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

thick with homosexual transexual mascara that penetrated deep into the bowels of the cabaret underworld of a bereft Berlin. A socialista workers paradise appeared in it's glitzy place, forewarning of a possible fornication as he sat down on the floor of the bar to watch Tom Joad and the False Maria getting it on, electing eventually to erect monsterous and preposterous monuments to Karl Marx, Frederich Engles and Papa Ooo Mao Mao!
The subliminal droning of the Industrial assemblylines hummed a tune that was a delightful color, and as colorfully imposing as Diego Rivera's blue-collar steel-grey Soviet Stalin hues. I looked around, my head spinning around and then...I stumbled, I tumbled and swore as I fell, face down, ass up onto the cantina’s jukebox floor – passed out and pissed off in Ciudad de Juarez in 1966. Dreaming drunk, vivid and vibrant, I walked the dog of Chihuahua through the desert of the same name. The desert, now deserted except for techno-color fragrance of nightime, dreamtime nightshade and bella donna blooms. I could have been snorin’ in Sonora with a senora or senorita or two, dos, passos, pesos, but instead travelled in suspended cartoonic and catatonic animation through fully phallic fields of the cactian cosmos astride a fully loaded, fuel injected heavy metal steely dan saguaro..locked and loaded.
I found buttons in the surounding hillsides, and ate one only to feed a hunger and to quench and squash a thirst. Soon I was assailed by the sounds of laughter and unfamiliar dialects, not chinee but mex me thinks, with the dust swirling like little dustbowl tornados created by little brown feet belonging to the little brown kids of the little brown mestizo village who danced delirious in the dormant dirt of the dusty catholic plaza..Saint San Shit or something or other.
A lone tree, stood, still, silent, leafless, but flashed on and off with liquid-light, bright with Robert Johnson hues of blues and the hot reds of deep south negroid rhythms, bumps and grinds, bullfrogs, gators, bayou crickets, and big invisible swampy snakes with blank faces.
The mescaline band, mucho mariachis in hand, performed a flaming tight pants'd flamenco with a flamingo of dubious gender on the table, tanked up on too much tequila. Then the trumpets, blaring out festive fiesta fandagos with a serape serenade for sweet scheherazades, with wave after wave of music, like lyrical tsunamis crashing to shore, deep inland and further yet to reach the lagoons and indonesian caves. In my dream, or someone’s dream, can't remember now, I stood alone, with all the others, fixed in place fixated on all the empty eyesockets of the other prisoners of Zen, in the Jesuit jail, white stucco’d, caucasion calked and adobe’d, surrounded again like saturn confined to rings of debris, by anxious urchins, begging, imploring to fill the pinata with more peyote and tequila dreams.
I lowered the mache of paper to the dusty ground below, filled it, packed it like a pirates cannon full of shrapnel words, not in any particular or peculiar order of sentence or structure of any kind. Then it was raised by the numerous Pablitos by its frayed rope high above the blindfolded assemblage who couldn’t wait to swing a stick at it like Mussilini hanging upside down in the square like a slab of facist meat.
Sticks swang and swung and swinged, wildly, no hits, no runs, no errors until ol’ Number Seven connected with a direct hit. As the ball flew out of the stadium, words, so many of them, fell from the punctured pinata complete with punctuation, like so many pieces of pretty candy flying out without wings in every direction. It was an explosive array of metaphors, verbs, nouns, some were reknowned nouns while others merely unknown nouns. The cascade of the english language fell not to the ground but found sanctuary on the linen pages of a book waiting for them in illiterate alleys, for their very arrival, survival and grammatical revival. The children, the smart ones, not the adults, gathered up the little candy like words together, and together they spent the morning forming sentences and paragraphs until the no-sense finally made sense, mainly socialista mumbo jumbo about a lady named Frida, Che Guevara and the flats of tortilla.
Soon the words became sentences, the sentences paragraphs, and soon it was a book, a tome, that I read a little of. Soon in my dream my eyes became heavy with drink and mescaline and I had to rest. I laid the invisible book on the invisible table next me and was glad to sleep. The alcohol and peyote were wearing off as the plaza and the pinata began to fade from view and my reach. Voices disappeared too, decible by decible until there was only a loud silences. I had some tea in a cup and it smiled back at me, a weird Cheshire cat got your tongue grin, and then I doubled over and threw up….
Next Day
The sun rose in the east as I suppose it feels it has to, that is what we hired it for afterall. It warmed my face as I sat up, refreshed in spirit with a hollow stomach. Sitting in the corner, quiet as a saint was the mysterious Doc Yucatan, a haiku hobo of recent aquaintance from Denver. “Damn Doc, I had the weirdest dream last night, or I think it was my dream and not someone elses. It was one long string of dream beads or shells strung together.”
Doc motioned for me to get up as it was time to head out, so we both got up to leave old Mexico after I had splashed rancid brown water on my face and grabbed by backpack by the bedstead. Doc and I walked through the sleepy village and down the sleepy road where even the dogs were to goddamn lazy to bark at us, we lit a joint and walked out into the desert…the Haiku Hobo and the Dharmabum in search of the Peyote Coyote in the kingdom of cactus…..
Death Valley Dazed
California is a smorgasbord of yin's and yang's.
Southern California, is the Pacific coast playground of the rebel without a cause hot rod car culture and Surf City, where, the Beach Boys promise, there are two girls for every boy. Northern California however, is the John Muir high country of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the majesty of Yosemite. Coastal redwoods and mountain sequoias, woodland giants in a rich Lord of the Rings environment that encourages contemplation and meditation. The City of Lost Angels, home to lights, cameras, action! Hollywood! San Francisco to the north, is where the North Beach beat goes on much as it did in the Kerouac era of cheap port and poetry, and Haight Ashbury in the Sixties was the gravitational center of a new spiritual and political universe spinning out of control in a psychedelic orbit. California Dreamin' was becoming an eight mile high rolling paper reality with it's non-stop influx of youthful immigrants from the middle west middle class seeking an upbeat Upton Utopia that turned out to be as disorienting as an opium dream at best.
I had been living in the Haight since early 1966 and by the time of the Summer of Love Normandy Invasion of 1967, the streets had lost their luster, and were now a charlatans cacophony of spare changers, speed freaks, heroin dealers and predators. Hip was dead and buried, and I packed it up for the insane sanity of North Beach. My girlfriend at the time, Myrika, was a German artist and musician who had come to the states for a short visit and decided to stay. She sketched and painted while I spent hours writing in my journal, as our North Beach days were spent in exploration of the artistic and literary abstract, along with some of the best Italian sausage and vino in town. One night while walking along strip club infested area of Columbus Avenue near our apartment , she asked about the American deserts. Germany, famous for forests, lakes and rivers it seems, did not have a desertstrasse to save it's life and wanted to experience the expanse and tranquility only it can offer. Infinity itself, defined in terms of endless horizons and a vast ocean of sand, plants and animals. She wanted to sketch "stories" as she called them of the desert diversity and illusions it can create. She also just wanted to hear, experience and tape record the howl of the romantic Cary Grant leading man of the desert, the coyote.
it didn't take much to persuade John and his girlfriend, Olivia, good friends of mine and kindred spirits in Berkeley, to gas up the aging, coughing VW Microbus he owned to take to the road and head to Death Valley near the Panamint Mountains in southern California. Both were aspiring filmmakers so this was a f-stop opportunity to photograph and film a day in the life of the desert, except that day would turn into two weeks of more than just Ansel Adams antics. The peace symbol festooned magic microbus picked us at our apartment and was already fully loaded with Nikons, black & white film, two movie cameras, 16 mm film, cooking equipment, sleeping bags, food, wine, books, tripods, two kites, lanterns, built in camp cook stove, and a load of wood for fires John always kept handy for the many trips we would make down the coast to Big Sur to camp on the beach. The bus had been named Big Sur in the beaches honor one night around a big blur of a drunken campfire on the big beach at Big Sur. We did Big Sur it once again that night as it would have been blasphemy not to and headed out the next morning after a magnificent sunrise for the land of borax, mule teams of twenty and a saltwater lake called Bad Water. On the road again, cutting over to San Luis Obisbo, then Bakersfield and then into the valley of death rode the microbus four.
Death Valley National Monument, as it was first designated in 1933, was elevated to "park" status in 1994. Tourism was off and running from the starting line in the 1920's as Henry Ford's assembly lines went on blue collar factory overdrive to mass produce automobiles at a pace and price within reach of the motor mad masses. The supposed curative powers of Death Valleys natural springs attracted tourists during the flapper era of the Roaring Twenties like buzzards feasting on roadkill. Roosevelt, Franklin, not Eleanor, had the WPA programs include the blazing of trails through the Panamint Range of the desert area and campgrounds were set up to accommodate the new trade of auto-tourism.
We arrived in Death Valley near the end of the day so decided to park it and camp it. In those days you could pretty well just pull off the side of the road and set up your rustic version of Xanadu and rule the realm, and we made it to Bad Water which is about the limbo pole low as you can go in the continental United States at a basement foundation depth of 282 feet below sea level. We unloaded the sleeping bags, cook gear and food, along with one of the kites, three bottles of wine and flannel shirts for later in the evening. Limited campfires were permitted in those days, and a pit dug in the sand sufficed as fire pit. John, in his Muir-like wisdom had brought an ample supply of firewood along for numerous small fires as opposed to one that would reach the sky and herald the opening ceremony of a Burning Man gathering of the tribes. We got the camp stove fired up, black beans and rice ready to be transformed into the eighth