Life at 23
Moving to this new complex allowed me access to a swimming pool for the first time in forever. I began spending all of my free time there, and despite my lack of melanin my skin began to turn at lest a light hue of brown. Weightlifting, riding a bike which I received from Terry for my birthday and the countless laps in the pool had shaped my body into one that would compare favorably to almost any other fit male. And as a result, the attention from females ramped up. In 1981, we had not an inkling about AIDS, other venereal diseases were something only dirty people got, and the outworking of the sexual revolution was a certain boldness of the part of women when they felt attraction toward men. All of this amounted to trouble for me, since I had already dipped my toe into the water and now was being pushed into the deep end.
At Christmas, I began to feel homesick and decided to find a way to get to Fort Smith. Lacking enough funds even for a bus ticket, I shared a ride with Dave as far as Monroe, Louisiana, where he was spending the holidays with his girlfriend Janet, and from there hitchhiking the remainder of the distance to my old home town. I remember little about that week, other than taking a walk on the old golf course I had first played at some sixteen years before, and smoking some hash I had brought with me. I do recall hitchhiking back to Monroe: after getting a brief jaunt to the highway, I was picked up by a young woman who had a child in a car seat in the back. She said she felt like she could trust me and that she would be safer with me than driving alone. She was driving back to a town near Monroe after having picked up her daughter from her divorced husband. I repaid that trust by being my usual gentleman-self, which led to her becoming fond of me and and making somewhat of romantic overtures. She was amazingly attractive, as was her offer, but the logistics of our lives even to my then-fanciful mind did not augur well, so when we said goodbye the hug felt electric, but I forced myself to pull away and make the farewell final.
The spring semester began and, looking from a rear view, I foolishly loaded myself up with 21 semester hours including Calculus II. Perhaps I could have handled these fine, if the 16th of this month had been a better one for me. Rick, a guy who lived in the other half of the unit, was a stud of an athlete and played semi-pro football. He invited me to a training session/audition for new players. I was psyched to do it, and though it was non-contact the intensity on the field was high and the plays were run at full speed. I was playing defensive end in a 3-4 alignment, and I rushed the quarterback on this one fated pass play. The quarterback feinted me, and I tried to change directions on a dime. My rubber-soled shoes slid in a muddy patch, and my left knee slid out to my left as my body folded up on it like the pincers of a nutcracker.
There was a literal explosion in my knee, I could hear the sound reverberate through my body simultaneous with a rush of ungodly pain. The play had gone downfield, and for a few seconds I was left in a heap screaming until they heard me. Rick, who was a physical therapy assistant, saw immediately that it was serious. They carried me to the bleachers, my leg dangling with no control. They carried me into the back of his pickup and took me to the local hospital. First order was to give me the blessed relief of morphine. (Sidebar - There may be an opiod crisis, but when we support policies of government that deny people in pain legitimate analgesia, we are being de facto monsters. Thank God the extract of poppies exists!) The diagnosis was a catastrophic tear of the medial collateral ligament separated from both the femur and tibia. With no job or insurance, I asked to be transferred to the VA hospital in Jackson, but the surgeon refused, saying that I might not recover correctly if it wasn't performed immediately. The surgery went off without a hitch, and by that night I was high enough on my on-demand morphine pump that I could even joke about my situation with visitors, which included Vicky and David. That buzz I had felt with her in the past briefly came back, and I wondered if I had ever truly gotten over her.
Convalescence was a beast, with me wrapped in a groin-to-ankle plaster cast. Pain management was difficult at first, and I bawled like a baby just moving from living room to bathroom. The itching, which is well-known to any of you who have had these implements, was unbearable and I had to fashion a custom-bent coat hanger to reach those maddening stimuli. After 2 weeks, I couldn't take it any more, so I cut it off using a steak knife (that took awhile!) and prevailed on Rick to swipe a flexible brace from work that was much easier to live with. I stayed on crutches for awhile longer, and by 5 weeks past the injury my gait still had a limp but I started pushing myself to start light jogging and some simple movements on the basketball court.
School was a different matter. I was far behind, and even with assignments being sent home via a student courier, I was in danger of flunking all my classes. Forced by the pressure of not being able to drop all the classes since my VA benefits would have been cut off, I decided to cut my losses and focus on the four classes I could salvage, and stopped attending the others. I had until spring break to drop the other three and still maintain full-time status, and when I left the Friday before to drive to Pennsylvania with Terry to see her family, I thought that had been executed. But weeks later, when I received a notice that I was failing Calculus II, I went to the office and found that my drop slips which were signed by each teacher had mysteriously, in these pre-digital storage days, disappeared and it was too late to do anything about it. I begged all three for a chance to make-up missed work, and only the Calc teacher agreed and I was able to push my grade in that class up to a "D" at the close. Those other 2 "F"'s have stayed on my transcript forever and I believe have more than once denied me opportunities at professional school vacancies which otherwise I was excellently qualified for. My takeaway - life is arbitrary and unfair, but once done what can you do?
In April, I received a last-minute call from a friend Kurt that he had an extra ticket to the NCAA championship game played that year in New Orleans, if I could drive. Terry agreed, so I picked him up, and as we arrived there we each took a hit of purple microdot acid. The game had just started as we made it to our seats, and we and the other 61,000 plus in attendance were treated to one of the immortal classic college basketball games ever played. After then-freshman Michael Jordan began his legacy as the G.O.A.T. in basketball by sinking the winning shot, we sped through the crowd, still peaking, and made our way to Pat O'Brien's, my favorite bar in the French Quarter.
Jordan's game winner that I witnessed live
The next four hours were a magical mystery tour. We only had to buy our first drink as wave after wave of rich North Carolina alums came in ordering drinks for everyone. There was an ongoing train of their famous Hurricane drinks being passed from person to person. We became pinned down on the steps from the upper to lower patio, and though some might find this claustrophobic, when one is being pressed against Georgetown cheerleaders still in uniform, the takeaway is much more positive. Unable to move anywhere, a pretty ebony cheerleader and I chatted it up, then fueled by the constant rum onslaught we started making out. Kurt finally grabbed me at 3 am saying we need to find the car and get back. On the way to there, we were stopped by a toothless old hooker who offered me a blowjob for $5. That intrusion of Nawlin's reality jarred me out of the last of my acid high, though I was still blindingly drunk.
Jesus took the wheel for the return trip to Biloxi. I can offer no other explanation for how I found myself at Kurt's curb at 5 am with no memory of the prior two hours. His wife Patti came out cussing me up one side and down the other, and I absorbed her anger with patience since I couldn't argue for our irresponsible adventure. I brought the car back to the cottage, flipped the keys on the table and then staggered the two blocks to the beach, whereupon I collapsed in the sand. Some time later, I was awakened by the harsh sun shining in my eyes, and a pair of gazing eyes belonging to a young girl.
"Mommy, I think the man is dead." Not quite dead, but with the massive hangover that had emerged it would have felt like God's mercy had it been so. The mother grabbed her child as I arose, then staggered back to my abode, thus ending my latest adventure in mind alteration.
After school was out I tried to drown my sorrows about the poor grades by partying. One day a large group materialized at our place for some reason or another, and since there was tequila available a game of quarters commenced. I have never before or since seen such accuracy by all participants in flicking the coins into the shot glass. Shots were doubled, then tripled, and before 30 minutes had elapsed - enhanced by copious hash smoking - the whole enterprise started to breakdown. I went to pee, but it was already occupied by a guy projectile vomiting into the toilet. I heard noises in our bedroom next to it, and I looked in to see two people who I barely knew engaged in carnal knowledge on our waterbed! I yelled out my disapproval, but was then distracted by a hubbub coming from the living room.
Scott, a friend who was usually a chill dude, was getting hostile with some people trying to leave as he was blocking their path. His bag of pot was missing and he suspected anyone and everyone, and was demanding a CSI-type investigation. I tried peace-brokering but other disagreements began to brew. The situation out of control, I reached into my bag of tricks to swerve everyone away from incipient hostilities - I grabbed a plate out of the dish drainer and broke it over my head! A fountain of blood started spewing Vesuvius-like out of the forehead gash I had opened up, and at least one person started retching and hurling. I was painless, and happy that I had gotten the chaos to finally freeze. Scott was a medic, and he put pressure on it for a long stretch until it finally clotted, and then bandaged it with butterfly strips. Great ending to a wild party. As a postscript, Scott found his bag outside at the foot of a tree where he had been peeing prior to the breakdown. His mistake led to the craziness which led to this great memory.
I rebooted for summer school, and took Chem I and II. Day one of the first section, this shimmering, olive-skinned, magnetic waif sat in the row in front of me, and instantly every guy started hitting on her. Hell, even the 40-something balding instructor stammered when he conversed with her. And me? I played it cool and maintained an indifferent attitude. At first, that is. My lack of interest apparently raised my open-market value in her estimation and she took every opportunity to chat with me. As fate would have it, we were assigned as lab partners and things took off from there. Elena was everything I wanted Terry to be - beautiful, funny, alive and openly and unabashedly sexy as Cuban women can often be. We began a slow mutual seduction that turned into full-blown discussions of me leaving Terry for her, since she wasn't willing to go past minor making out until I made that choice. I had determined to do this one late June night, but Terry had fallen asleep early so I decided to push the break-up talk to the next day.
She woke me in the middle of the night crying. She had experienced a nightmare that involved her being abducted by aliens, and when I emerged in the scenario, I turned my back and refused to rescue her. She told me between sobs how much she loved me and made me promise in the emotions of that moment to never leave her. Curious timing, no?
It was equally as hard the next morning to tell Elena that I couldn't turn my back on Terry, so we would have to stop seeing each other. She ran off crying and didn't come back to class. The next day, she asked me to come to her car with her. She wanted to give me a goodbye present, since she was dropping the class because she couldn't handle seeing me yet not being able to be with me. The gift was a solid gold cane her father (who in retrospect may have been a Cuban drug lord) had given her, which she said was worth $25,000. She wanted me to have it in case I ever need money since it could be easily converted. I was blown away; in addition to everything else that made her irresistible she was ridiculously rich! And then I did what I though was a noble thing but which in retrospect was incredibly stupid - I told her I couldn't take it. When we said goodbye minutes later, that was the last time I ever saw her though in the immediate years to come I at times sent letters addressed to her via Gulfport general delivery, on the off-hand chance these might reach her. And then there was the cane - several years ago at golds peak it would have been worth over $120,000! Silly ethical me.
My birthday party grew to enormous proportions that year, since there was so much outdoor space on the grounds of the cottage. At least 50 people filtered in and out of the shindig that night until the wee hours of the morning. We had two kegs, tons of grilled meat and assorted botanics and pharmaceuticals available. At some point, I wandered off down the road to get a chance to breathe from having to be on and the life of the party. Being the center of attention can be fun for a brief time, but it began to be wearing for me. At the end of the block, there were three people huddled together with their backs to me, and Casey was one of them. About 20 feet away, I froze in my tracks and listened - they were speaking an alien language. Not a foreign language, enough of which I had heard in my travels and studies to be able to at least situate by region of the world, this was instead a strange set of vocalizations that I had never heard before. I interrupted them by making noise and they turned, startled as if they had assumed privacy.
Casey immediately acted nonchalant, with a smile on his face like the cat that had swallowed the canary. "Whatcha doin' Bob?" he said in an almost-mocking tone. I wasn't too far gone to play the gaslighting game, so I laid my cards out and told them there was something strange going on. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Casey said "Well, you've discovered our secret. We're not from here. We're from there" as he pointed toward what looked like the north star, Polaris. He nor the other two did not break expression, and though part of me was skeptical I had no explanation for the strange communications. "Don't worry, we're just here to watch" he said and they abruptly left before I could ask further questions. I tried several days later to talk to him about this, but he brushed me off then became distant and we eventually lost contact. My tumultuous year ended with a mystery that I have never and probably will never find an answer to.
I met a guy named Casey whom I hit it off with. He was ex-military as well, along with his roommate, who had in their apartment a prime early 80's aphrodisiac - one of the first original Atari video game systems. Laughable tech compared to our current era, their living room was still the hot spot of the complex, crawling with hot girls in bikinis waiting their turn to play "Pitfall" or "Pac-Man," with doobies and alcohol making the rounds. It was three of us and at least 12 of them, either unattached or bored with being stay-at-home military wives. Things can happen in such situations, and they did, though unlike my other 2 comrades I stuck to the single girls. Often on my long bike rides I would strike up conversations with women in random situations, and this led to several opportunities for some ... partying. Looking back, I wished I been a better person and had cut ties with Terry instead of being technically unfaithful, but every time we were close to those moments she would beg me not to leave and I couldn't muster the coldness to let her go. I don't think there is any reason, in retrospect, to assign blame for my behavior or later hers - we were 23 and 22 and still learning about life. Those days were priceless lessons.
In September, the fall semester began and I took an interesting class in interpersonal psychology taught by a very intriguing instructor named Don Green. He structured the class as an experiential one, with exercises every meeting designed to make people interact with one another. Because I was so versatile of mind and well-read, my contributions to the class were seen by the other students as valuable and without desiring this I became a sort of wise "Yoda" type figure. What was comical about this was that my reality was closer to 180 degrees away from this perception of me held by others. I perhaps could articulate wisdom, but had no clue as to how to actually apply it in my life.
My propensity for partying became even stronger when I met a guy who would later become my roommate and probably the best male friend I ever had, David. Dave was a hedonist par excellence who had recently re-started college after having flunked out his freshman year, then being forced by his dad to work off-shore to repay the money his parents had seen go down the drain. What those two years had done was solidify his appetites for intoxicants, and we hit it off immediately with this common interest. He would often show up late at night egging me to go to New Orleans with him, and often I would comply to the dismay of Terry. On my own, I tended to stay in my lane at cruise control, but with Dave's influence I was metaphorically driving blind and way over the speed limit. He became a third wheel at our apartment, since his mother had banned me from his house because with my long hair I looked to her like a drug dealer. The irony was delicious - I was buying my pot from him, not the other way around.
L.S.D. came into my life these fall months of 1981. I had somehow missed the boat before with this hallucinogen, and was truthfully leery of any purportedly available, but now that I had a reliable source I had met at school - Buzz, a legit Hell's Angel biker who had tripped since the 60's - I felt more comfortable and since Dave was a veteran inner explorer and was all-in for it, I purchased 40 hits. My first experience was noteworthy for having supernatural tones as well. A guy we both occasionally bought Quaaludes from, Bobby, came over with his girlfriend Paige to trip with us, and he donated some sinsemilla buds which Terry ground up to make cookies. By the time the doses hit, it was cookie time, and the exhilarating buzz of the acid was soon being tempered and modified in a good way by THC. The wheels began to come off. Terry destroyed an entire bag of chips and dip, and passed out after presumably having esophageal orgasms galore. Bobby talked us into going to his health club just across the street to get into the hot tub, and Dave and I followed.
Bobby was gone for a long time, and it was the three of us in the hot tub. It was late and we were the only people in the atrium that housed it. Paige began tickling us with her feet, and though neither of us wanted to cross this boundary, she became more physical and there was no Bobby to be seen. Suddenly, I heard Dave's voice in my head: "She wants it." I looked quizzically at him and his eyes met mine and then "said" "It's cool, I'll explain later." He then motioned to the atrium wall, where there were entrances to wet and dry saunas. Without words, we took the action into the wet sauna, Paige following us like a young kid chasing an ice cream truck. We were a melange of various body parts in the heated, steamy room, and though we didn't technically copulate we each achieved much satisfaction.
It was a few hours later when we began to come down and Bobby and Paige had left when we compared notes. Yes, what I had heard in my mind was exactly what Dave was articulating internally at that moment. We had experienced a pure moment of telepathy, created no doubt by the alteration of our neuro-chemistry. While this was mind-boggling enough to chew on for days, he shifted the convo to explain the Bobby-Paige matrix. Dave knew Bobby since high school and that he was closeted gay and Paige was what is now popularly known as his "beard," though we didn't have that word for it then. Bobby was on board with friends filling "gaps" he couldn't, or more properly wouldn't, and Dave had taken advantage of this situation with her before. But as good as the sexual hijinks were, my takeaway from that night was a brief, though intense, love affair with L.S.D.
My 21 day experiment began in earnest. Each day I ate a breakfast, took one hit of the blotter, and then I would go to class. It would kick in during my first class, I would peak during my second and third, then I would start to come down during my final period. On my days off I still did it but had less structure to deal with. I was doing fine in classes up to finals except for calculus which was a bit of a struggle. On finals day for that class, it happened to be the last day of my experiment and I had 2 hits left. I took both, then went to my final. The heavens opened up for me. I could see projected out into space two ships proceeding at different vectors in my mind's eye, and suddenly word problems which had been my weakness were simple. I made an "A" on the final raising my overall grade to a "B." And that's when I quit acid, except for a few sporadic times over the following several years. My best guess is I had absorbed everything I need from the experience: by doing it up in such an extreme way, I had fulfilled my curiosity. It's like the old adage: once you receive the message, you can hang up the call that delivered it.
We still had Terrance, though we had to keep him on the down-lo since pets weren't allowed. He was spotted sunning in the window by management one day, and we received an immediate eviction notice. Grasping at what was available, we moved back toward Biloxi to a duplexed cottage that functioned originally as servant's quarters and which was one of several behind an old Beach Highway mansion . The rent - $200 - was acceptable and beggars didn't get a choice anyway. After we made the move, I began sensing the thickness of vibrations than literally poured out of the walls. I would occasionally see spirits as well, and many people who came over reported feeling strange and emotional. This locale would frame my last several months both in Biloxi and with Terry, and I believe the spiritual energy there was at least highly conducive to such chaos.
We still had Terrance, though we had to keep him on the down-lo since pets weren't allowed. He was spotted sunning in the window by management one day, and we received an immediate eviction notice. Grasping at what was available, we moved back toward Biloxi to a duplexed cottage that functioned originally as servant's quarters and which was one of several behind an old Beach Highway mansion . The rent - $200 - was acceptable and beggars didn't get a choice anyway. After we made the move, I began sensing the thickness of vibrations than literally poured out of the walls. I would occasionally see spirits as well, and many people who came over reported feeling strange and emotional. This locale would frame my last several months both in Biloxi and with Terry, and I believe the spiritual energy there was at least highly conducive to such chaos.
At Christmas, I began to feel homesick and decided to find a way to get to Fort Smith. Lacking enough funds even for a bus ticket, I shared a ride with Dave as far as Monroe, Louisiana, where he was spending the holidays with his girlfriend Janet, and from there hitchhiking the remainder of the distance to my old home town. I remember little about that week, other than taking a walk on the old golf course I had first played at some sixteen years before, and smoking some hash I had brought with me. I do recall hitchhiking back to Monroe: after getting a brief jaunt to the highway, I was picked up by a young woman who had a child in a car seat in the back. She said she felt like she could trust me and that she would be safer with me than driving alone. She was driving back to a town near Monroe after having picked up her daughter from her divorced husband. I repaid that trust by being my usual gentleman-self, which led to her becoming fond of me and and making somewhat of romantic overtures. She was amazingly attractive, as was her offer, but the logistics of our lives even to my then-fanciful mind did not augur well, so when we said goodbye the hug felt electric, but I forced myself to pull away and make the farewell final.
The spring semester began and, looking from a rear view, I foolishly loaded myself up with 21 semester hours including Calculus II. Perhaps I could have handled these fine, if the 16th of this month had been a better one for me. Rick, a guy who lived in the other half of the unit, was a stud of an athlete and played semi-pro football. He invited me to a training session/audition for new players. I was psyched to do it, and though it was non-contact the intensity on the field was high and the plays were run at full speed. I was playing defensive end in a 3-4 alignment, and I rushed the quarterback on this one fated pass play. The quarterback feinted me, and I tried to change directions on a dime. My rubber-soled shoes slid in a muddy patch, and my left knee slid out to my left as my body folded up on it like the pincers of a nutcracker.
There was a literal explosion in my knee, I could hear the sound reverberate through my body simultaneous with a rush of ungodly pain. The play had gone downfield, and for a few seconds I was left in a heap screaming until they heard me. Rick, who was a physical therapy assistant, saw immediately that it was serious. They carried me to the bleachers, my leg dangling with no control. They carried me into the back of his pickup and took me to the local hospital. First order was to give me the blessed relief of morphine. (Sidebar - There may be an opiod crisis, but when we support policies of government that deny people in pain legitimate analgesia, we are being de facto monsters. Thank God the extract of poppies exists!) The diagnosis was a catastrophic tear of the medial collateral ligament separated from both the femur and tibia. With no job or insurance, I asked to be transferred to the VA hospital in Jackson, but the surgeon refused, saying that I might not recover correctly if it wasn't performed immediately. The surgery went off without a hitch, and by that night I was high enough on my on-demand morphine pump that I could even joke about my situation with visitors, which included Vicky and David. That buzz I had felt with her in the past briefly came back, and I wondered if I had ever truly gotten over her.
Convalescence was a beast, with me wrapped in a groin-to-ankle plaster cast. Pain management was difficult at first, and I bawled like a baby just moving from living room to bathroom. The itching, which is well-known to any of you who have had these implements, was unbearable and I had to fashion a custom-bent coat hanger to reach those maddening stimuli. After 2 weeks, I couldn't take it any more, so I cut it off using a steak knife (that took awhile!) and prevailed on Rick to swipe a flexible brace from work that was much easier to live with. I stayed on crutches for awhile longer, and by 5 weeks past the injury my gait still had a limp but I started pushing myself to start light jogging and some simple movements on the basketball court.
School was a different matter. I was far behind, and even with assignments being sent home via a student courier, I was in danger of flunking all my classes. Forced by the pressure of not being able to drop all the classes since my VA benefits would have been cut off, I decided to cut my losses and focus on the four classes I could salvage, and stopped attending the others. I had until spring break to drop the other three and still maintain full-time status, and when I left the Friday before to drive to Pennsylvania with Terry to see her family, I thought that had been executed. But weeks later, when I received a notice that I was failing Calculus II, I went to the office and found that my drop slips which were signed by each teacher had mysteriously, in these pre-digital storage days, disappeared and it was too late to do anything about it. I begged all three for a chance to make-up missed work, and only the Calc teacher agreed and I was able to push my grade in that class up to a "D" at the close. Those other 2 "F"'s have stayed on my transcript forever and I believe have more than once denied me opportunities at professional school vacancies which otherwise I was excellently qualified for. My takeaway - life is arbitrary and unfair, but once done what can you do?
In April, I received a last-minute call from a friend Kurt that he had an extra ticket to the NCAA championship game played that year in New Orleans, if I could drive. Terry agreed, so I picked him up, and as we arrived there we each took a hit of purple microdot acid. The game had just started as we made it to our seats, and we and the other 61,000 plus in attendance were treated to one of the immortal classic college basketball games ever played. After then-freshman Michael Jordan began his legacy as the G.O.A.T. in basketball by sinking the winning shot, we sped through the crowd, still peaking, and made our way to Pat O'Brien's, my favorite bar in the French Quarter.
Jordan's game winner that I witnessed live
The next four hours were a magical mystery tour. We only had to buy our first drink as wave after wave of rich North Carolina alums came in ordering drinks for everyone. There was an ongoing train of their famous Hurricane drinks being passed from person to person. We became pinned down on the steps from the upper to lower patio, and though some might find this claustrophobic, when one is being pressed against Georgetown cheerleaders still in uniform, the takeaway is much more positive. Unable to move anywhere, a pretty ebony cheerleader and I chatted it up, then fueled by the constant rum onslaught we started making out. Kurt finally grabbed me at 3 am saying we need to find the car and get back. On the way to there, we were stopped by a toothless old hooker who offered me a blowjob for $5. That intrusion of Nawlin's reality jarred me out of the last of my acid high, though I was still blindingly drunk.
Jesus took the wheel for the return trip to Biloxi. I can offer no other explanation for how I found myself at Kurt's curb at 5 am with no memory of the prior two hours. His wife Patti came out cussing me up one side and down the other, and I absorbed her anger with patience since I couldn't argue for our irresponsible adventure. I brought the car back to the cottage, flipped the keys on the table and then staggered the two blocks to the beach, whereupon I collapsed in the sand. Some time later, I was awakened by the harsh sun shining in my eyes, and a pair of gazing eyes belonging to a young girl.
"Mommy, I think the man is dead." Not quite dead, but with the massive hangover that had emerged it would have felt like God's mercy had it been so. The mother grabbed her child as I arose, then staggered back to my abode, thus ending my latest adventure in mind alteration.
After school was out I tried to drown my sorrows about the poor grades by partying. One day a large group materialized at our place for some reason or another, and since there was tequila available a game of quarters commenced. I have never before or since seen such accuracy by all participants in flicking the coins into the shot glass. Shots were doubled, then tripled, and before 30 minutes had elapsed - enhanced by copious hash smoking - the whole enterprise started to breakdown. I went to pee, but it was already occupied by a guy projectile vomiting into the toilet. I heard noises in our bedroom next to it, and I looked in to see two people who I barely knew engaged in carnal knowledge on our waterbed! I yelled out my disapproval, but was then distracted by a hubbub coming from the living room.
Scott, a friend who was usually a chill dude, was getting hostile with some people trying to leave as he was blocking their path. His bag of pot was missing and he suspected anyone and everyone, and was demanding a CSI-type investigation. I tried peace-brokering but other disagreements began to brew. The situation out of control, I reached into my bag of tricks to swerve everyone away from incipient hostilities - I grabbed a plate out of the dish drainer and broke it over my head! A fountain of blood started spewing Vesuvius-like out of the forehead gash I had opened up, and at least one person started retching and hurling. I was painless, and happy that I had gotten the chaos to finally freeze. Scott was a medic, and he put pressure on it for a long stretch until it finally clotted, and then bandaged it with butterfly strips. Great ending to a wild party. As a postscript, Scott found his bag outside at the foot of a tree where he had been peeing prior to the breakdown. His mistake led to the craziness which led to this great memory.
I rebooted for summer school, and took Chem I and II. Day one of the first section, this shimmering, olive-skinned, magnetic waif sat in the row in front of me, and instantly every guy started hitting on her. Hell, even the 40-something balding instructor stammered when he conversed with her. And me? I played it cool and maintained an indifferent attitude. At first, that is. My lack of interest apparently raised my open-market value in her estimation and she took every opportunity to chat with me. As fate would have it, we were assigned as lab partners and things took off from there. Elena was everything I wanted Terry to be - beautiful, funny, alive and openly and unabashedly sexy as Cuban women can often be. We began a slow mutual seduction that turned into full-blown discussions of me leaving Terry for her, since she wasn't willing to go past minor making out until I made that choice. I had determined to do this one late June night, but Terry had fallen asleep early so I decided to push the break-up talk to the next day.
She woke me in the middle of the night crying. She had experienced a nightmare that involved her being abducted by aliens, and when I emerged in the scenario, I turned my back and refused to rescue her. She told me between sobs how much she loved me and made me promise in the emotions of that moment to never leave her. Curious timing, no?
It was equally as hard the next morning to tell Elena that I couldn't turn my back on Terry, so we would have to stop seeing each other. She ran off crying and didn't come back to class. The next day, she asked me to come to her car with her. She wanted to give me a goodbye present, since she was dropping the class because she couldn't handle seeing me yet not being able to be with me. The gift was a solid gold cane her father (who in retrospect may have been a Cuban drug lord) had given her, which she said was worth $25,000. She wanted me to have it in case I ever need money since it could be easily converted. I was blown away; in addition to everything else that made her irresistible she was ridiculously rich! And then I did what I though was a noble thing but which in retrospect was incredibly stupid - I told her I couldn't take it. When we said goodbye minutes later, that was the last time I ever saw her though in the immediate years to come I at times sent letters addressed to her via Gulfport general delivery, on the off-hand chance these might reach her. And then there was the cane - several years ago at golds peak it would have been worth over $120,000! Silly ethical me.
My birthday party grew to enormous proportions that year, since there was so much outdoor space on the grounds of the cottage. At least 50 people filtered in and out of the shindig that night until the wee hours of the morning. We had two kegs, tons of grilled meat and assorted botanics and pharmaceuticals available. At some point, I wandered off down the road to get a chance to breathe from having to be on and the life of the party. Being the center of attention can be fun for a brief time, but it began to be wearing for me. At the end of the block, there were three people huddled together with their backs to me, and Casey was one of them. About 20 feet away, I froze in my tracks and listened - they were speaking an alien language. Not a foreign language, enough of which I had heard in my travels and studies to be able to at least situate by region of the world, this was instead a strange set of vocalizations that I had never heard before. I interrupted them by making noise and they turned, startled as if they had assumed privacy.
Casey immediately acted nonchalant, with a smile on his face like the cat that had swallowed the canary. "Whatcha doin' Bob?" he said in an almost-mocking tone. I wasn't too far gone to play the gaslighting game, so I laid my cards out and told them there was something strange going on. They looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Casey said "Well, you've discovered our secret. We're not from here. We're from there" as he pointed toward what looked like the north star, Polaris. He nor the other two did not break expression, and though part of me was skeptical I had no explanation for the strange communications. "Don't worry, we're just here to watch" he said and they abruptly left before I could ask further questions. I tried several days later to talk to him about this, but he brushed me off then became distant and we eventually lost contact. My tumultuous year ended with a mystery that I have never and probably will never find an answer to.
Comments
Post a Comment