[ I brought a boy home, I don’t know why. My girlfriend moved to Brooklyn two weeks earlier. In the

I brought a boy home, I don’t know why. My girlfriend moved to Brooklyn two weeks earlier. In the morning I couldn’t stand the sight of him, and he smelled bad on top of it. I was glad to have not made any poor decisions. The boy woke me up at eleven a.m. to “talk,” I’d only fallen asleep at five-thirty.
Later I was nursing a hangover. My roommate and I went to a Jewish deli after buying bass strings, a handle of Jack Daniel’s, and a twelve pack of Stella. This looked like a good day.
When we got home we tore into the sandwiches and discovered that my chopped liver sandwich was plain old roast beef. I was furious and began to feel ill again. I had even imagined the smell of chopped liver filling the interior of the car on the way home. Both of us had. What the hell did we smell?
I had no clean clothes so my roommate lent me a Hawaiian shirt. It didn’t feel right and I asked him for a different one. He chose a random shirt from his drawer and tossed it to me. I put it on gratefully. It was a Zippy the Pinhead shirt that read “Reality is a sandwich I didn’t order!” This, I thought gravely, cannot be mere coincidence.

We went to band practice even though our drummer was at work and our violinist/guitarist was in LA for four months. There was nothing to do but pretend to play music with a less than mediocre kid on drums who refused to wear a shirt. It was fun anyways and we drank whiskey and messed with effects on a big blue pedal.
I bought an eighth of AK-47 (whatever the name— pure golden medicine) and smoked hash out of a strange cup device with a pin balanced on top of a peanut-butter candy container. It looked ominous but went down smooth and grassy. The weed put me in a better state to play ridiculous music. The guitar sounded like a buzz saw wielded by a maniacal Pigmy and my roommate’s newly upgraded bass was as chunky as an elementary school gym teacher. The drums were still bad.  The only thing we could play was The Ramones. No harm done.

I gave a beautiful girl a poem that I had written about her. We were sitting on my back porch while her brother cooked fries in the kitchen and my roommate was sleeping a solid drunk off. It was eight-thirty p.m. My handwriting was so bad she couldn’t read it. She asked me to instead.
The tube lights illuminated her in a way that would make a movie scene great. She had a small beauty mark next to right eye that had always made me go bonkers. I held the poem with shaky hands and read in my best Ginsberg voice. I loved the way he read his poems, especially America. My voice soon forgot itself and turned into a quavering slurred rant… but I think she enjoyed the poem.
When she left I asked her brother if I could marry her. He said yes and to stop asking, seems I’d asked him a hundred times before.

At a party a girl with bleach blonde hair was shining like an ornament on an expensive car’s hood. I attached myself to her side and spoke nonsense trying to smile constantly and play the part of a sad confusion poet. She believed me and let me keep my hand on her thigh about as high as a hand can go. I told her I would love her forever but she left with a hardcore kid who had a moustache.
With my love forever lost I wandered drinking Jim Beam out of a water bottle. I had stolen the whiskey from work after closing. I used to be the manager.
I sat down to join in on a joint in the kitchen with an old friend and a hyperactive Asian girl I’d never met. She rolled a bad joint with “wild berry” flavored papers then told me she’d sell me an ounce for six hundred dollars. My friend and I laughed in her face while she pouted. I liked her all the same… she ended up kicking me in my balls.
I called an acquaintance a “little bitch” because he told a girl that I didn’t ever mean what I said. I had called her a snake and a liar, she was crying. I was too drunk to know that she had feelings. After she cried herself into a different room I apologized to the acquaintance and said I wasn’t being serious. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “Bullshit, you always mean what you say.”
The next day the bleach blonde sent me a text that said she just had the moustache guy give her a ride home and she only went with him to make me jealous.
Oh how fucked, I thought, this cruel game.
I had been doing cocaine all day. We were supposed to be practicing music with our new drummer. It didn’t work out as well as I would have liked because a cooler-and-more-enlightened Indian kid came over and played shit funk with a frat boy and an anemic hippy. We were upstairs snorting coke and smoking joints.
We got to play two songs, Search and Destroy and a song of my own before we scurried home to make it to a concert.
The cocaine started to make me fiend, I was almost done with mine so I bought the rest of my roommates and we saw the Silver Jews. As I entered the venue the lead singer walked sloshingly up the stairs and exclaimed, “Welcome to the show!” I wasn’t positive it was him until he walked on stage after Leonard Cohen’s Is This What You Wanted? They began their set with a song that made my skin catch fire and heart swell like a sponge.
I don’t remember most of the rest of the night, seeing as how I began drinking heavily after the cocaine ran out. The lead singer’s wife was the most radiant sun goddess I’d ever seen and I wanted to wash her feet or rub her shoulders. The flounders swam around my head again.

In a previous life my roommate drank Jim Beam with Jimmy Page. He also smoked opium with Han Shan on the Cold Mountain. At least this is what I suspected.

My girlfriend and I took a gel tab of acid each. They were strong hits and I had saved them for over a year. We began walking to the woods but I laughed and my tab flew out of my mouth. It landed on the path made of pebbles and was impossible to find. We walked back to the house and got the last tab so I could eat it. The trip really began then.
In the woods we encountered a businessman sitting in the dirt by a small creek having a cell phone conversation. Then an angry giant punk walked by. He looked murderous but I said hello to him. On top of the hill a fat black man was eating his lunch. I never thought there would be so many people in the woods. I’m on acid, I thought, what is your excuse?
There was a broke down street lamp in the middle of the woods. Someone had written “Life is a Dream” on it. I had to stand and puzzle about it for quite some time. When we reached the pond with the frogs I started throwing pebbles in. The ripples always became three giant ovals and I pondered numbers as my girlfriend sat in the shade and figured everything out. I think she made me go into a Korean jungle, but she swore it was a nice pathway around the frog pond. Incredible and terrifying bugs swarmed at me on all sides and I was glad when I made it to the cool of the woods again.
“I feel very wet,” I said to my girlfriend.
“That’s because you’re made of water,” she answered. Hmm, I thought. I couldn’t look at her most of the trip because she was too angelic to comprehend.

Most of my money went to liquor, beer, cigarettes, and weed. I went without food for the most part, I didn’t like how I felt after I ate. Slow. I hated to feel slow. Cheese and crackers were the only thing I could handle.
When the brain spun the world held perfectly still and I felt I could catch a drop of rain in my eye. This is the stasis of the abused, and the abuser.

If blue cheese had been an animal, I felt like I had just bitten into a live one. The cocaine taste went away and valium made me smile.

I woke up at nine thirty AM to head north and attend the organic farmers festival. Our ride (who said he’d be there at ten) arrived around twelve in the afternoon. After my roommate and I had smoked a joint and taken a couple shots of bourbon (our friend who was driving was twenty years sober… he had espresso), we were ready to get on the road.
Our friend drove an average of one hundred and ten miles per hour the entire way there. Three states flew by in three hours. We arrived at the festival at four PM, and slowly made our way through a rich hippie’s paradise. My roommate and I weren’t aware of the fact that these people were too nice for comfort and too burned out for intelligent conversation. We learned our lesson. Our friend said things are always changing. My roommate said, “It is what it is.”