Bum Wines and the Peyote Coyote by Mike Marino (ebook pc reader .TXT) 📕

beauty at night. The sky full of stars over their heads and the distant coyote howl to sing them to sleep to the strains of an old harmonica playing Red River Valley. Tomorrow, they would get up and hit the road again. haiku hobos by choice or circumstance. If you're traveling in the desert and some soul has a thumb out, at least wave as you drive by for encouragement if you don't care to stop. You never know, it could be the ghost of Tom Joad.

The Cactus Kingdom
Doc led him, drunk and hungover much of the time through the looking glass, tumbling down Mad Hatter rabbit holes on sojourns through Death Valley in California, and the desert lands and sands of ol' New Mex and Arizona. Two madmen doomed on the dunes, without gravitational attachment to hold them to convention nor conformity. It's also when he began keeping his writing journals to become a journalista and peyotisa. So much to absorb in this mystic region.
Plentiful pastels had aligned in secret conspiracy with the allure of desert sky azures of the old ‘Merican southwest and was attracting flies to their deaths on flystrips, and more than it’s share o’ O’Keefes and Ansels. While this macabre dichotomy of life-art and bug-death raged quietly, it conquered the hearts and dreams and fostered schemes of cool conquistadores, including the king of cibola cool, Coronado and his chaotic, quioxtic quest for seven cities of gold. He searched for amazing amazons in possession of just one breast apiece who dominate and rule the herds of male livestock in the pastures and fields of the false isle of California.. baja to you-hoo! Later, in time, the region would become awash with the meandering wanderings of the lost dutchman and his fabled fabulous, fondled shaft searching for gold with one hand, while one finger was deep inside a dyke.
California, Old Mex and arid Arizona, locked and loaded with lore and legendary figures and tall tales of their own, can’t compete in the open air market of turkish madness and madmen and mayhem, ahem…amen…ah-women…with the bastard bandito chile called Nuevo Mexico … cut now to saloon scene with whore wars underway, soiled doves in can-can boxing matches and prostitutes racing in the streets for the sports as the players placed their bets on the naked runners…win, place or show more flesh
The bare stage of the smokey cantina is set. Drunks, bad whiskey and worse, desert bad asses drink, swear and spit as the purple curtain opens, the crowd goes wild with approving applause and they can’t get enough of the outlandish outlawry of Billy T. Kid, the James Dean of the wild west firing off mirthful salvos from a pearl handled six shooter with silver city bullets packed lethally with equal measure of angst and lead. The Lincoln War Regulator without a cause, unchecked and unbalanced, left handed, right handed, got to hand it to ya…guns blasting away with the ferocity and velocity of Mr. Gatlings gun..letting loose an orgasmic ejaculation of hot lead and death.
Geronimo! the avenging Apache with more Apocalypse Now attitude, machismo, and bravado than Brando’s marvelous Col. Kurtz, the king kong of the Mekong on Vietnamese methamphetamine…racing across the border skewering mex-ca-bobs in redskin retaliation for brown skinned trangressions and incursions that massacre’d mescalero women and children.
Mustachioe’d Poncho Villa, viva Villa, Viva Las Vegas, it’s a gas, gas, gas, the bandito’s bandito and bandit saint of the southwest second in importance to only the Virgin of Guadalupe, or her sister, little latin lupe lu…Poncho on the march, pillaging villages with Black Jack Pershing in hot anglo pursuit south of the border, s.o.b., north of the border, norte, sur, sur, norte, nick, nolte…
1947
Good Golly, Miss Goddard! Sci-fi hi-fi so high saucers from outer spaced, stonehenged, stoned age and crashing just outside of Roswell with a klaatu, barada, nicto thud, loaded with debris and Michael Rennie-gades who now become the alienated of the alien nation – born in lunarcy, and cloaked in secrecy with lunar cretin secretions giving birth to bug eyes, anal probers and wild eyed UFO’gists!
This all on the helter skelter heels of Rockin’ Robert Goddards rocketry revelry and associated atomic badda - bing badda boom boom bomb tests near A-Bomb Alamagordo, Flashback Gordo!
“Waitress, could I get a big ass plateful of radiation and isotopes with a side order of mushroom clouds please?” Muchas Garcias, Martinez…Holy Hiroshima, Batman! Nagasaki nuked, Fatboy Wonder…duck and cover, duck and cover..and damn, do I miss the cold war. The bomb wasn’t all bad after all hell it gave us silver screen scream direct from the new mex white sands wilderness, giving birth to Gojira and the 50 foot wo-myn, the atomic hula with large, massive coconut breasts the size of Jupitor, cleavage as deep as the Grand Canyon and as delicious as Venus in a wet sweat of passion.
Outer space implodes and exposes inner space with Aldous Huxley Little House on the Mental Prarie, windows wide and doors unlocked and open..inside in the dark and cobwebs strung along like electric wires the Peyote Coyote howls with Ginsberg chanting a yiddish yin and yang and yanking all the time to a new mexico mandela mandala…om, sweet om!
Hemp, hemp, hoo-ray-gun! Hallucinogens and dream catchers and dream creators, the southwest is a pipeful of mindful illusions..chinee opium dens wove silken patterns from pipes, long and hollow, as naked lute and flute players played to the opiated and doped up cowboy cowpoke pokin’ a cow, o-boy and flying high above the clatter of the stampede.
Marijuana made it’s lewis and clark cheech and chong trek, crossing the line at the rio grande from old to new..mex..to entrench itself, muy bueno, into the hempadelic fabric of Pancho’s pancho at the el rancho. The loco locals of the locale also had other ways to get whacked out, Gringo…Mucho mescaline mined from small spineless cacti called peyote kept many a medicated medicine man or woman hopped up and happy for many moons. If haight ashbury was the fort knox of LSD, then the southwestern pueblos packed enough of a peyote punch to knock out Muhammed Ali..down for the count…out cold.
Racing thoughout all it’s history, coursing through arterial lava tubes was a thick mass of asphalt, artery cloggers with speed limits in the limitless expanse of the sand of reservations…ghostly ruts of the Santa Fe to the kitcsh kulture of Route 66…the Original El Camino Real was real heavy with burro traffic, spaniards and indios, then the 20th cent paved itself over externally while we were combusting internally and the auto engine replaced the desert injun in blazing new trails amidst the redskins red rocked mountains majestic..soon, tourist from Tucumcari to Albu-Quirky snatching up every cheap knockoff navajo souvenir like rez junkies looking for a back alley wigwam welfare fix from some imaginary free clinic..war bonnets and rubber tomahawks, woven blankets, rugs and cool kachina dolls to hear the ka-ching of mucha wampum..oh yeah, got a buck? Pose with the chief along the roadside with a spittin’ image of Tonto from Toronto..all for one u.s. greenback.
Flash forward, cross the border to today, time and space…Billy the Mysterious Kid. Is it brushy bill in tex, or the kid in sumner fort? Aliens or Area 51 military secrets kept guarded and hidden and purposely misleading? Smoky bear..is it “ey” and “The” or just “T”…?? Our search through the mist of history and the desert days searching for the buttons of holy altered altars…Doc exclaimed, and how many people actually “exclaim”, THE PEYOTE WILL FIND YOU! So while we searched for the peyote, apparently the peyote was tracking us like a pitbull in heat in search of prarie dog meat…it was also the first illumination that the journey itself is part of the destination..a journey that began long ago for me through the portals of journalism, pop culture dumpster diving, drugs and sexual revolution…it’s where I learned the difference between gonzo and ganja from my purple hazed and double domed double dazed alter states and altered ego…dr. sandoz diego cerveza…and where the hipster haiku began with a lineup of assorted sordid train-hoppers, pill poppers, junkies, trannies, anarchists, artists, activists, dykes on bykes, atomic hulas, dharmabums, haiku hobos, peyotistas and socialistas…and not just a few Tom Joadistas….it all began in the American southwest desert in 1966 outside in a parking lot at a place with a broken sign that read…”Eats” in neon….
Neon Eats
Dust, dirt, diesel, and dead flies on the window sill…”Order Up!” That was 1965. The diner was packed and Doc and I just got off a ride from Barstow to Rogers, California and could smell the calories on the grill I so desparately needed. By 1984 she was down for the count and although I hadn’t been there in almost two decades, a friend of mine, Frank Cisco from the Siskyous did and wrote me this letter….
Sandoz:
Lot’s have changed Amigo with the place. I remember you tole me about this place and it is calorically magical and now that I a too am a journalist, though still learning, wanted to visit you this summer and decided to stop here and see the place and see how the locals, what’s left think of it and how their lives have changed subsequently. Hope you don’t mind me stealing a story from you.
Frank
Dust, dirt and diesel, dead flies on the window sill...."Order up!"
The diner's rusted neon sign had long ago bled dry; evaporated along with the flowing stream of highway traffic that used to flood the two lanes of the now cracked, aged California concrete. In it's day in another era, it was a two-lane Mississippi river of commerce as migratory tourists searched every prarie dog hole for those elusive invisible jackalopes that don't really exist and stacks of cutesy, kitschy "wish you were here" postcards to send home from the open road to the folks back home in cold, frozen, plaid and proud Minnesota.
Khaki clad GI's ready to lock n' load poured across the desert two-lane on their way to Ord and Longbeach ready to train and end the war, any war. They jammed the jukebox with quarters, musical ammo snug in the slot, as the lonesome whistle country blues sounds of Hank Williams rose like an angel on wings, and Bill Haley one o'clocked, two o'clocked, and three o'clocked around the clock.
That, however, was before the intrusion of the interstate. The Red Ball Highway that won the war in Europe, now declared war on the American Southwest, decimating the diners, cafes, gas stations and warm beer juke joints. Blew them to smithereens with a steady, unrelenting bombardment of four lane super highways. Artillery shells of progress and prosperity, exploding, leaving the legendary two lanes, bleeding and lifeless, debris now, relics with fading signs on forgotten, forlorn, rusted and abondoned on old roadsides.
Hollywood itself, all glitz and glamour, stopped by the old place back in the heyday '30s. "Hell, Clark Gable hissef' et here once I'm told by my Grandpappy. Yep, him and Carol Lombard too on a couple o' occasions. Big cars and mink coats. Hoowee, them was the days, boy, them was the days. Ain't lak that now, though, I tell ya. Nope. Seems ole Ike, hell of soldier, President to, before that Catholic feller Kennedy got us all messed in Vietnam. My daddy voted fer Ike, but the General had this here idea you see, about that autobane or whatchacallit in Germany. Bigger cars, faster roads, people in too much of a hurry today if'n ya'll ask me. Anyways, done came through here in '66, maybe '67, and kilt the town. Now don't that beat all. S'pposed to be progress, and kilt the whole damned town. Shame is