Halcyon Summer Redux

This time thing is a strange concept, as i sit here in the suburbs and look back it's hard to fathom that these things all took place twenty five years ago, it's like an sifting through a box of old Polaroids, some of the names and faces have begun to fade and discolor and yet some are as bright and fresh as the day they were taken. Of course all it's just a fucking dream now and the if it happened or not it doesn't make any difference as the it's the experience that has shaped and influenced the last quarter century. Oddly enough, in what i'd term getting back to my roots, i've gone all organic in my chosen substances much like i was back then, and much like i was back then i've been reading at a good clip, and much like i was back then it seems to be the titles of the madmen and mystics i didn't get to in those days, so instead of Burroughs, Bukowksi, and Celine it's Anton Wilson, McKenna, and Watts.

So now of course i'll quote the words of Bobby Frost and mumble something about the road less traveled and how it's made all or maybe some of the difference. You could probably say hallucinogens did the rest... to recap, the year of 1993 saw the legal dissolution of my nuclear family. I can still remember the day my father sat in the kitchen wearing his grey suit with the final papers in his had, a look of sadness on his face and the words, "well, that's it." It saw me graduate from college and turn down three jobs in the advertising industry so i could go be a half-assed surfer/poet. There was my drawer full of drugs, specifically two ounces of grass, a half ounce of mushrooms, one vial of hash oil, and ten strip of acid... and one cannot forget our brief dalliance with the mistress Angel Dust, thankfully just a dalliance. The grass would help feed me as i smoked up the guys from the pizza shop across the street and the other stuff helped me have a damn fine time as well as attract some female company.

Oh yes and who could forget the female company. Two of the most influential women i ever had the pleasure of knowing waltzed through my life in those four months and change. It wasn't how long those relationships lasted but the intensity and  living that was crammed into them. It's a mix of lust and emotions smashing together like atoms that creates an unsustainable paradise, like heroin, a high so beautiful you don't think or want it to end but it does, what i've come to call the fool's gold of young lust.

Some eight? odd years ago the post titled The Marriage Proposal attempted to capture the tragic and comic stint that i spent with Audrey. A marriage proposal based on the consumption of four hits of acid, a shaved kitty, and an agreement where we would take turns supporting the other for three years at a time freeing the other to "make art". What a lovely fucking scenario.. of course all i really wanted was to take Audrey to bed because i had lusted after her since i had met her briefly the summer before. She was the Art School Girl from Hell that summer her who had transformed into a stunningly beautiful young woman, she had refined herself yet not lost any of the wild-eyed and reckless abandon. The proposal was made in the dim light of the whorehouse sitting room (the rooming house i lived in was on old brothel)  as we drank cheap beer and smoked stolen cigarettes sometime after midnight. We spent a lot of time in my hot and tiny room listening to Jane's Addiction and Pavement and smoking specials, (specials were a joint with hash oil spread on the paper and then given a chance to dry, they possessed the ability to floor the five or six people who crammed into my tiny living space). Yet oddly enough when i think of Audrey and i, i frame it in terms of the Stones, it started Wild Horses and finished Dead Flowers, her staring blankly and chasing me with a hammer. She never seemed more beautiful than that night.

Why was she chasing you with a hammer you ask? Because i had left her to chase another girl. I was a bit ADHD when it came to women. Maybe too it was the fact Audrey wasn't a full time denizen of the Zoo, our loving term for the cesspool that is downtown Ocean City, Md. She would come in on the weekends to see me and then leave. And you see there was this other girl who worked the t-shirt shop right in front of where i lived, she always wore a Yankee's cap pulled down low to hide her eyes, i can remember how she'd tilt her head back to look at me when i'd walk by and smile. Elise. She knew i was looking. She liked that i was looking. One day we started talking, she knew where i lived and went to school with the Pizza guys across the way who traded food for weed, she apparently had asked them about me, they told her i was a good guy. They lied. And so it began.

If this were a Tarantino film this chapter would be titled, Seven and a Half Weeks, that's all it was. How can roughly 50 days impact a life so much? Call it young idealistic nihilism. Call it chemistry at it's finest, a reaction so strong that it left both participants reeling. Of course when i finally asked her to hang out on the infamous porch she said she was wondering when i was going to get around to it. I smiled. Later that night as she bounced up the stairs in her little blue skirt with the white flowers, white t-shirt, and that same fucking Yankee's cap i couldn't help but be smitten. I told her i hated the Yankees, she said she liked winners, we were a bit like fighters feeling each other out, neither wanting to give away too much, each trying to project an air of toughness, each wary of the other, maybe because we both sensed how dangerous this could be, that there was risk involved.

In the end she stayed the first night. It ended how we both wanted, naked in my sweltering room. In the morning as she dressed i wondered what she was thinking, as she put on the Yankees cap she crawled into bed and kissed me, turned and said, "I'll be back," then grinning added, "good sex is hard to come by." And with that she went out the door. The rest as they like to say, is history. Torrid wouldn't do the next few weeks justice, we were actually making deals with each other not to have sex while we were undressing, that it would be the last time and we'd take a few days off, we could barely walk but yet we couldn't stop. Pleasure junkies, adrenaline fiends, young lust in heat, i don't know what it was other than intense, an intensity that any normal person knew couldn't last. She was studying art of course. Seemed to be a common thread with the women i met that summer. School took her away and i though we gave it a try the magic dissipated almost as fast as it had appeared. But man the imprint we left on each other, to this day...

By September i was on my fourth job in four months, washing dishes in a breakfast place. I got free grub and was done by 2PM, the season crept to a close and those of us left had money and time. I read and wrote and called Elise, i hung at the bar and shot pool and made it home early so i could get up the next day to wash dishes. I did whippets in the walk-in cooler with a couple waiters, burned joints with the owner, it was a great way to end the summer. Hell i even had two days off a week. Then on the 23 of September, 12 days after turning 23, i headed for the deep wilderness of those years i write about. A month of being homeless and couch-surfing and relying on the kindness of women until finally landing in the Burgh and my second gig as the local weed dealer, living in the infamous White Trash Pleasuredome apartment, it was hand to mouth and it was fucking grand and it all started in that sweltering room on the third floor of an old whorehouse... i wonder if it's still there...