In the summer of 1982, I was living in San Antonio when my friend Jeb asked if I wanted to go to a party at a house where the Butthole Surfers were rumored to be living. This invitation felt like both a threat and a promise. I heard the way the band treated their fans, their credo of punishing the audience with their music, their habit of throwing chairs at them, lead singer Gibby Haynes blasting shotguns over their heads, whatever it took to get the point across. If this was how they treated their fans, what would they do with some dude who hung out with some dude named Jeb, who probably wasn’t even invited to said party?

When Jeb added that Timothy Leary, of turn on, tune in, drop out lore, might be living there too, I felt a duty to go despite the risks. Let’s call it a journalistic obligation. Let’s call it I had to see this shit for myself.

Even if the University of Texas had kicked Jeb out of journalism school, finding a good story was still in his bones. Even his look was a story in and of itself: his long, freckled frame, standing over six and a half feet tall, high and tight red hair, the enormous denim bibs he wore because he felt they made strangers less afraid of him, his punchline of two missing front teeth. People would ask, “Was he a hockey player?”  “Was he a boxer?” Nope, he’d say through a smile showcasing what was missing. “Buzz Aldrin did this to me in Houston,” he’d say, proudly pointing at the gap even though he’d never reveal what transpired in that Sears and Roebuck parking lot. What had he said to trigger the astronaut to punch him in the mouth? Jeb would never tell anyone other than to promise it had nothing to do with the Earth being flat.

Even if I was not kicked out of journalism school, I was less impressive than Jeb. The story my body told was more of an accountant hell bent on keeping my teeth to the unbroken side of the ledger.

These differences didn’t matter so much now. We had Butthole Surfers to find. We had Timothy Leary to drop in on. We rolled up on the house, which is to say one careful step by step down the sidewalk from several houses away. In the front yard, three trash cans formed a crooked line behind a makeshift ramp, and some dreadlocked kid in stringy cutoff jeans and a sunburnt torso flew at us, easily clearing the trash cans on a skateboard.

“Shouldn’t there have been more than three?” I tried to ask Jeb, but before we could break down the finer points, we entered the house, which is to say the mob all around us moved in, and we rode the wave as if we still had free will.

We made our rounds through the house, finding no Butthole Surfers but lots of dudes hanging around drinking from plastic cups and staring at Gibby’s paintings of Lee Harvey Oswald doing trivial things such as playing badminton or mowing the lawn.

I came out to sit on the porch above the front yard, now without trash cans or flying skateboarders, but you still believed it could. A dog the size of a small horse, which is to say a large dog made its rounds through the party before following me outside.

“That’s Gibby’s bitch,” the kid next to me said.

“Where’s the band?” I asked.

The kid flicked me in the chest. “Whatever you do, give that dog whatever it wants.”

The dog trotted up and down the porch, its yellow eyes scanning us as if evaluating our life choices. She stopped right in front of me. The kid flicked me in the chest again.

“The band’s all here,” the kid said. “They’re always all here.”

The dog turned and dropped the weight of her lower half right down on my lap.

“Yep, that’s the only way she can sleep,” the kid said.

Any move I made was met by a confident growl that overtook half the party with religious mania and incited the other half to an old-fashioned front yard ass whooping.

“Lap of a stranger!” the kid said. “The only way she sleeps!”

I heard someone add that the dog hadn’t slept in weeks. I used to spend so much time writing about the world that sometimes I’d forget to be in the world, but here I was starting to feel a level of companionship previously foreign to me when a lady sat next to me and the dog. She flicked me in the chest and asked if I minded if she took a turn.

Handing the dog off was more complicated than I had expected. I tried standing up, lap first, but the dog counter pushed my every move. The lady seemed to be losing patience. The dog and I were hip to hip, about three-quarters up in the air, when someone who looked an awful lot like Gibby Haynes walked in and quickly looked like someone running inside to retrieve their shotgun.

One thing at a time, one thing at a time, is all I could tell myself and this mantra gave me just enough strength to deposit the small horse, big ass dog, to the lap of the impatient lady.

Play it cool, play it cool, is all I could tell myself, and this mantra gave me just enough strength to stumble into the yard where a bunch of sunburnt kids were hanging around. That’s when I remembered I couldn’t remember when I had last seen Jeb.

This wasn’t the kind of party where you had to wait for things to develop. Even if you were ready to do some waiting. A commotion inside the house began to overflow outside. Someone kept yelling, “Quit aiming that thing at me!” and I started to respect it as a possible mantra. The guy who looked like Gibby Haynes, which is to say a ridiculously tall man with long black hair and big bouncy eyeballs, came running from the house, my friend Jeb riding him piggyback and looking like a man interested in getting the hell out of town. Gibby Haynes might be the only man in the world who could possibly run around with a man like Jeb on his back. It occurred to me how lucky I was to witness such a thing.

Hot on their heels was the sunburnt torso kid with a guy riding on top of his shoulders who looked an awful lot like Timothy Leary, which is to say a white haired, red faced, old man aiming a shotgun at the world while yelling, “Quit aiming that thing at me!”

Leary was smiling like a wise man rather than a mad man, convincing me there had to be something behind his logic, even if I failed to report what it was.

They ran down the street and apparently around the block because the yelling formed a perfect circle of quiet and loud, quiet and loud, hell bent on proving the world wasn’t flat.

The impromptu parade collected little kids in Butthole Surfer shirts, little kids on big wheels, bigger kids on bigger bikes, some kid playing a marching drum, and some old guy who looked an awful lot like William S. Burroughs, which is to say just like the Grim Reaper.

I stood in the yard with this kind of life slam dancing in my head, screaming mantras and beating marching drums. Jeb and his propensity for becoming the story. The bastards had kicked him out of journalism school. They had tried to kick me out too, but I made it through. It felt like nobody lived the irony of a weed out class the way Jeb and I had. And now, somewhere in San Antonio, in that miserable summer of 1982, Nancy Reagan rose to the top of my mind, and I had to laugh. Nancy Reagan is right, Nancy Reagan is right, my brain kept singing in an annoying rhythm that I filed away in case I ever had a punk rock band and needed to assault my own crowd. As for the day at hand, I would apologize to Timothy Leary no sooner than Jeb would to Buzz Aldrin. Just saying no was making an awful lot of sense, which is to say I knew it was time for me to leave this parade behind, one careful step by step, and quietly be on my way.