The Colt 45 Chronicle #32

This letter should be read in the voice of Sean Penn's Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) or, better yet, Crispin Glover's Layne from River's Edge (1986). It's written to my friend Shale who was a conservative undergraduate firebrand at that bastion of American liberalism, U.C. Berkeley. In high school, Shale had accidentally blown off several fingers on his right hand with an M-80 while he and Jeff, who is another friend I write to and about in these old letters, were exploding mail boxes in their Southern California suburban neighborhood. Shale could be difficult to get along with, but I managed. He was a good drinking buddy -- both coffee and beer. We both loved to read.

The epistle below is a doozy of an embarrassment -- a drunken buddy love letter. It reeks of maudlin malt liquor sentimentality. But it is what it is. Youth.

Spring 1989

Man, you want to know what 19 feels like? It feels like Homer, like Zeus' fucking thunderbolt, like we were Hume at 24 gulping cubes of red-hot charcoal. And you were my best buddy. We were up and going forward, eating everything that came our way. Slamming that booktown hard, hitting the secondhand stores and then slipping into the coffee houses for four or five cups and a little conversation. And then we'd be off to a market or liquor store with long-dead but nominally and spiritully correct "S.T. Schuster" for two sixes, usually some unconscious and haphazard and wonderfully lifeavowingly naive choice like Rainer Ale or Lucky Lager or Mickey's Bigmouth. And then we'd make it back to Durant Street in your gray Toyota accelerating into everything: lights, turns, straights, parking -- man, you had the energy. We'd pop out. I'd have the beer in some droopy fucking brown bag, pulling and cradling it; and then we'd make it to my autumnal porch deserted. Up the stairs we would go, up the crusted greasy smooth green carpeting. Open the door, and we'd be there -- home: old but young, young but old; the books, the tunes, the beers, the light off the walls with the paintings. Man, that was a real joint -- bottom line: one in a million. So much of our youth, our honest exuberant life (everything seems to be just a little bit held back now, not the 110% we were used to then, just a little bit impure now) was played out on that platform, between those walls. I've never had that feeling of wise, old youth before or since with anybody but you. I bled for you, man, and I know you bled for me. And this ain't fag talk, like we've been accused of by countless so many mouths; they just don't the fuck know what we're talking about. I would be down and out on that old threadbare Persian rug of ours, and you'd be right next to me, and Ashley would be hovering over us; and the music would be on; but best of all, we'd be covered, fed and bathed by this beautiful earwax yellow beam of light. We were dead, and we were immortal -- all in one evening, under one roof, on one floor.