When I was sixteen, I passed out drunk inside my then-girlfriend’s house at a house party the night we decided to have sex for the first time. I’d attended my school’s club hockey game earlier in the night before availing myself of the bottle of Southern Comfort a friend’s very out-of-town dad kept stashed beneath a disused basement workbench; Mary worked, hawking affordable yet stylish fashions at the mall where my friends and I often played video games at the arcade. Given my condition when Mary arrived at the party after her shift behind the register, she was understandably hesitant to go through with the act, but that was the agreement we’d made, and the agreement we would keep, clumsily tangled in the cartoon-character bedding of the pre-teen who apparently lived here. We’d been going out for close to three months. It was time to consummate the relationship.
“Don’t move me,” I remember telling Mary, but who listens to an unredeemable drunk who just threw up all over the wall and needed to be led from the party wrapped in nothing but a polyurethane garbage bag and out the back door in the middle of winter?
That had been a long time ago. Not one of my finest moments, then or now.
Somewhere in the middle of that long unraveling, I found myself at Owl Farm, the Woody Creek, Colorado home and “fortified compound” where the author and progenitor of Gonzo Journalism, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson lived, worked, and died in 2005—Raoul Duke, one of his frequent literary alter egos, come to life. We were in his office. It was the nerve center of the place.
“So, you don’t drink brown liquor?”
“Throwing up on your girlfriend while you’re inside of her will do that.”
“Or smoke?”
“I’m physically incapable of the act.”
The Good Doctor leaned forward in his chair and cocked an eyebrow.
“Are you some kind of narc?” he asked.
We were supposed to be shooting guns by now, and I could see Hunter was getting restless. A charge of impending violence rolled up the back of my neck. A choice would need to be made directly.
“I won’t smoke it, but I’ll eat it.”
“Ah! You heard him! He said he’d eat it!”
The statement seemed to me for the benefit of the other assembled guests, only there were none. It was just me and the lord of the manor, or so I thought. What kind of fever dream was this? Who was he talking to?
“Stay right there! Don’t move.”
When the Great Man returned, he had a charger full of brightly colored confections which he placed on the edge of his desk between he and me, eager to see what I would do.
“Go ahead. Try one. They’re good.”
Despite my better judgement, I reached for a small blue orb.
“Not the blue one. Try the orange instead.”
The snozzberries taste like snozzberries! I did as I was told, like I was eating caramel corn at a carnival sideshow, smiling like a mental patient in an extreme attempt to not show fear.
The next thing I knew, the rest of our party—me, Hunter, and the apparitions he’d conjured and were now visible to me as well; terrible, naked creatures doubled over at various coordinates dotting the property’s back forty, relieving themselves of their lunches and who knows what else against a perfect Colorado sky. I was the last one to throw up, a clear case of emetic contagion. Sympathy vomiting.
Moments earlier, the counterculture legend who once wrote, “the world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs, loud music and firepower,” (mescaline and 110 decibels on the first two counts) had taken an oft-pictured shooting stance and was aiming his .44 caliber Desert Eagle in my direction (the aforementioned “firepower” on the third) prompting me to scrabble for cover on the dark side of a nearby cord of wood, behind which I remained sheltered until the sound of retching in the frost air urged me from my refuge.
As I stood there staring at the sky trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe as bullets whizzed around the property, a song came to mind.
Look at the stars, look how they shine for you.
And everything that you do.
They were all yellow.
I came along, I wrote a song for you.
And all the things that you do.
And it was called yellow.
Why this one, I don’t know. “Yellow,” by Coldplay was possibly the worst song ever except for “Amber,” by 311. I disliked 311 even more than I disliked Sublime, which had zero to do with Coldplay, but was still saying a lot.
“Blue Monday” I liked.
How does it feel, to treat me like you do? When you’ve laid your hands upon me and told me who you are.
Blue Monday, Blue Thunder, Blue Bayou, Behind Blue Eyes, Pale Blue Eyes, Blue Suede Shoes, Folsom Prison Blues, the Man in Black, Black Dog. Tangerine. That was a color and a fruit. Back in Black. Paint it Black. Brown Eyed Girl. Purple Haze. Purple Rain. Tangled Up in Blue. Mellow Yellow. Green Onions. Cheese and Onions.
It seemed that most of my thoughts came to me in song lyrics these days or lines from books I’d read.
Owl Farm did not disappoint.
I wonder if Mary remembered that night the same way I did. Sticky fumblings and whatnot.
“C’mon, man. Get it together.”
Everything I’d left behind came rushing back in an instant until all I was left with was memory.
