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By Jim A Parks
Summer comes early in Tucson -- by May at least. But the peak of heat isn't reached until late June or early July, when two holidays mark the occasion. The first is John the Baptist's Day, *Dia De Juan Bautista*, and the second is the Fourth of July. To be honest, I never heard of the first holiday until many years later, when Tucson's Mexican culture became romanticized by artsy types who were newcomers to the Southwest, just as I had never heard of The Day Of The Dead, *El Dia De Los Muertos*, which has now become a yearly parade -- or procession, as those who take it seriously call it. These holidays have great meaning for darkly Catholic Hispanics in Tucson, but as celebrated by bored Anglos in search of ethnic festivities, The Day of The Dead has become something like a circus or a costume party. I shouldn't be so cynical, I suppose. It's not their fault they started looking for cultural authenticity long after I had -- and long after I had given up on the endeavor.
One relentlessly hot Thursday evening between those two summer holidays I went to 4th Avenue by myself, hoping to run into some people I knew. Two blocks north of the underpass, a new punk venue had recently opened, Tumbleweeds, yet another dive that booked shows on the weekends, sometimes big acts from Los Angeles, but mostly local bands. On Thursdays, though, only the newest or the least popular bands played. I paid the cover and walked into the bar, feeling the rush of relatively cool air pumped out by the swamp box cooling. The place was just about empty. On one side of the establishment was the bar proper and some tables and booths. On the other side, separated from the first by a partial wall, was the stage and a big empty space intended for the crowd. The owner didn't bother keeping tables and chairs there. He knew the kids liked to dance, or whatever it was they called it, and sometimes fixtures ended up being utilized in unusual ways. Mopping up blood was an occupational hazard for a bar owner, but Jim had his limits. During the day, Tumbleweeds was a hang-out for drug dealers, prostitutes, and street people, but on weekend nights, Jim made decent money off "all this punk business". He smiled when saw the bands come in for sound checks, and he sent them away with free cases of beer after closing time.
Having shows on Thursdays was an experiment that didn't seem to be going so well. The opening act, the Psy-Gones, took the stage with a dozen people on the bar side and maybe half that on the other. This band had been playing nights like this in Tucson for over a year and never seemed to develop a following. They were made up of a clean-cut singer in a business suit who did a sort of Ska thing, backed by older guys who looked like they had never emerged from the sixties. The bass player had long hair and a flowing beard -- completely gray -- and wore overalls. Rumor had it that he had turned prematurely grey from the shock of a particularly gruesome event in Viet Nam, and that for many years he had never said a word and only played the harmonica. Other than these kinds of stories about them, there wasn't anything very entertaining about the Psy-Gones. They deserve credit for doing original material, but their songs were mediocre at best. I remember there was one song about a photographer. "Boom, boom, I shot her with my Canon...."
So when Jorge and the sisters showed up and offered me a hit of acid, I took advantage of the respite from boredom and washed down the blotter paper with a glass of beer. I bought another pitcher and sat with Jorge and the girls at a booth, where we made fun of the daytime clientele still hanging on at the bar. There was one guy -- a short stocky Mexican not much older than I was -- who was getting into an argument with the bartender. He started pouring out his bottle of Bud on the bar, daring the bartender to do something about it. Sometimes after I've had a few beers, I fancy myself a righter of wrongs, and I interfere in situations that really aren't any of my business. I'm not a tough guy or a brawler. All I have to defend myself with is my moral outrage -- and though that has caused some to back down, more often I find myself held up against a wall or sprawled on the floor after having been popped a few times. The stocky Mexican looked like he was ready to do one or another, but I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Jorge.
"Come back to the table, Sugar Ray. You don't want this kind of trouble."
As I walked away with Jorge's arm around my shoulder, he said softly into my ear, "You need to be careful, maestro. You won't always have me to protect you."
Once again I felt Jorge's unsettling affection for me.
Back at the booth the mood quickly lightened, and I became aware that one of the sisters -- the blonde, I think -- was displaying a much less unsettling form of affection for me. She took my hand and sat close to me, and the dim light of the bar became brighter and warmer. We started giggling uncontrollably about everything that we saw or said. There was an oscillation of light and shadow around us, and I kept looking up, expecting to see a huge ceiling fan rotating slowly. I then had that revelation -- the one where you've forgotten you took a hit of acid and it suddenly becomes abundantly clear that you are tripping.
I got a little apprehensive. "This shit is pretty strong," I said to Jorge. He wasn't paying attention. I grabbed his arm and repeated myself.
"It's blotter, man. Sometimes you get a stronger hit."
I began to regret my decision to do the acid, clamming up while Jorge and the girls continued to cavort. The blonde sister kept poking me and teasing me. I got up from the booth and walked over to the other side of the club, where a somewhat larger crowd had formed to watch the Psy-Gones' second set. I was worried about how I was going to get through the next eight to ten hours, but I began to pay attention to the music and the spectacle on stage. It seemed to me that the Psy-Gones had never sounded so good before -- that they had become something like a lost segment of *Fantasia*. The silhouettes of the crowd in front of me, contrasted against the light on the stage, conducted the performance like dozens of identical Stokowskis.
Preposterously, I started skipping through the crowd that was gathered in front of the stage, waving my arms and conducting with the others, only I kept running into people, or tripping and falling onto the floor. At other shows, this might have been acceptable, even encouraged, behavior, but the crowd that night was in no mood for heroic dance moves. I fell one last time onto the floor among the crowd. I felt myself grabbed by each arm, drug out of the bar, and set down on the sidewalk lying face up. I looked up and saw Jim and his hulking doorman.
"You can come back tomorrow, bud," Jim said, not unkindly. "But tonight you're 86'ed."
I'm not sure how long I lay there -- I had lost track of the passage of time. I was fascinated by the view above me. Occasionally a few familiar faces would look down at me, laughing or saying something unintelligible. The sky was whirling around, periodically lit up by bright flashes, punctuated by cannons roaring in the distance. Boom, boom. At one point Jorge and the girls hovered over me briefly but ran off shrieking.
The fever of summer is usually broken suddenly by the first thunderstorm. The respite from the oppressive heat is welcome, but the storms are violent and sometimes destructive. High winds, lightning and thunder are followed by a heavy downpour -- big, thick drops -- what the Indians call masculine rain. This was the kind of rain that began to fall on my face, and in my condition it felt pounding and penetrating, like the orgasm of sky giants.
I slowly got up to my knees and then to my feet. My intention was to get up and walk to my car, but I kept forgetting what it was I intended to do. I thought, okay, I will take it in steps: first start walking. But I had forgotten where my car was. Hearing some laughter and screaming in the distance, I began walking toward it. My clothing was soaked, and my vision was blurred by rain on my glasses. The street around me would light up with a flash and the image would persist for several seconds, day-glo colors melting back into the darkness. The thunder would crash, making my body vibrate. I tried counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder but forgot why I was counting. I started counting everything around me, and then just counting, each number becoming highly significant.
Hearing voices and laughter again, I followed, coming to a dark cave-like opening. I started walking down, down, down -- it felt impossibly steep. I leaned on the wall to the side of me. Suddenly, the rain stopped. There was a kind of audible silence and a dim light around me. Then I heard loud horns and saw bright lights flash by me -- I felt splashing water. I fell to my hands and knees and cowered from the beasts in this cave. Hearing more laughter and shrieking, I pulled myself up with great effort and stumbled along, still descending. Hell, maybe. Beware, beware, all who enter. The only way up is to go ever down.
I think Jorge and the sisters found me, or I found them. They pulled me along. The girls were like reindeer steering me through a sky full of Christmas lights. Sometimes I fell, and Jorge would pick me up and set me back into the sleigh. On Dinah! On Kleine! That couldn't have been their names! We went on like that for a lifetime. And then through a maze of alleyways -- beasts growling and barking on either side. The beasts spoke to me -- a secret language. THE SECRET. Yes, of course. You always learn the secret, only to forget upon awakening. This time I would remember it. I would write it down. But I had no pen and paper.
We started climbing a tree. I felt myself being pushed and pulled upward, supported by a thousand arms. The tree was alive, and Jorge and the girls were a part of it, their arms like branches. I whimpered and held on. I held on to a body, or a trunk. I kept holding on. I heard speech, and I spoke back. I had intercourse with the tree, with The Tree Of Life.
Then silence.
And then....falling.
For what seemed like minutes. Falling, hitting.
You're supposed to wake up before you hit. So I was dead. That's what happens. That's the rule.
But I was picked up and carried. A giant spirit-angel picked me up like I was nothing. Of course, I *was* nothing. The wind could have picked me up and carried me. So this was a spirit of the wind who carried me and then set me down. I lay on something soft with a blanket over me, shivering. How can spirits shiver? A figure appeared, looking down at me. I saw a crucifix swinging slowly next to my face. The Pit and The Pendulum.
But no, I saw cleavage of all things, warm caramel flesh. I could almost taste it. My gaze traveled upwards, the chest, the neck, the shoulders, and then a face. How could this be? It was the face of Ana Socorro Castellano. She was in a nightgown and robe, which had parted as she bent over me to hold a cool washcloth to my forehead.
I knew I was starting to come down because for the first time in many hours I suspected that I really must be hallucinating.
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anxiously awaiting party IV....
Comment by
davo
2/14/2008 @ 7:26 pm
I'm about half-done with the next
installment. Thanks, Davo!
Comment by
Jim A Parks
2/15/2008 @ 6:54 pm
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