Why I Committed Suicide (6 page)

Of course my ultimate fantasy would be to go with Her to the shows. It would be our first road trip together and seeing the Dead would be sweet, but she already committed to going with (gasp) Kristoff at the beginning of the summer.
Calm blue Ocean, calm blue Ocean.

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

I’m actually all right with it. This trip will be a definitive point in our lives together I can just feel it. She told me that she wished she hadn’t promised to go with him so long ago but in a way it’s good. I’m praying it will help her decide she really wants to be with me but I’m relaxed about the situation now that the final cards are dealt because it’s all up to fate I suppose. Regardless of what happens we are going to have a little time together before our vacation/separation and more than likely we’ll see each other at the shows in Oregon but I really don’t know what to expect. Long car trips tend to create a forced companionship that strengthens or dissolves any bond. I’m confident that even if she doesn’t know me yet, she knows she wants to know me and I’ll leave it at that.

One of Jenifer’s ex-boyfriends (another?) who owns part of the Karma Kafe is going and she isn’t promising anything, but she said she would talk to him. I’m hoping to find a ride because I would like to go with someone who knows about the music and “scene” to maximize my experience.

It would be cool if I could find some opium too, but I’m not holding my breath. Among the Grateful Dead fans there seems to be a riptide of desperation underneath the happiness so I don’t know what to expect. The people I’ve spoken to say that this might be the last year to see the shows because Jerry Garcia is rumored to die soon. He looks pretty old I suppose but I don’t know why he would suddenly keel over. Maybe it’s a fan thing, but geez they sure are pessimistic.

Well it’s official, I’m moving out of the Delta Lodge. I am sad to leave a house I truly love but there are some good reasons for this. I’ve written before about how I keep getting sick in the room I’m living in. Even with that it might be tolerable if the room wasn’t so accessible to revelers and hoed out all the time. Plus if the heat abated a little our room might actually be downright cozy for about the only 4 months of the year Texas weather isn’t intolerably annoying. Of course I’ll miss all the free marijuana I get to smoke around here (thanks to someone always needing a nearby room to light up in) but while I enjoy smoking dope, ever since I met Jenifer I’m enjoying being a little more aware.

My second reason for leaving the house, and I’m not fucking kidding about this, are the giant possums that wander the hallways at all hours like ambling diseased ghosts. A literal family of possums have taken over the first and second floors. The front door got ripped off during a party last week and several windows are missing so there isn’t really any way to keep an animal that can climb trees out of an open house. One of my alternative fraternity housemates tried to kill one of the possums with a garden rake but the creature was too damn big. I’m serious, we’re talking at least the size of a medium dog here. It’s extremely disconcerting to stumble into the bathroom hungover, or barely hanging onto reality thanks to varying drug combinations, and find a salivating mangy possum between the porcelain god and me. Hangovers and tetanus shots are not a good combination. And despite what I’ve heard about possums, these motherfuckers
do not
roll over and play dead like in the fucking Deputy Dawg cartoons. I’m speculating whatever keeps making me sick probably mutated them into a new smarter and larger species. I thought they were cute for about five minutes, then back in reality I learned it’s not really cool in any circle to cohabitate with rodents. Jenifer’s pet rat Rico is the exception I suppose.

My third and most important reason for moving is that I found a new place to live. Jim Heines, my friend from the dorms, and his friend Dan found a neat little house on the opposite side of campus, right by the school. I initially didn’t really think they would find any houses at all, so I kind of off-handedly offered to move in with them if they could find one near the campus, knowing that’s a near impossible task in a college town. But less than a half hour after I sent them out on a snipe hunt they came back and had a fresh pad. The rent is cheaper, the house is cleaner and I’ll have my own room.

Ernie wasn’t too thrilled to hear I was moving out on him, but he understood. I think he is secretly ready to get the hell out of the Lodge also, between the crappy room we rent and me being sick and complaining all the time I think it’s for the best. He’s going to move in with Kirk (yet another good friend from our dorm days) so I’m not just leaving him hanging.

Being poor has advantages. I calculate I can move all my belongings in a few quick carloads. I’ll miss controlling the Delta Lodge sound system from my room with the souped up 70’s stereo system I have rigged up with a genuine working 8-track player. But really, how many times can people listen to STYX in a row before the novelty wears off? Still, the feeling of power that goes along with controlling what people are listening too while they are drinking free beer is intoxicating in its own way. I’ll miss being able to subconsciously influence drunken partygoers and exposing various sorts of people to groups like The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Police, Nirvana, Johnny Cash, Mr. Bungle. And some good old N.W.A. & Easy E. The thrill and novelty of being the music god wore off the night some drunken chick pounded on my door over and over and over until I finally answered her insistent pounding and the crazy bitch tried to come in and smash my Dire Straights’ “Brothers in Arms” disc because she thought it was country music. What a damn shame.

It’s moving day! It’s moving day! The protagonist says gleefully with the enthusiasm of Steve Martin yelling “The new phone books are here!” I am so totally stoked about moving into our new house. There are four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Dan and his younger brother Jerry (Jay) are staying there also, rounding out our numbers to four. Four people, four rooms, what a deal. D & J put down all the deposit
and
they were able to get their parents to help set us up with utilities and all the other stuff that’s so hard to get turned on the first time. I know Dan from the dorm but mostly from him hanging around with Jim at the Flying Tomato on one of my Thursday or Saturday shifts. It seems like a larger percentage of my friends are alcoholics and I love them for it. They love me for it too, because I have the hook-up for free beer on Fry St., so it’s a fucked up symbiotic relationship I suppose.

There is only one usable air conditioner in the house. A giant motherfucker of a window unit that is in the living room, so I imagine we’ll be spending a lot of our time there. The house does have a lot of windows and we all have fans so we should be able to circulate a lot of air through the house and keep moderately cool. If all else fails, I’ll have no problem camping out in the living room and sleeping during the worst of the heat. Dan and Jay have some old furniture from when their parents redecorated, so our new digs already sport a couple of lazy boys, some carpet, a TV & stereo (w/cabinet) and a microwave. All the necessities. Our home will be a hodge-podge of varying styles and comforts united by a mutual appreciation for B-boy flavor.

Jay got what was/is the master bedroom since he was the one who plunked down the $450 deposit. I took the leftover room that wasn’t originally a room but more like a porch area where the original owner probably kept the lawn-mower. My doorframes have no doors in them. They open directly to the kitchen and Jim’s room so I hung up thick blankets for partitions, we’ll see if this lets any of the cooler air into my room at all. Jim’s room is a lowered out area in-between me and Dan. He has to cut through one of our rooms to get in or out of his room, which is kind of cool for his privacy, but it’s kind of restricting for the rest of us. I’m sure it will work out fine. I know Jim is going to hear Jenifer and me when we are rooting around in the bedroom, but we won’t mind. Jim’s got a longtime girlfriend named Simone and I’m sure we’ll hear our fair share of them going at it also. We are both dirty dogs and we’re both down with it all. Isn’t that one of the long-debated gender separations? Guys will encourage other guys to get their groove on as much as possible while girls don’t tend to support their friends who hop in the sack with everybody very much, but they do like to have one friend who sleeps with more people than they do so they don’t feel like sluts.

My room has a backdoor that opens to the humongous backyard which is one of the best reasons for living in this house. Years and years of previous tenants and typical college student neglect has left a veritable garden of wild jungle attitude right in our corner of the city. It’s muy plush and green and I’ll have to add some of my own special plants and see how they do.

Behind the house, near my backdoor, is a garage apartment. The guy who lives there is named Andy and he’s a pot smoker who is one of those people who are so white that they look borderline albino. Andy is pretty chilled out, he seems like he keeps to himself most of the time. Andy’s an all right guy to get high with, except he critiques the weed and his pot is usually superior to whatever I can contribute.

I’m looking forward to mowing the lawn since I had that chore for the majority of my childhood. The two-year hiatus I took from mowing while I lived in the dorms has stirred strange longings for the grit and grime of manual labor. I think it’s just one of those things that appears a lot more fun after the unpleasant details fade away from memory. I guess I’ll figure that out either way soon. Besides, our little lawn shouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the giant acreage I slaved over in my youth. Maybe I was merely smaller then.

My next ambition is to build a half pipe in the backyard since we have more space than we know what to do with. Dan and Jim are both skaters even though they are a little older and not quite as die-hard about it as I seem to be. Although I must note, enthusiasm and skill are two different things, because I know Dan can shred his ass off when he wants to.

I’m excited to be moving in with Jim, he has a lot of savvy about him that I admire. Our ritual ramblings in his blue Mustang is one of the reasons I learned to appreciate smoking pot. We used to cut out of the dorms most nights and drive all around the back roads of Denton by the airport because it was such a pain in the ass to smoke out anywhere on or near campus. A lot of the roads we explored back then are the same roads Jenifer takes me out on when she gets that restless urge to drive. I have a lot of fond memories of Jim and me driving out by dinky-doo airport, smoking big bombers, hitting the proto pipe, listening to Paul’s Boutique on the tape deck and debating whether it is the greatest album ever. We’ve tripped our balls off on acid a few times and watched the lightning storms approach and rumble across the sky while listening to The Orb. Many philosophies and theorems about the secrets to life were debated and solved during our excursions and now we’re going to be living together so let the good times roll.

In moderation of course.

Looks like I’m going to the sows! I mean shows! Good news. Really good news, since there’s little more than a week left to get there. John Browning, one of Jenifer’s old boyfriends, is taking his giant white Ford Econoline van along with two other people up to the shows in Oregon and California. I don’t know how or why I got this lucky, but somebody must have cancelled on him for me to squeeze in a primo seat at the last minute. The deal with Jenifer and John B. is that they went out for a little while before she got bored. Then I suppose he was tossed aside like a bag of potatoes just like the rest of us. It’s a cruel, cruel world to live in when the girls get used to people constantly obsessing over them. Oh, the blessings and curses of having a sweet ass. Jenifer is one of those rare beautiful women that aren’t preoccupied with how much money somebody has or what they might one day be able to earn, (unlike some people who shall remain nameless) if so I would have been eliminated long ago.

John B. and I get along great. He’s got long brown hair and a fully-grown goatee. It’s not a look he’s carefully crafted as an alternative fashion statement either, his goatee comes from being genuinely unkempt. Loose overalls and t-shirts, a carefree attitude and genuinely nice. John’s the same age as I am but he owns half of the Karma Kafe’, a pretty successful business that guarantees he has major bank. I think maybe he likes me because I’m a fresh face that doesn’t hang out in his place all the time. I think he finds it refreshing that I’m not trying to gloss him over with hippy peace and love while trying to scam vegan sandwiches on the side. Plus we have the bond of being obsessed over the same girl and having to watch her go on a road trip all the fucking way across the country, to the same place, without either one of us. We share the spurned lover bond. Ha!

The other two guys going with us are also pretty cool. We kind of all met briefly, checked out the van and had a little smoke out together. It was kind of an introduction, to make sure I’m not a cop or a dickhead before we travel across the United States together kind of thing. There’s another John with really short hair that plays conga (pronounced cooonga) drums, who is all hyped about finding a drum circle at the shows and another guy named Mike who resembles a red Viking giant. One thing is for sure, if the pre-trip smoke session is any indicator, the marijuana will flow like water.

All three of them know a hell of a lot about the Grateful Dead, which is good because I don’t have much time to cram familiarity into my thick head. My plan is to absorb as much of their music as I can on the trip and attend the shows with an open mind prepared for nothing but a good time. I found out that the Dead let people tape all their live shows anyway so no-one can predict or know exactly what they will do each time they get together and play. Spontaneity, I dig it, I’m all over it. It’s even cool that I don’t own any of their music. Apparently anybody who is a true fan doesn’t pay much attention to the studio albums that the Grateful Dead put out anyway, John #2 said, “the early ones are ok and the rest are shit.” I don’t know, I always thought “Trucking” was kind of a cool song.