I was sitting halfway up on the bank of Oak Creek, on a steep slope of crumbled orangish rocks. I threw these Arizona rocks in long arcs above the tops of the trees along the riverbed. They would drift lazily in the air until they decided to plummet through the foliage with the sound of rustling newspapers and plunk into the shady water, sometimes where I could see a little plume. I could hear the rocks fall deep, and I listened to the hiss of the water as it fell back on to itself. The ripples spread out in circles under the leafy branches.
I had disappeared on my parents; I was starting to get sick of them on this vacation. The guy behind the counter of the Oak Creek Liquor and Deli grinned at me when I put a five dollar bill on the counter next to a 40 oz Mickey’s. He took all my money and didn’t say a word.
I had to clear a little level place in the hillside for my bottle so it wouldn’t tip over, and I threw rocks into the river and drank my beer in the late afternoon sun. I thought about girls back home and how I couldn’t seem to talk to them very well. There was a girl in the liquor store who winked at me and she was really cute in faded cutoffs and a red flannel shirt, probably two or three years older than me and I could still feel the flush on the back of my neck that wasn’t all sunburn.
Picking up rocks and throwing them through the trees into the river helped a little with my sour mood and the prospect of four more days trooping around in Arizona without an escape from my parents. Each stone seemed to carry a little weight from my shoulders. My hands were caked with a thin layer of earth from the rocks and dust sticking to the water condensing from the beer bottle when I picked it up. The beer didn’t really taste that good, but it was cold, and it was alcohol, and all of my friends back home drank Mickey’s, so I did too.
As I picked up another rock, I glanced at it to see which way would be the best way to hold it in order to make it to the water, and there was a little brown and yellow scorpion poised on it. For one long moment I studied it, my face no more than a foot from it; it was exactly like the ones they had in the tourist souvenir selection in the motel lobby frozen in some sort of plastic to make a wonderful eye-catching paperweight. Mom had purchased one for me yesterday. And here, virtually in my hand, was the real thing.
I flung the rock away from me with a quick gesture and scrambled to my feet on the shifting slope, knocking over my carefully ensconced beer to clatter down the slope and into the river. Throwing rocks through the trees into the water no longer appealed to me with the same casualness. I turned and struggled up to the edge of the road that led down to the motel and put my hands in my pockets. The girl in the cutoffs gave me a ride back in her jeep after I had walked a third of the way there.
Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category
I went to the Grateful Dead shows in Las Vegas and didn’t have a ticket, which usually isn’t a problem at Dead shows except that there were throngs of tie-died fanatics gambling on other generous deadheads to have extras. It’s Las Vegas; you go there to gamble.
“I just walked here from Pakistan to see the Dead.” I was trying anything to get into the show. I was hoping that I would get some sympathy for the incredibly ugly disco-era shirt I was wearing to try to be colorful in the land of the tie-die rainbow. It was a sickly green and covered in silver sparkles and the material looked as if it would be irritating to bare skin, but it was too hot to wear anything else. Then again, I didn’t have anything else. I tried to trade the girl standing to my left for a ticket and got a sharp kick in the rump. The carload of out-of-place fraternity guys actually looked interested. Not only did I have to find a ticket for myself, but my friend Dawn was having a ghastly weekend of losing her wallet at the Friday show (now it was Saturday, the peak of the frenzy), leaving her tickets that she had so wisely mail-ordered back in Isla Vista, and having a newly torn ligament in her right knee, so she needed a ticket, too. I didn’t have the balls to tell her that one of the fish she left my roommate to watch for three simple days had died even before I had left, floating bloated and bulge-eyed to the surface with the fake little seaweed wrapped around it’s corpse like a green shroud.
I didn’t care why the fish died, though I think that in trying to spoil it I overfed it; I was leaving early the next morning for Las Vegas and was a third of the way through a fifth of Jim Beam in true Bukowski style, bitching and grumpingabout everything that could go wrong. I hadn’t guessed that the fish would die, though. But I was using anything as an excuse to drink more whiskey, so I saluted the fish and finished the water glass. I was drunk over twenty four hours, from the night before leaving for Las Vegas until early Saturday morning, when Dawn roused me out of the corner of the hotel room I had seized from the other fifteen people staying there and demanded that I escort her across the street to Bob somebody-or-other’s “Vegas World”.
We had two hotel rooms reserved, but somehow the telephone lines from Las Vegas to Isla Vista distorted the amount that it was supposed to cost. Siobhan, another friend of mine from IV, got stuck with the credit card bill, so we sold one room for 120 bucks to two guys going to the show who smoked our entire party out with some crippling marujuana, and I wasn’t really in the mood to go anywhere, especially “Vegas World”, which has Bob’s name emblazoned on the carpet every three square feet, but I was too wasted to argue coherently, so there I was with Dawn, a handful of nickels and a Budweiser being assaulted by the noise of four million slot machines being run by silverheaded women with the knack of winning while I watched. Dawn was darling, limping around on her bad knee in a blue splint with a little change bucket and bright eyes and the hopes of hitting that nickel slot payoff at 2:30 in the morning. But I really wanted her to play a table, any table, so they would bring on the free incentive drinks.
Earlier, I had somehow convinced everyone to walk to Circus Circus with me for the buffet, $4.23 with tax so that you not only get to choose from forty-seven wonderfully decorated types of cardboard, but you really end up spending five bucks because you get three quarters and two pennies back and in Vegas you sure as hell aren’t going to keep any pocket change unless you’re a Jedi knight. They might as well not give you any change, they’ll get it all back somehow; luckily the only money of my own I gambled the entire weekend was those three quarters, which I converted into $3.50 then into nothing in the space of five minutes. My friend Calvin showed up at six Saturday morning with the tired look I imagine the people who play against James Bond have after losing some ridiculous amount of money and sending his ATM machines into the red. He’s worse in Vegas than me shopping with somebody else’s billfold.
I don’t rightly remember exactly how I convinced two separate people that I was more in need of extra tickets than the other million people flocking the parking lot and surrounding roads with hopeful looks and their fingers raised, but I secured those extras. They cost forty dollars each, and I think the green disco shirt is what did it, since nobody was having any luck but the scalpers selling the GA tickets for eighty to a hundred dollars apiece. And I even watched one of them get busted by the police and they wouldn’t sell his tickets on the spot; they said they had to check to see if they were genuine – yeah, right: everyone knew they were just going home to call in their lunch break, grab their Jerry Garcia Band tie-dies and head back to the show. Even the ambulance drivers were wearing tie-die T-shirts. I was just hoping that I wouldn’t get lost from the people I came with while I was on LSD. On the way back from 7-11 where I bought my breakfast – a super-big-gulp mix of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper and a king-size Snickers bar – I stopped a Deadhead who laughed at my shirt so I offered to trade it to him for an extra.
“Almost, man.”
“This shirt is a classic,” I cajoled, “Real vintage stuff. The Trammps wore this gear. Cost me a hundred in Milan”
“Gotta save ‘em for the parking lot.” I paused; he was still admiring the sparkles. “Doesn’t it itch?”
“Got any doses?”
“You need a tab if you’re wearing that.” He gave me a hit and I dropped LSD at ten in the morning on the way to a parking lot of colorful crazies with no tickets. And then, three hours later, I was standing on the road into that lot clutching two precious extras in front of twenty or thirty jealous fans, peaking, with no idea where anyone was and feeling like my life could be threatened at any moment by a real die-hard Deadhead.
At the Grateful Dead, though, if you’re on acid, you came with everybody else at the show because they all know you or your friends from somewhere or through somebody or at least respect you for liking the same music they do; it’s a friendly phenomenon found nowhere else. There was no hope of me losing anyone anyways because I was wearing the green disco shirt. I got more admiring looks and compliments because of that shirt than I could understand; I was introduced to some girl named Marjorie who was wearing an even more widly colored dress, and I could see that she was happy that there was somebody else dressed as garish as she was. I was feeling a little out of place because I didn’t have anything tie-died or with a logo that was punning on the Grateful Dead’s name (“What do you do if you meet a bear in the woods? Play Dead!”), but I was content after a while to stick out like a fan at his first Dead show. It was my first Dead show. Probably not my last though, I’ve got a closet full of wacky disco clothes and I’ve got to wear them somewhere.
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