Bum Wines and the Peyote Coyote, Mike Marino [pdf e book reader txt] 📗

The Peyote Coyote
The Bum Wines Collection
By Mike Marino

The Peyote Coyote
By: Mike Marino
theroadhead@yahoo.com

a spare change publication
produced by sal's mimeo
copyright 2008


Includes Magazine Interview With Mike Marino

Preface
The Peyote Coyote is a series of pastel recollections and semi-literate rambles about my haiku hobo days hitchiking and traveling through the American Southwest in the Sixties. It was a tie-dyed altered states purple hazed time of desert, mountains, cactus, cerveza and cantinas. It's a visual portrait of people and places, Route 66, Santa Fe Railroad, Phillips 66 gas stations, old dusty diners, old Mexicans and New Mexicans. It's a microbus microcosm magic carpet of blue haikus and dharmabumming in a time when all things seemed possible. A revolution of spirit was underway and yes, the times they were a' changin'.
I spent years living on the beach in Hawaii, beach bummed and broke and eventually made it back to the mainland to live on the streets of Sunset Strip and then on to the kaleidescope known as Haight Ashbury and settling down finally, in the beat North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. It was during 1966 while living in Northern California that I began exploring the deserts north of the border and south of the border and more than just a little to the left of Tom Joad. The road prophets I met along the way are all ghosts of memories now except for a few old friends who remain, but mainly it's a desrt painting of my altered states alter ego, Sandoz Diego Cerveza and his adventures with Doc Yucaton in search of lost chords and the elusive Peyote Coyote....
In the words of William Faulkner...."Good Literature Be Damned, Just Let The Words Fall To The Page And Have Fun With Each Other!"
Huevos Whateveros
(In a letter from author Ken Kesey to Mike Marino.in 1997 when they would eschange ideas back and forth on literature, politics and southwestern cuisine)
Mike:
Whateveros are very popular the second or third day after the main dish that has inspired them has faded away from memory…easiest of course, are the leftovers from a bulky Mexican meal. I like to chop them all in a big skillet along with some fresh tomato and peppers, and even tortilla chunks if there are some leftover. Cook until the tortillas are swollen and soaked. Crack, carefully, about a half dozen eggs and top with chilie sauce and chunks of cheese. Stick in the oven and cook until visions can be seen, then turn off the bottom and turn on the broiler until the eggs and cheese are turned light brown. Serve for lunch or supper or even breakfast. The same thing can be done with leftover Chinese, using noodles instead of tortillas, or leftover corned beef, or thai food. Anything that was good once and still has body, will be good again. Best served with a cup of good Mexican coffee.
Kesey..
Welcome to the cantina.............
...

The Peyote Coyote
Juarez, Mexico - 1965
Tequila & Marijuana Cocktails
Double-dazed and purple-hazed, he had journeyed from the cheap wine and endless row of topless bars that formed a phallic phalanx along the fog drenched streets of San Francisco's wet dream North Beach...caressed the Golden States left coast as though fondling an asphalt breast...whoopin' and hollerin' and campin' and campin' it up and down on the Pacific shores at Big Sur with love. Then, Death Valley with its shimmer, dunes and mountain hues, purple and copper in color, and then crossed the border into Old Mexico looking for a new life among old mexicans and even older indians who held the secrets of peyote .
He was already high when he walked into the dusty hot sun baked village, himself as dusty and tired as the old siesta men already asleep against adobe buildings. Holographic mandalas appeared as the mescaline hit he had taken just an hour before began to take effect, causing them to swirl in the air to the strains of a marching band, bold as brass. He marvelled too at the hallucinatory batons that were silver, tossed high, higher than he had ever seen, high into the bosom of the sky by young zen cheerleaders in revealing skirts of catholic plaid. Haiku visions followed him down the streets and into the cantina, visions of poets and hemp happy hipsters spinning out of orbit with a post-beat cadence, swimming and sailing as great Ahab whaling ships in search of a great white whale in a kaliedescopic sea of murals filled with mermaids. Beastly large frescoes, obscenely obese as magneto generators deep inside the industrial vagina of old Henry the Ford’s not enough eyeliner, yet, too much Rouge Plant, downriver, back home, years back, eons ago, in Detroit. Now he was well beyond home, and far past the exhaust of a creative blaze orange blue collar sunset
The mescaline massaged him with gentle fingers of hallucination as the dust swirled at this feet as he entered the cantina and ordered a drink. Soon he could see only the dialated vacant alley eye socket stares of the insitutional disabled and he could now eavesdrop on those silent screaming voices in the victims head. Victims imprisoned in wheelchairs, straightjackets and hoped up on narco midnight pills while interjecting injections of sweet dreamy morphine. Drug induced circumnavigating their own private Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular explorations they were, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were. Those recesses, the corners, the 90 degree forks in the road, were illuminated in deep shadow by electric currents, pulsating and twitching in orgasmic release as the tequila he was now drinking in the cantina, had wormed it's way home to the grand nerve central station, exposing the masks of drunkards with tankards, comedians and dexadrinians. The broken mirror in the men's room fired back olfactory warning shots over the head and as he ducked he could see the pile of neon lipstick tubes lying in the bottom of an empty William Holden swimming pool, empty except for Holden floating on top with a bullet in his back, on the fading estate of old Sunset Boulevard. The drugs finally shielded him from the visions of bright lights emanating from a very secretive Left Bank French underground,