nota bene: this slice of life is a pseudo follow-up to "I Keep A Wolf @ The Door." To read the Daddy, click HERE!
shoulda brought a fucken jacket.
it certainly wasn't this fucking cold when i was chasin' the dream, chasin' the sun. chasin' that first high.
it wasn't even this cold the night i met Sally Sue. back in '81. Studio 54. one of many times dancing with the Man in the Moon With a Cocaine Spoon. i'd spent those New York nights as a part-time bodyguard for a moderately successful Ginny pusher from Bensonhurst, and by the time he got touched by an undercover DT, i'd already warmed up to the most of the clientele rather thoroughly.
as for Sally Sue, it was love at first bite. fucken Stars Falling On Alabama!
there were a few birds in the hopper that night, but they were fucking Also-Rans. same old song.
i'd never seen Sally Sue there before. she was wholly impressed by my signature party trick: grabbing a can of Ajax (with Bleach) from theboys' room and blowing lines of it like it was nothing. and it was nothing. pure talent. nevermind that my septum was fucking obliterated. like any jokehead worth his salt.
a few lines here, a few cocktails there, and Sally shares that she's the heiress to the Mead family paper empire. how intere$ting... you can marry more money in a few hours than you can make in 12 lifetimes. and don't you fucken forget it!
as has often happened while shooting the shit with females, i divulged the nature of my dreams and aspirations, chief among which was racing in the Baja 1000 desert endurance race. Man against Machine against the Elements against the Clock against the Wall.
her eyes lit up when i started rambling on with rapid-fire coke-talk about harrowing feats of victory and the devastation of fatal defeat. absolutely fascinated. hand on my knee. breaking concentration only long enough for the next hit.
she had the build of an 11-year-old boy, and kinda looked like Momma, in the face.
but she fucked like a champ, she had an endless supply of dope money, and she was into me, so why split hairs?
and being a member of that elite yet reviled class, the Idle Rich, it was only two weeks before we were off to Mexico to fuel my dream and my habit.
"We" bought a bodega about 55 miles south of Tijuana, and soon thereafter, a racing machine and all the intoxicants we could get our fucking hands on.
the Truggy she'd had shipped from Miramar was a pretty solid, respectable piece of equipment. reminded me of the Jeeps in Nam. only far quicker, much lighter, more agile, less forgiving, and sans gook-killing apparatus.
those burnt-out Mexican days mostly consisted of me cleaning my guns at sunrise, shooting a shitload of military-grade speed at sunrise, and running over various desert flora & fauna (and a small cripple boy from down the road; nothing some Mead money couldn't fix) in the Truggy, bashing about the formerly Spanish terra firma like some kind of fucking amphetamine-fueled mechanized werewolf.
and the heat...
so many dead, eyeless things, wasting away on the sides of the trail that i'd sometimes run down to buy cartons of cigs.
unbearable!
that might be the word some queer pigfucking pantywaist might use to describe it, i guess.
i'd say more like,
Ideal. fucken optimum operating atmospherics. forged in the fire and all that shit.
as for my girl, she spent the desert weeks shooting black tar into her right foot (the only vessels left standing), constantly painting her fingernails, and trying in vain to decipher the stiff, discolored stacks of
El Universal. but never once complaining.
she was a beautiful thing. that is, until, on a junkie's whim, she ate our entire stash of mescaline, stripped down naked, and sprinted down the
cigarillo trail, sobbing like a newly orphaned child, screaming some nonsense about "The Lineage."
she'd run faster than I'd ever seen a human being move without the aid of a machine. faster even than the frightened, inexperienced bugle boys, retreating from determined AK rounds.
Running For Their Lives.
but then again, so was she. she was a beautiful thing. i never saw Sally Sue again.
knowing that her little Stunt would draw unwanted (but not unwarranted attention), i gassed up the Gringo-Mobile, ditched the bodega she'd bought, and headed back for the "States."
crossing that border was an admittedly cartoonish affair, what with my 37" tires, banks of floodlights, long-travel suspension, and 1000 dB idle.
I assured the sentinels that everything was ok. repeatedly.
"I'm an American, Si? OK? Amer-I-Can. Right? OK?"
they let me through. they kept the Truggy...
"Goodbye Gringoooo!"
what i wouldn't give for that Baja heat right about now. thermometer by this guy's window says 42.
but going back to Mexico, at least in spirit, would require a touch of sun, and that asshole Helios would give away my position sure enough. just like that cigarette did in the Khe Sanh jungle that humid Halloween night. won't ever forget it. fucks saw Christensen from a quarter-mile away. blew his face clear off. he was an asshole anyway.
for a fleeting second, it looks like the husband/boyfriend/man of the house character's spotted me, but turns out he's just makin' his way across the room to fetch the booze and the lube.
she's got a great pair of legs, but her tits are clearly fake. so fucking fake. i'll put aside my hatred of implants for the moment though. one of the few stops i've ever made where there were no fucking curtains.
glorious!
hand in the pants."Showtime Tom!"
