bank. They watched as the impressions moved across their field of vision, the same expressions on their faces that one sees when people are looking into an open coffin.

But it was bigger than their humble hashish delirium could estimate. Around the next curve, upwind from the boat, a full-grown reddish-brown bull lay in the shade near the cool river's edge. He seemed perhaps ten times bigger than the men and boat put together and his bearing was that of a fairy-tale monster guarding a high-priced item. Flash at the tiller whispered, We can't go past that thing, man, he'll fuckin' eat us!

Wolf managed to organize his thoughts enough to draw out of the fog a fact: Bulls don't eat meat, small comfort as they drifted almost even with the monster and passed the point of no return. And even as the thick, blue hashish smoke trailed along behind them, no one figured out that the bull hadn't made his move because he couldn't smell them. As they negotiated the next curve, however, the wind caught both them and their smoke and delivered the bouquet right up under the monster's nose. One hardly imagines a beast of such mass being lithe or lightning quick, but this one was up and into the water in a single motion and the wave was too much for the little boat, which once again dumped its contents into Chocolate Bayou.

Not quite able to charge in five feet of muddy water and unwilling to swim, the bull backed clumsily onto the bank and resumed his questionable guard. Not wanting to replay the scene just yet, the contents of the boat returned on foot to the house, troubling themselves only to recover from the water the hashish, bobbing along in its tin-foil wrapper, and Squinch, who was thrashing and pleading with them not to let him drown.

When they reached the house, Deacon was passed out with his face in the carpet and the television was blasting. Spook was hollering at him to wake up while trying to revive the corpse of an unexpected guest who had dropped over after accidentally injecting too much heroin into this little bit of a vein between his thumb and index finger. It was Kenny, one of those people you always think are so wonderfully crazy, so unpredictable--into everything. Kenny would do things like buy a night club with money he'd made dealing dope, then stay high for six months, only to wake up with a failed business and a lot of debts. Then he'd bounce back with another mad scheme and be off again. He might call in the middle of the night from Costa Rica with an elaborate plan to bring back a ton of solid-rock cocaine in the 43-foot sloop he'd just bought ("No, man, I can't sail, but somebody we know must be able to..."). Then he'd show up working in a record store with no more explanation of what had happened to the coke deal than, "Well, some days chicken, some days chicken-shit." But eventually the drugs got the best of him. Sometimes he couldn't even remember how many bags he was supposed to shoot. And maybe that's what happened in Alvin that afternoon. He wasn't a cautious man.

Some people resorted to rather extreme measures in an attempt to regain that part of themselves that was eroded by time, travel, sound. Others, rather than regain it, tried to escape the container once everything had gone. When your own spirit joined the ones on the highways, you either had to go looking for it or alter the container it had lived in.

Another way to meet the problem head on was to set about denying that it existed, to go full steam ahead with so much energy and fury that you began to convince yourself that you were still all there--after all, just a part of you couldn't possibly raise that much hell, could it?

Mighty Mouse Legends and the Almost Perfect Crime

Within a couple of weeks, the excitement of being back wore off and members of the band were looking for places to gig and ways to make money. A local trombone player named Mouse (for the same reason anyone is named after that rodent) got C8, Cherokee and Deacon involved in trying to supplement their income by taking the safe from a club where Mouse worked.

Mouse was a skinny genius with a wispy beard and blue-tinted sunglasses. He had a habit of quoting old sayings in Russian, because when he went into the Service and scored too high on the wrong exam, the authorities put him in a total-immersion Russian course. At first he was pleased that he wouldn't end up as another bull's-eye for some V.C. sniper. Then he learned they were going to send him to the approximate geographical center of nowhere, in which place it was 30 below zero. There they were going to make him monitor Russian radio stations all by himself for at least three years; and unconfirmed rumors had it that the Russians occasionally came along and randomly dropped loads of explosives on these American radio shacks. When Mouse refused to sign the loyalty oath, however, they sent him instead to the approximate geographical center of North Dakota with instructions to guard with his life a very secret installation. For two years, with a .45 on his hip and a carbine in his arms, Mouse waited for an opportunity to take a spy on a guided tour of the entire complex, but his only visitors were jack rabbits and wildcats and so his lifelong ambition to perform a major subversive act remained a dream.

But he went on as someone who didn't fear anything--much. For that matter, he hadn't really changed since an incident when he was 17. While ferociously DWI, Mouse was stopped by the local Man, who began asking perfectly ordinary questions that struck Mouse as terribly impertinent. When Mouse began giving him the bad mouth--not just ordinary sass but the "suck dirty swamp water through a pygmy blowgun" type of talk--the patrolman felt obliged to unsnap his side-arm holster in case the boy might have to be subdued. Before the Man even looked up from what he was doing, Mouse had a knife to his throat, took his gun and badge and car and was gone. For the next few hours, Mouse drove around, listening to headquarters tell him where they thought he was so he could go in the other direction.

By the time he sobered up enough to realize what would happen when the car ran out of gas, he was running through his head the list of charges: obstructing an officer, completing a cycle, malice aforethought with intent to off a pig, stealment of a short, peculiarity and cruising while wasted.... They could have had him in the joint for half his natural life if he hadn't gone straight to his father--who, by negotiating the sheer and slippery cliffs of bureaucracy with outright bribery, got Mouse sent to a private mental institution, where he crowbarred open a cabinet full of dangerous experimental psychedelics and stayed screaming stoned for the next two months, during which time he made friends with a lobotomized female patient who could neither talk nor walk nor understand, but could smile and, in a rather inhibited fashion, copulate.

Even years after he was discharged, Mouse's view of the world was so distorted that it seemed sensible to rip off the club simply because its safe was so small and easy to move. He waited outside with one walkie-talkie while C8, Deacon and Cherokee hid in the bathroom until the club was locked for the night. With the other walkie-talkie, they went into the office, where they discovered a safe as wide and tall as C8 and so heavy they could barely tip it from corner to corner. But they weren't about to go away empty-handed, so they began rocking it toward the back door, contentedly ignorant of the silent alarm under the carpeting and the dead batteries in the walkie-talkie, which was why Mouse couldn't warn them when the police came and began trying to jimmy open the back door. There they were, these seven-foot-tall, heavily armed blue-eyed Houston policemen on one side of the door, and Deacon with a stolen shotgun, guarding C8 and Cherokee on the other side. Mouse in the meantime had fearlessly sequestered himself in a trash barrel, where he stayed through a torrential rain all night and half the next day. The police became so engrossed in trying to break in the back door that they didn't notice that the would-be burglars finally snapped and left with much sound and fury through the front.

Professional Risk and, the Double Happiness Mistake

Even though C8, Cherokee and Deacon were far too bent to be very frightened by this close call, they did get the notion that certain detectives they knew might suspect them of trying such a caper. And Deacon was getting nervous about holding the 40 pounds of turkey he'd bought and the riot gun he'd ripped off from a squad car one drunken night outside that same night club. Since Wolfman and Flash were more or less clean at the time, Deacon asked them to get rid of the stuff.

Wolfman was something of a square peg, consciously turned on the lathe of home-grown rebellion until he was round as the rest. He hadn't started playing tenor until he was 13. Before that he'd spent all his time in scholarly pursuits, reading the complete works of Dostoievsky before he was in the eighth grade, mastering differential calculus and the basics of non-Euclidean geometry before he reached high school. But when they gave him that math scholarship to Rice University, something came over him. In one hand was a saxophone, in the other a slide rule ... and that old slide rule just didn't have any soul. And old Wolfman was one soulful cat, full of information and wishing he could just cash it in for that much more soul, a commodity fairly hard to come by in those times.

Wolfman sat in the front seat of Flash's TR 4 with a 40-pound plastic bag of weed and a 12-gauge pump stamped Property of the Houston Police Department while Flash drove into the woods along Chocolate Bayou and Wolfman mumbled, God, don't break no traffic laws, Lord, don't run no stop signs....

After burying the whole sinful mess under a few feet of loose dirt, they were so relieved to be clean again that they decided to ride up the river but discovered the little Sears motor wasn't working quite as well as it did before it was left in Chocolate Bayou overnight. There was only one thing to do; they had to head back down-river to the big docks and pick up a metal-flake-blue Johnson outboard motor from one of the little crafts that had been carelessly left out.

Massive doses of marijuana over extended periods of time seem to breed a peculiar mixture of courage and terror. Once they had the motor in their possession, the bite of innocence lost produced such anxiety in them that Wolfman and Flash found it necessary to wrap the motor in plastic and bury it half a mile from the turkey and the riot gun.

On their way back to Houston, the police disassembled the TR 4, explaining that some burglaries had been reported in the area. When the officers discovered nothing of interest, they said, Mighty Fine, Boys, as all Texas policemen do when everything appears Mighty Fine, and left the two pale hornmen standing in the road, staring after the prowl car as it disappeared down the road.

Of all the day's events, this last produced in them by far the greatest need for a nice cool drink and a couple of reds, if not a Tuinal or a yellow jacket and maybe a couple of joints and a green-and-white one to smooth it off at the top, or even part of a black one or a speckled bird could do the trick, though after discussing it, they decided that Ritalin might be just the thing to hit the spot, no matter whether they could score the downers or not, but first things first, which meant going to the Double Happiness Ballroom, where they could not only start out with a few Black Jacks and ginger but could sit in with Cherokee.

The set was ending with a glitzy break tune over which the leader signed off, speaking radioese and spicing it up for the audience: "We've gotta break here for fifteen but we'll be right back on the scene remember Wednesday night is Free Beer Night all you can drink for nothin' two-fifty cover at the door and we'll be here till two Thursday too when we've got the Big Tits Contest don't bother bringin' your falsies 'cause you gotta stand tall and show it all so stay right where you're at we'll be back at bat in a flash and speakin' of flashes how about those waitresses Folks they work only for tips so dig down there in your hip pocket and give 'em somethin' reeeel nice they'll love you for it but not on the dance floor please OK keep a cool tool you fool and whatever you do don't let your meat loaf...."

Wolfman and Flash sat unpacking their saxophones with Virgil, the club owner, and his wife, who was eight months' pregnant, while the leader rambled on, getting dirty looks from the musicians, who wanted to get out of the hot lights and have a drink. Virgil was buying the drinks to celebrate the 230th consecutive night of his wife's pregnancy. He patted her belly grandly and hoisted a tankard of Lone Star, beaming through the smoke, a stout, contented man.

Wolf and Flash were feeling a big rush from some kind of strange new drug Cherokee had laid on them, something called MDA. As they mounted the stage, they were beginning to break into a cold sweat and shake all over, not quite certain if they were getting high or suffering that last rich sensation before the void. They broke into I Can't Turn You Loose with a horn part that could be felt through the concrete parking lot outside, when four policemen, all with striking blue eyes and looking like recently graduated high school linebackers, came in to break up a fight in a far corner between two acned customers. Any fight was the signal for the band to play its fastest numbers at full volume, so the fighters didn't even hear when one of the officers drew his revolver and fired a warning shot through the new acoustically designed ceiling for which Virgil had paid four months' wages. The music roared on even as Virgil charged up in front of the policemen with his Smith & Wesson .38 Lemon Squeezer drawn high, shouting for them to get their asses out of his club. One of the young officers took him for just another brawler and shot him in the leg. That was the kid's mistake.

Virgil looked down at his leg in shock, astounded that anyone would do that to him. Then he leveled his Safety at the boy and emptied it into his chest. The shots slammed large pieces of the policeman's back against the far wall, and people scattered as the boy was thrown back, overturning tables. As he slid to a stop in a mixture of cocktails, beer and his own fluids, the three remaining policemen turned on Virgil and began firing. When the first shot blew part of his shoulder away, Virgil was spun around with such force that his glasses flew across the room. Three more slugs caught him in the back and sent him skidding onto his face, where he lay while they fired on him until his wife threw her body over his.

During all this, Cherokee was prepared to go on singing at top volume, as if this were just another one of the fights they were instructed by Virgil to drown out--and they had managed to cover the sound of the shots with some degree of success--but the band as a unit dropped everything at the first smell of smokeless powder and hit the floor on the far side of the stage. Crawling down onto the floor beside the others, taking care not to wrinkle his suit, Squinch grumbled, Fuckin' well looks like we just lost our gig again.

Godliness, Cleanliness And Getting Next To The Savage Beast

In the morning, Wolfman was so bent out of shape that he just didn't have the energy to face the unparalleled mess of his house. The MDA had let him down, but the aftereffects were gruesome. Every ashtray looked like a recently active volcano. Dishes covered with week-old food--and, in fact, the whole kitchen--were guarded by flying cockroaches that looked to Wolf like hyperthyroid almonds walking up the wall. Texas cockroaches, he quoted from the encyclopedia of his mind, are the sharks of the insect world, not only capable of devouring any type of organic substance but also prone to attack when wounded.

Tiny, one of Wolf's roommates, was a 6'10" guitar player whose sole claim to fame was the invention of the Toila-phone, a homemade guitar fashioned from a Stratocaster neck and the seat of a toilet. Later Tiny changed its name to the Commodiola for the sake of consonance. Tiny's old lady, Emily, a 200-pounded boogiewoogie queen, and Aureliano, a South American mooch whose lifelong ambition was to get his grandmother to bring a pound of cocaine into the country from back home, also lived in Wolf's house. Together in a deranged mescaline stupor complicated by three liters of Monte Albàn Mezcal Regional de Oaxaca con Gusano, Wolf's roommates had systematically removed every record from its jacket and sleeve and had strewn the pieces across the floor, producing a sorting job that could take days. Failing to find the record they wanted, Wolfman's roommates tried to make a fire in his fireplace, which was never meant to be functional, so the whole west wall of the living room was black from the smoke and the floor was sticky from a six-pack of Coca-Cola they poured onto the hearth to douse the blaze.

But the mess wasn't all their fault. Wolf kept an antique shotgun beside his bed. He wasn't sure it even worked until one night when he and his old lady were involved in a coke-assisted ball and Homer, the pregnant cat, decided to intervene. Wolfman threw Homer across the room, accidentally hitting the weapon, which tipped toward the floor, caught on the open dresser drawer and discharged a load of number-eight target shot into the six-by-eight-foot mirror on the other side of the room.

The old Wolf couldn't face it. A certain amount of chaos, a degree of clutter was necessary, lovable even. But there was a limit. And Wolf's house had gone beyond that limit. And so, while Tiny and Emily were in the shower, Wolfman perked a big fresh pot of Colombian coffee, spiked it with four black ones, cooked up a mess of huevos rancheros, squeezed fresh oranges and made sure Emily and Tiny had as many cups of coffee as they wanted. When he got back that afternoon, Tiny and Emily were having a tense, dense, involuted discussion of plans to remodel the house, which was spotless. As if by magic, every particle of dirt had disappeared. The records were tucked away in the racks and systematically, obsessively arranged alphabetically according to artist, style and title. And there was still time for Wolfman to get to the store for some steaks.

The reason he never got to the store had in part to do with Houston's having almost no sidewalks. Generally, the only animals seen walking in Houston are dogs, and the only people who get out in the sun without a car are the eternal nigger maids waiting for the eternal buses through the lemonade afternoons. Wolfman was only a Mexican (which in Texas is almost like being a nigger), but while he walked along in the street, a Volkswagen came by and its driver hollered out the window for him to get his muh-hummin' hippie ass out of the way. It also happened that Wolfman took no shift from anyone without a good and immediately apprehensible reason, so he offered this hayseed the alternative of taking a flying fuck at the moon, to which the seed replied by swinging around and taking a swipe at Wolfman with his wagon. When the Wolf kept walking, apparently oblivious to idle threats on his life, the seed wheeled back once more and stopped alongside with a 45-caliber commemorative Buntline Special aimed at the Wolf's chest. When he pulled back the hammer, however, Wolf raised his hands and said, "You win, I don't even know how I got into this street anyway, I'll get right off it right now," and he rushed home feeling a peculiar itching just below his left shoulder blade, where he knew the bull's-eye was.

On another night, when Wolfman was working the Act III with Johnny Winter, a stone cracker had caught Johnny out at the Poppa Burger and called him a fag for having shoulder-length white hair, and when Johnny shot him the finger, the man threw down a shotgun on him. That was the law of the land, that one should maintain this rage like an expensive habit, that the potential energy level should have grown so out of proportion that its prime symbol became the firearm, its coldness and perfection that of a silent, machine-turned brass cartridge that contained such rage for whoever cared to own it. It's easy to misunderstand: Not just the fuzz-topped, blue-eyed, hayseed-chewing, red-neck, racist, right-wing pigs were armed. The Wolfman was driving along with some people, cool as they pleased, and they stopped at a light long enough to realize that the flow of the moment called for staring at the freak in the next car, who, seeing this, wheeled out of his car and laid a pistol over his arm across the roof. It just happened all the time.

It seemed a lot of freaks were into firearms. Not long after the Volkswagen Buntline incident, the Wolf was examining some La Voz extra-hard reeds in Brook-Mays Music Company when he turned around and saw someone take a good long swing with a Fender Jazz bass and split open a freak's head. As the unfortunate dude lay on the floor, Wolf heard it explained that the freak and his two friends out in the car were hitching when the guy with the Fender baseball bat picked them up. The freaks commenced to present the driver with their Roscoes--a .25-caliber Beretta, a .22 derringer and a .38 special. They then demanded his money and made him cash his pay check, sell his camera and his bass. The victim was negotiating for the bass when the freak turned his head at an inopportune time. But this was before Charles Manson spread the word that freaks were just people, like every one else.

Free Enterprise and Sudden Terror in Val Verde County

Though the Wolf didn't get any steaks, there was dinner anyway, because Deacon came around with a bucket of chicken breasts. For dessert he brought a bottle of Amytals and a small phial of pharmaceutical cocaine, both of which he bought from a friend who got them by presenting his nine-shot prescription to the local pharmacist.

Deacon was a born-and-raised Port Arthur Coon Ass who learned early that might may not make right but it did tend to make money and it generally raised the quality of life. His friends were criminals who would do petty much anything and his involvement with music came from a very basic talent, which circumscribed any desire he had to make money or have power: He could sing. He could sing so well that no one minded his attitude toward his organ playing. When asked if he could pump a little rhythm, he would often reply that his right was his organ hand and his left was his cigarette-and-drink hand. But he just couldn't seem to get after it and repeatedly returned to crime as an expedient, right up until the time he was caught up in one of the "movements."

He and some hard-core Texas gangsters got very psychedelic. They tended to follow fads in those days and the East Side hoods just couldn't resist when Leary and Dick Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass) were spreading it thickly across the amber waves and purple mountains. After enough hits of acid, peyote, THC, and so on, they packed a stolen Pontiac full of drugs and liberated firearms. They took turns driving the Pontiac and two warm Harley-Davidson Electra Glides all the way to a hippie commune in Oregon. It was there Deacon took his first MDA and saw the light, ate macrobiotic food and saw the light, lived out in the land as the first man--emerging from the green fields at the dawn of history--must have ... and saw the light.

After his extended romp with natural forces, living the good life and frying a few brain cells with psychomemetic goodies, Deacon--once cynical, money-grubbing, criminal minded--came forth with a completely new outlook. All the wanted out of life was to return home with his new self, pump up financially as quickly as possible and get back into music, to sing and have a nice little sixroom apartment in River Oaks with a big stereo, a Lincoln Continental and a couple of hogs.... He just wanted to rough it, money be demned.

Because of this new self, he was a little suspicious when presented with the way to make that money. Because of the old self, he jumped at the chance. Down in Val Verde County, Texas, a guy had a ranch right on the Rio Grande. Across the river there was another ranch where they stored huge quantities of Michoacán marijuana. They had been allowing it to trickle in a little at a time and needed someone like Deacon with connections so they could start running six or seven tons a month. And all through the dealings, his new self was a voice in the back of his head, warning him. Like when he met Ray and saw his "ranch." Ranch to Deacon meant a little lake beside a grove, with a low-slung Western-style house that you'd drive up to on a mesquite-lined road, where you'd meet someone in big riding boots who would say, Well, the place's a little messy, why don't you stay in the West Wing? Ray's ranch was shelled, a shack, with butcher paper covering the windows and exactly enough plastic dishes for three people. The kitchen floor was strewn with sleeping bags, some with live bodies in them. And Deacon's little voice was saying, "Looks like a Government compound"--as if Ray could move out and another guy could move in without anyone ever noticing.

Ray himself was not exactly a good omen, for that matter, with his pearlhandled, chrome-plated .38 revolver stuck in the back of his jeans and his habit of whipping it out, spinning the cylinder with a high-pitched ratchet sound and saying, "Boy Howdy! Zzzzz, Boy Howdy! Zzzzz." In fact, this habit of Ray's was downright nerve-racking, because Deacon was never sure when or in what direction Ray was going to discharge that weapon.

The new self also saw trouble in an ex-carny named Negrito, who set the whole thing up. A stone hustler, Negrito kept himself in $200 boots and handtooled leather suits, while going back and forth across the Rio telling people he was in cattle, even though he'd never been seen within a block of anything on four legs except a bar stool. Even when Deacon had no idea, that little voice suspected what was true: Negrito caught the weed farmer taking too much off the top. The farmer was supposed to give 75 percent of the sheep's tail from the tops of the plants to the general as a bribe. But the kilos began getting shorter and one day Negrito threw down on him and warned that if those keys didn't start getting longer, this farmer's life was going to get measurably shorter. Being a Simple Peasant, the farmer had only one choice: to go to the federales.

And not even Deacon's new self knew abut the country boy who was used as a front to drive small shipments in an apple truck. The front was loafing along just as cool as you please, when all of a sudden there were squad cars all around him and big plainclothesmen with semiautomatic pistols. "Now, fellas," the front drawled, stepping out into the midday sun, "yew don haff t'pint them weapons at me." When he opened his truck for them and they said, "What's that?" he just allowed, calm as you please, "Them? Them's apples and Merry Wanna."

All Deacon heard was a dog barking the night of the first big run and old Ray spinning that chrome cylinder and saying, "Boy Howdy! Zzzzz, Boy Howdy! Zzzzz."

As it turned out, the dog was only barking at narcs who were hiding in the bushes listening to every word. And if it hadn't been for having to taste the goddamn weed before moving it. Deacon might have had the sense to pull out when Negrito did. Negrito, who had learned to listen to his own carny voice, clutched at the last minute for no apparent reason except that the vibes were coming out of the woodwork and beating everybody over the head. "No," Negrito said. "I guess I'll stay here tonight."

And Deacon's little voice was screaming, "Yes! That's right! Stay here tonight!"

But what Deacon had already sampled was monster weed. with that crisp pepper flavor and those long pods flecked in brown and red slivers of hashish. His ears were ringing so loud he couldn't even hear his own voice, let alone this newfangled little voice.

They lit the last joint. Deacon was riding lead car, which was supposed to maintain a three-mile distance from the truck in case of wetback checks or any other kind of trouble. They were going about 80. trying to outdistance the truck, when a pait of headlights came up at over 100 and then dropped back maybe 50 yards behind them. There was no doubt who it was.

Before they even came to a complete stop on the shoulder, four shots crashed through the wheels and shrapnel went scattering out across the concrete apron. Deacon and his three companions found themselves staring down the ventilated ribs of four Colt New Police Pythons. There were men holding them, frightened men, who were saying, "Now, boys, don't even breathe heavy. 'cause we'll blow your heads off," so scared they didn't even realize they were pointing their weapons not only at the men in the car but at each other as well, because those .357 magnum slugs go right through a body and keep on going. And just about the time they had these four dangerous criminals handcuffed, the truck came loafing along; they shot its tires out and it went spinning off onto the shoulder.

Black and White Holes in the Mind

As in any other dangerous profession, there's always the chance that someone's going to lose his nerve, just for the short edge of a second, and blow it. Once in a while, one of the Flying Wallendas loses it. Auto race drivers occasionally lose it and have to quit. Fighters, stunt men, fireman--I even knew a coal miner in Man, West Virginia, who saw a dam break and wipe out 18 miles of houses. He never went back into the mines again.

In a way, this is what happened to Spook. About the time Deacon was cutting mountain roads on the Safford, Arizona, Federal Prison work crew, Spook was walking along in the springtime sun and happened across a college campus. He saw long-legged girls hugging their purses and guys in Sta-Prest jeans lounging around under the trees with books or curled up sleeping in the sun, and something clicked in his head: He'd been working his ass off since he was 13, blowing his very breath through a tin funnel, getting shot at and doped out and dosed for a few hundred dollars a week, running from Nowhere, Texas, to Swampshit, Louisiana, to Bumfuck, Arkansas--and all the while there were millions of people hanging out in these high-rent playgrounds, reading books and making it with long-legged girls who got off on discussing sören Kierkegaard and the evils of Dow. There were a couple of quick phone calls, some forms to fill out and some talking to weird-looking dudes with wide ties and wool suits from Denmark, and Spook never picked up his ax again.

Wolfman at one point holed up in Cripple Creek, Colorado, with his old lady and spent the summer getting his bell rope pulled and reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from "A--Antarah" to "Vase--Zygote."

Flash was busted one night in a radio station when the d.j. played a Frank Zappa record and Flash--in complete outrage at the Mothers of Invention's polluting musical territory with their hogshit--whipped out his joint and pissed all over the record while it was turning on the expensive cuing table and being played over the air.

But Flash and Wolfman endured, staying in Houston, where musicians get better and better and play beautiful music in no-account night clubs until someone comes to take them away to New York or until they die or grow too old to play.

Cherokee got himself a little club in Jacinto City, where he could do what came natural, sing two or three songs a night, drink ten or twelve margaritas, cop a few red birds, some blacks and maybe a Preludin, a handful of joints; and every once in a while, when there was a full moon inside and out, com blasting out onto the stage, dancing and screaming like the end of the world was at hand, and bring a small crowd of East Side farmers to tears with a voice like fucking angels in heaven.

C8's story was a little different. Back when the others had settled down with their handful of dope, saying, "Well, I've gotten as high as I'm ever goin' to get. This here appears to be the in-tire shootin' match," C8 was still pushing upward. He saw the light that Deacon saw, but, like an insect, flew toward it, there to die half-crazed with heat.

Everything they tell you about speed is true. And C8 shot speed until he just couldn't speed anymore. And when that happened, he wound his Harley-Davidson up to about 75 miles an hour and jammed it up underneath a horse trailer. When they finished pulling the clutch handle out of his aorta and the spokes out of his liver, when they had patched and sewn and strung him all together with baling wire and catgut, they looked him over and said he'd never live. And when, a few months later, he ripped a piece of stainless-steel tubing from the bedstead and shattered an intern's skull with it, they said, "Well, he may live but he'll never walk." But after a year, he was doing that too and shooting speed (or anything else he could get) until he was so crazed that he ran Wolfman off with a shotgun and beat on his own best friend and held her captive until she had to run out onto the highway and flag down a car to escape.

Now he's a night guard in a motel and working on getting a sheriff's deputy's commission through a judge who owes him a favor. They say he'll get it.

The Mineral disappeared without a trace. One imagines him talking his way back to L. A. and talking a living out of some band, having a high time living the good life, kicking sand on skinny people down at the beach.

Squinch got himself back together after taking it all apart with LSD. His drumming got so mangled that it was like a sound exiled from a Harry Chapin session. But word has it that his old fireheaded, half mad, shell-shocked sound is back and that he was with Johnny Winter and B. J. Thomas for a while doing something wild and new--that's the word.

And disaster and music rolled on, cutting their haphazard paths around and through them all. At least that's the word.