I was thirty and one years…I was finding out what was in man…it was Central headquarters of an America I had never seen…the onus of my little catholic great grandmother of Denver and her small squeezed world of guilt and effusions…”51” pieces of shame on old Julian Street in Highlands, that was all I had to compare to…and it did me good stead because I could feel the crazy disconnect between one slow and one furious world, these two boys and their great ancient mother in this small town with palm trees and dirt roads and small houses…I was digging my own garden and watching the sea for the green flash…hearing the great birds of the tropics whose calls and songs were so much melodic compared to the harsh bickering of the magpies outside my mountain youth window…
So I sat there and smiled so deep inside for my good fortune, my luck in being privy to a new thousand looks of beauty and my present six companions: Jon, Oscar, David, Old Mother, Old Mother Friend, and my disquisitive mind…and then Old Mother got up, and Old Mother Friend did to, and she informed Jon that she had to got to her sister’s house to get ready for the wedding and would see us all there…and with a few slow movements and the passage of time, she was gone…and in almost the same stroke, Oscar had the stereo on, speaking in cryptic parables and loud as hell, Jon having requested some punta music…It was killing the moment, and stony David requested some of the music I had played on the boat while diving…so I dug out a cassette tape of New Order and Oscar rolled the big one…
And we flew. Flew to another place completely. Here were the frontal truths, the rear truths and the rare truths…Bizarre Love Triangle came on, Jon and David had memorized the lyrics on the boat! Oscar was floored, never having heard early Eighties New Wave with a poet’s lyric…We traveled inside that song on a talkative laughing spaceship, passing the joint and free-disassociating at random…within that song’s breadth I took endless naps while Oscar wrote biochemical theses on the breeze warbles…Jon and David just kept screwing their faces into pure mirth…we had an 18 year old high going, where a hue of tenderness and endless possibility free-ranged alongside joyance everywhere…the guys felt completely connected to a honky and a song…music’s power had once again shown it’s mettle, bridging rugged space between race and culture…we laughed from deep in our guts and became hermanos for this earthly life…
I was so high I thought I had died. But then how to explain the Belikan beer and the dying sun oranging through the west window? Or how to account for the Monte Carlo’s Flames for Christ’s Sake? How could you explain that? This was most certainly prelude and/or harbinger—the chariot of dangerous…We were going to ride this flaming automobile into Chetumal to our hilarious demise…one on a chameleon gift of vivid erection, like a contact high from the King James Bible…
- Michael Price
