Rolling Up Smoke in a Cigarette Paper
Oct. 19th, 2011 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonLooking back on it all and it’s like trying to roll smoke between a cigarette paper. We wore our illusions the way we wore our leather jackets, our thick black boots, our still fresh tattoos –hard, with a sneering defiance tempered by a hint of menace. Who were we? A wolf pack of misfits, a murder of stoners, a Tribe Called Angst, a constellation of super novas forming a great big celestial middle finger to that distant yet dwindling future ahead of us. We were wingmen, back-up, connections, alibis, witnesses, conspirators, drinking buddies and allies. We dressed ourselves up in our finest mythologies – our war stories pinned to the breast of our pride, our shit talk perfumed with pick up lines - and we did so simply to get high, to get laid, to get out of fights, to get ourselves on the guest list, or invited to parties where no one had heard of us, but really just to get ourselves as far as fucking possible from the cast iron trap of what the world expected us to be.
We could be counted on one hand but when you added us up we equaled legion.
Each of us ruled by a cardinal element.
The Fire of Jeremiah Sinn, enchanting to behold in his flickering charm but offering a sharp lesson in pain when you got too close. The Earth of Tom, strong and resilient as a mountain in his refusal to bend his knee to the world, yet choosing in the end to be shattered with lightning rather than be ground down to dust by attrition. The cool logical Air of Johnny Law, who could be as disarming as a first hit off a joint or as wild as a whirlwind touching down on a carnival night. Then there was me, the Water of dreams and reflection, quietly flowing around the lives of my friends where they sank beneath the treacherous waves of my memory the treasure of their confessions.
But before the betrayal, the bullet and the baby took them away from me, we stood united against each others demons armed only with the wink of our attitudes and the grin of knowing that we had already won the fight just by being in it.
There were times when we were tested and one of us would rise to the occasion with flying colors…
The four of us packed in Tom’s death trap on wheels. Four tons of Atomic Age issued steel, a car fueled on Tom’s scream and with a asthmatic engine that sputtered off without warning and a set of brakes calibrated for Maybe. We were lost in the wilds of OTP at two in the morning trying to find our way back to Terminus in the hopes of hitting 688 in time for last call. Hicksville, USA. Stoned out of our heads and lost on the way back from Tom picking up a QP of quality kind from a new connection. Add to the stash several sheets of acid and enough blow to make a corpse get up and dance. Of course all that Hunter Thompson bullshit sounds good on paper, until you realize that you’ve been followed by a cop car for the last three miles. The way we figured it Jeremiah’s goth-chic club wear, Johnny’s blazing red eyes, Tom’s spiked mohawk and my shaved head probably constituted probable cause on the books of wherever the fuck it was we were driving through. Tom was behind the wheel and he tried to subtly lose the law, but the squad car stuck to us like a sore on a whore’s lips. At one point we rolled up on some train tracks with a long freight rolling by us at a crawl.
We just sat there each of us trying not to look at the cop in the reflection of the rear view mirror, but we could all feel the eyes of law drilling into us. We chain smoked away, hoping to kill the dank odor of the blunt we just burned not but twenty minutes ago. Jeremiah & Johnny started offering conflicting bullshit stories to feed the cop when he inevitably flashed the sirens. I sat there huddling my chin into my shoulders, trying to self-implode myself into some form of invisibility. Tom just sat there, his fingers strumming frantically to the pre-Rollins Black Flag mixed tape he had been playing steadily since he got the death trap on wheels six months back.
The train dragged itself along with a steel grind that sparked against our nerves. Behind us the ominous silence of the cop car.
Finally Tom stopped strumming his fingers and snorted a – “Fuck this.”
Before any of us knew what he was doing, Tom bolted out of the car, and we watched in disbelief as he made his way to the cop car. We all leaned in close to watch the whole scene go down in the rear view mirror. Tom was at the driver side of the cop car, leaning in the window and talking. Occasionally he would point off in a direction and nod. Then, after a few minutes went by and the last car of the train rumbled off and the mechanical arm rose back up opening the road before us, Tom jogged over and hopped back into the car.
Behind us the cop car did a U-ey and drove back off the opposite direction.
“The hell was that?” I asked Tom stupefied.
“I asked him for directions.”
“Who? The cop?” I said immediately.
“No, dumb ass. The Mayor.” Tom snickered dismissively, kicking the death trap into gear and rumbling us off, “Of course the cop. Best way to get one off your ass is to get in their face and ask them a simple question. ”
“That’s crazy.” I muttered.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Of course you might wonder how much of that was true and how much of that was bullshit.
But that’s the Scene, right? Where the most outrageous rumor can haunt a soul until their dying day and the most simple truth can flourish unnoticed for decades. What matter the facts when we speak of those we miss, save that we speak fondly when we do?
Anyway, nothing left of us now but these watered down legends. I try to summon them back together but you might as well fill a shot glass with a memory of whiskey and try to get drunk off it. You can go through the motions and even convince yourself for a second that you are there. But in the end your sipping nothing but bittersweet nostalgia.
Still here’s to you guys – it’s not much but it’s all I got left to offer.
We could be counted on one hand but when you added us up we equaled legion.
Each of us ruled by a cardinal element.
The Fire of Jeremiah Sinn, enchanting to behold in his flickering charm but offering a sharp lesson in pain when you got too close. The Earth of Tom, strong and resilient as a mountain in his refusal to bend his knee to the world, yet choosing in the end to be shattered with lightning rather than be ground down to dust by attrition. The cool logical Air of Johnny Law, who could be as disarming as a first hit off a joint or as wild as a whirlwind touching down on a carnival night. Then there was me, the Water of dreams and reflection, quietly flowing around the lives of my friends where they sank beneath the treacherous waves of my memory the treasure of their confessions.
But before the betrayal, the bullet and the baby took them away from me, we stood united against each others demons armed only with the wink of our attitudes and the grin of knowing that we had already won the fight just by being in it.
There were times when we were tested and one of us would rise to the occasion with flying colors…
The four of us packed in Tom’s death trap on wheels. Four tons of Atomic Age issued steel, a car fueled on Tom’s scream and with a asthmatic engine that sputtered off without warning and a set of brakes calibrated for Maybe. We were lost in the wilds of OTP at two in the morning trying to find our way back to Terminus in the hopes of hitting 688 in time for last call. Hicksville, USA. Stoned out of our heads and lost on the way back from Tom picking up a QP of quality kind from a new connection. Add to the stash several sheets of acid and enough blow to make a corpse get up and dance. Of course all that Hunter Thompson bullshit sounds good on paper, until you realize that you’ve been followed by a cop car for the last three miles. The way we figured it Jeremiah’s goth-chic club wear, Johnny’s blazing red eyes, Tom’s spiked mohawk and my shaved head probably constituted probable cause on the books of wherever the fuck it was we were driving through. Tom was behind the wheel and he tried to subtly lose the law, but the squad car stuck to us like a sore on a whore’s lips. At one point we rolled up on some train tracks with a long freight rolling by us at a crawl.
We just sat there each of us trying not to look at the cop in the reflection of the rear view mirror, but we could all feel the eyes of law drilling into us. We chain smoked away, hoping to kill the dank odor of the blunt we just burned not but twenty minutes ago. Jeremiah & Johnny started offering conflicting bullshit stories to feed the cop when he inevitably flashed the sirens. I sat there huddling my chin into my shoulders, trying to self-implode myself into some form of invisibility. Tom just sat there, his fingers strumming frantically to the pre-Rollins Black Flag mixed tape he had been playing steadily since he got the death trap on wheels six months back.
The train dragged itself along with a steel grind that sparked against our nerves. Behind us the ominous silence of the cop car.
Finally Tom stopped strumming his fingers and snorted a – “Fuck this.”
Before any of us knew what he was doing, Tom bolted out of the car, and we watched in disbelief as he made his way to the cop car. We all leaned in close to watch the whole scene go down in the rear view mirror. Tom was at the driver side of the cop car, leaning in the window and talking. Occasionally he would point off in a direction and nod. Then, after a few minutes went by and the last car of the train rumbled off and the mechanical arm rose back up opening the road before us, Tom jogged over and hopped back into the car.
Behind us the cop car did a U-ey and drove back off the opposite direction.
“The hell was that?” I asked Tom stupefied.
“I asked him for directions.”
“Who? The cop?” I said immediately.
“No, dumb ass. The Mayor.” Tom snickered dismissively, kicking the death trap into gear and rumbling us off, “Of course the cop. Best way to get one off your ass is to get in their face and ask them a simple question. ”
“That’s crazy.” I muttered.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Of course you might wonder how much of that was true and how much of that was bullshit.
But that’s the Scene, right? Where the most outrageous rumor can haunt a soul until their dying day and the most simple truth can flourish unnoticed for decades. What matter the facts when we speak of those we miss, save that we speak fondly when we do?
Anyway, nothing left of us now but these watered down legends. I try to summon them back together but you might as well fill a shot glass with a memory of whiskey and try to get drunk off it. You can go through the motions and even convince yourself for a second that you are there. But in the end your sipping nothing but bittersweet nostalgia.
Still here’s to you guys – it’s not much but it’s all I got left to offer.