Slow Players #25: "Bull of the Woods" (Fiction)

It’s been a minute since I wrote fiction. I stopped, mostly, because I was feeling tired of it—tired of making things up, tired, for a while, of reading it—but also because shunting my work onto a nonfiction track was freeing to me. It put me back into a position of not knowing exactly what I was doing (not that one ever knows exactly—or even approximately, at times—what one is doing with a piece of fiction, but the novel and its possibilities felt pretty engrained), but for me the distinction has always felt a little flimsy besides. When I first met Geoff Dyer, years ago, our conversation—for The Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series—began with him taking exception to a dividing line between his “fiction” and his “nonfiction,” a stance I’m inclined to agree with as well. My two novels are both fairly (although also misleadingly) “autobiographical,” while both Always Crashing in The Same Car and The Golden Hour are, to my way of thinking, novels. In the end I don’t think the distinction matters that much (it would if I were a journalist, but in the sense it might not have mattered much to, say, Proust, it doesn’t to me, or it hasn’t so far), but I bring it up because I’ve been surfing through some pages of uncollected fiction I’ve written over the last decade, stories and fragments that are for the most part unpublished, as a way of getting back in touch with the impulse. The project I have in mind next will be a novel, one far from the world of entertainment and the movies, and so it’s been a pleasure to look back and see what lurks in pages I haven’t looked at for years.

One thing that jumped out at me was a story I wrote for the late, lamented Black Clock, a fantastic journal that was edited (out of CalArts) by Steve Erickson, whose novels you should investigate immediately if by any chance you happen to be unfamiliar with them. (Start, maybe, with Days Between Stations or the one from which the magazine took its name, Tours of the Black Clock.) Before it ceased publication in 2016, Black Clock’s contributors included—among other people—Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Miranda July, Jonathan Lethem, Maggie Nelson, Samuel R. Delaney, Susan Straight, Lynne Tillman, William T. Vollmann, and . . . me. It was always a pleasure to write for them, obviously, and Black Clock’s loss—like that of a million other literary magazines before it, from Antaeus to Open City (sigh) to Tin House—was a real blow to literary culture in general. Since the Black Clock archives aren’t anywhere online, I figured I’d post up a short story I wrote for the magazine’s “Psychedelic Issue” (the later Black Clock issues were themed) back in 2015.

Before I do, I gotta say: the response to The Golden Hour has been wonderful, not least here on the ‘stack, where it’s been the subject of excellent pieces by the excellent Naomi Kanakia, the redoubtable Henry Begler, and—a real embarrassment of riches—the sharp-minded Sebastian Matthews, who wrote about it more than once (!). To shout out these writers feels a bit like what Spy magazine used to call “Logrolling in Our Time” (real Gen X heads know) but as I’ve shouted them out before, and as I really do enjoy and admire each of their writing enormously, I’m happy to do it again, and deeply delighted and honored by their attention, and by that of every other reader who’s taken the time to read my . . . memoivel? Nonfiction novel . . . ish-type-thing? You decide

OK, so . . . when I was invited to contribute to Black Clock’s Psychedelic Issue, I started by writing an inert—failed—story from the perspective of the (I think) late, great Clementine Hall. For those who don’t know, Hall was the occasional lyricist and muse of the 13th Floor Elevators (her husband, Tommy, was the band’s jug player, and can be seen in the clip below . . . blowing into an amplified jug, which provided the “psychedelic”—or irritating—tikkatikkatikka sound that runs through every Elevators song, including the one for which they are best remembered). That story sucked, but as my deadline crept up on me I spun around one day and wrote this instead, which features the Elevators prominently. (Why? The prompt for the issue was vague—a “psychedelic” theme could be interpreted any number of ways—but I’ve always been fascinated by the 13th Floor Elevators, who claimed never to have played a single note live or in the studio without dosing themselves with copious amounts of LSD beforehand, and whose existence in West Texas in the mid-1960s seems to have been pretty fraught, given that the hippie-to-cop ratio in Tx was presumably not as favorable as it would have been in San Francisco or LA. Hence I arrived at this story, which involves the psychedelic voyage of a young man (not me) on the campus of a liberal arts college (not exactly Hampshire College, my alma mater, but . . . not exactly not Hampshire either) circa 1985.

Poor Fox (of the story below)! And . . . poor Roky Erikson, seen shouting his lungs out in the clip above, a few years before a marijuana bust led to his being incarcerated for a few years at the Rusk State Hospital (“for the Criminally Insane,” it was referred to at the time), where he was subjected to involuntary ECT. Not so fun, I would imagine, but this story? If nothing else, this story—which is called “Bull of the Woods”— is that:

BULL OF THE WOODS:

I ate my first tab in the fall of ’85. It was cold and I could see my breath pluming upwards, drifting towards a sky that was milky and enigmatic to begin with. I stood in the middle of the quad, craning my neck at the strange Modernist cube of our dorm, all ruddy bricks and impenetrable windows. I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

“Hey, man.” My friend Microbe came over. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Not really, no.”

“You sure?”

I was from California. My reputation rested upon a certain fearlessness about the weather. I didn’t own any winter clothes and was currently sporting just threadbare corduroys and a T-shirt that read, with or without irony, Go Climb a Rock. “Define ‘sure.’”

He scrutinized me. Good old Microbe, the experienced psychonaut. He knew something was up. “Isn’t it a little early for law school? You’re either fucking cold or you’re not.”

I stared down at my toes splayed atop the hard grassless mud, up at the branches that were brittle and, likewise, bare. “I guess it’s a little nippy.”

“What are you doing?”

It wasn’t really all that unusual to see one of us standing out here on the quad alone, paralyzed by indecision. Indecision was our métier. At any hour of the day or night you could see one or two of us wandering around in circles like disoriented mimes. Hamster College (as we referred to it, thanks to the network of subterranean tunnels that ran from building to building, an alleged means of keeping dry and warm in winter although we used them mostly for graffiti and psychic torment) was for the confused. Sexually, philosophically, academically. Seven hundred kids had been shipped off by our parents to a kind of work farm in northern Vermont, only none of us actually did any work. Well, some did. Others, like me, had attended a smattering of classes—Foucault, Todorov, Cognitive Development in Dogs—and then bailed out, devoting ourselves to fucking up in its purest form. “What do you think I’m doing?” I clenched my fist and I shook it in Microbe’s face, then opened it. “Drogas.”

“Really?” He was a bland-featured Michigander with frizzy hair. His face looked like a binky that had been thrown in the wash too long. After you stared at him awhile you forgot you were looking at a person at all—more like a stuffed bear whose nose was in the process of disintegrating. “What kind?”

I smiled. “I’m not telling.”

He’d done it. Everyone here had done it, it seemed. I was the lone remaining neophyte, at least when it came to LSD. Thus far the quad hadn’t revealed any mysteries: just the same scrubby little set of bunker-like dormitories, the white clapboard house of student-health services, and the dumpy brick dining commons, all clustered around whatever these trees were. The sky was an iridescent white, the ground a hard crust interrupted by tufts of dying grass; and the trees that I hoped would start talking soon were just sickly, deciduous trunks, sad candelabra. “Come on, then!” He yanked my sleeve. “Let’s go listen to Bull of the Woods!”

I’d hoped to spend a little more time in nature. Then again, this was our thing. “Alright, alright.” My feet slipped a little, kicking against the cold dirt. “Don’t have an aneurysm.”

He dragged me off to the dorms. Things were, just at that moment, getting interesting. I figured it was all happening outdoors.

“BULL OF THE WOODS…the new album from the 13th Floor Elevators….”

We listened to the radio promo first, some weird little tag Microbe had taped off a garage rock compilation album. A Don Pardo-ish voice raved over a set of muffled musical snippets.

“From one mind to another…to you the Elevators say…‘BARNYARD BLUES’!”

We were way into this as we were into the Electric Prunes’ Vox wah wah pedal commercial—whatever odd bits of Sixties detritus had washed themselves up for our delectation, the weirder and more psychedelic the better. Whether we appreciated these things for what they were, or if our enjoyment was a little more…considered, wasn’t clear to us at the time, and still isn’t now. Was it superiority we sought or was it a genuine recognition that all these doofuses in Beatle boots, those goons who glared from the cover of Hipsville 29 B.C. and What A Way to Die! were cooler than we’d ever be? Who knew? Except that these laughing punks, these acid-fed slugabeds from San Jose and Boulder (rumor had it one member of the Chocolate Watchband was now a professor of astronomy there) impressed us. They weren’t hippies, like those asshole Deadheads who clustered around the salad bar and wouldn’t let us in, nor were they visionaries like Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, people who actually thought acid would lead you to knowledge. We’d heard all about that, those old heads with their Beethoven sonatas ringing through the woods at La Honda, their technicolor buses festooned with signs that read A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun! No, they were drifters, like Microbe and me, people destined to be forgotten by history but who’d made their peace with mediocrity early. And…what mediocrity, besides!

“Is that a…trombone?”

“No, man.” Microbe tapped his foot, twisted his head. We were lying on our backs on the floor of his dorm room that had a coarse gray coating like the baize on a pool table. “There are no trombones here.”

“You sure?”

BAAARNYAAAAARD BLUUUUZ….I knew nothing. I’d never lived or loved or been dosed by a reckless dentist before going home to write “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I only knew this record was wack. The current song sounded like “Season of the Witch” as performed by a cough-syrup-drunk hillbilly with a substandard IQ; the lyrics just dribbled out both sides of his mouth, forming continent-shaped stains on his bib. I was coming on, just, finally: The ceiling seemed to lower itself overhead, the drab lamp in the center of it glowing like a fiery tit.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and then started giggling. “Did I just say something about a trombone?”

Microbe was pissed. “Fuck you. Where did you get it?”

“Geezix.”

“What the? Geezix doesn’t—”

“No, Skeezix,” I said. “Skeezix. Sorry.”

“Oh.” Skeezix and Geezix were two guys who lived on our hall, not really germane here. All you really need to know is that everybody had a nickname (obviously), and that the two were neither related nor alike. Geezix came from Wyoming somewhere and Skeezix was from New York City, a skinny guy like a railroad spike in a trench coat, a real Times Square pervert in training. “Well, shit. How could you mistake those two characters?”

“I dunno.”

“Does he have any more?” Microbe, whose real name was Ira—he owed his nickname to hygiene, as we all did, really—sat up. He looked around. “Does he?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re tripping. Didn’t you at least have the decency to ask him if there was more?”

“No,” I said. “I was over in the Commons having breakfast and he just grabbed my jaw and force-fed me. It wasn’t like I had a choice.”

“Really? Blotter?”

I nodded. “What else would it have been?”

“And you didn’t think to spit it out and just…share it?”

“Come on, man.” You see why ‘Microbe.’ “That’s disgusting.”

“That little shit,” he fumed. “That’s just so uncool! Skeezix is a prick!”

I was pretty kindly disposed to Skeezix at the moment. I lay back down—no, wait. I was already lying down. I lay back further, feeling the floor tilt back like one of those zero gravity chairs, like I was wearing those boots Richard Gere wore in American Gigolo. Fuck.

“I’m gonna get some,” he said.

“You’ll be behind me.”

“I don’t care.” He got up and, though my eyes were closed, I could see perfectly well as he ambled across the room and stepped out into the hall. “Stay here.”

“Where am I gonna go?” My lips never twitched. The little tikkatikkatikka sound of the electric jug that was all over this record, as it was all over every song the Elevators recorded, tuned me right in. I could go anywhere without having to move. I watched him go down the hall, pound churlishly on Skeezix’s door with his fist, manage a few boorish negotiations (Skeezix himself was so high all the time that talking to him was like talking to a rhino; all you got was hide and horns and unintelligible grunting) before he came back in, working his jaw and feeling (I could see, even with my eyes closed) extremely self-satisfied.

“So.”

“So,” I mimicked. Dear God in heaven, that was a hard syllable to utter. My teeth now felt made of steel. “Wharrrrgh?” What happened, in other words. (I’m gonna go ahead and subtitle myself for a bit because…well, you know, because. Because the literal utterances of tripping children aren’t interesting to begin with, and there may have been quite the gulf between what I meant and whatever phonetic salad passed my lips.)

“That Skeezix is a reasonable man.”

“I’m sure.”

“This is the same shit he had earlier in the semester, that he got from that dude at Columbia. Not very speedy at all.”

“OK.”

“You’re going to enjoy this. This isn’t some boom-boom bathtub score-it-in-the-parking-lot-at-Worcester-Centrum-type shit. This is pure.”

“Stop talking.”

“I can see you’re enjoying it already. Foxy, I was worried about your first time. I always wanted to be a good chaperone for this experience.”

“[Redacted.]”

“You want me to flip the record over?”

I honestly don’t know what I said then. I opened my eyes and think I was surprised to realize it had stopped. Ah, Roky! Ah, Elevators! A bunch of fuckin’ goat ropers from Austin, Texas, had figured it all out. You didn’t even need to play music to hear it.

“Foxy. Hey, Foxy.”

Even transcendence gets boring after a while. When I finally opened my eyes I could see Microbe had joined me. His pupils looked like dinner plates. “What is it?”

“Shouldn’t we go outside?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Isn’t it…cold?”

“Since when did you care about cold, Inland Empire Man?”

I didn’t. “I don’t, but…there are extreme weather systems rolling in. Global blockages. I think there’s going to be another Ice Age, or at least another Cincinnati.”

“Oh.” He headed my gobbledygook off at the pass. “I have a pair of shoes you can borrow. Will that help?”

“GOD yes.”

“OK.” He shook his head. “Second Cincinnati averted. Now let’s get out of this room before it grows on us any further.”

Somehow, I managed to put his shoes, which looked like pontoons, hardcore clown shoes, on my feet. They were wingtips, which felt really weird without socks. “Jesus,” I said, “how do you drive these things?”

“Pretend they’re your fingers and you’re walking on your hands.”

God knows why, but this advice actually helped. Microbe handed me a coat and, because I wasn’t a total idiot and didn’t want to end up at Student Health Services with pneumonia (chlamydia, perhaps, but pneumonia? no fucking way), I took it. “Where are we going?”

“To the future,” he said. “The toppermost of the poppermost.”

“Don’t go all pre-Revolver on me, Johnny,” I said. “Stay current.”

I followed him outside. I wanted something, I realize now. Love, insight. We may have hated hippies, but I wanted the same things they did. I wanted to be changed. We left Microbe’s door open, but so what? Actions on hallucinogens have weird consequences. They either lead you into worlds of complication that are so baroque you forget, eventually, what caused them, or else they create little loopholes so elegant they lead you to God. By the time we’d wind our way back to the dorms, even if it was just five minutes from now, that door would seem nothing less than a gateway to Atlantis.

“Good grief!” It was dark as we stepped into the quad. “Have we been in there all day?”

“No, no,” Microbe said. “It’ll resolve.”

Sure enough, I’d been mistaken. I shook my head and…whoa there. Sunlight fell across my feet, my hands. “How’d I do that?”

“I dunno.”

I looked up into the sky and saw clouds scudding, drifting thickly across the horizon. Otherwise it was clear. “Damn,” I said. “I thought maybe that extreme weather situation I talked about was real.”

“It is real,” he said, and I had no idea if he was humoring me.

“What time is it?”

He shrugged. Neither he nor anybody else on this campus wore a watch. Professors didn’t, students certainly didn’t, and everyone pretty much went by the clock that was affixed to the library tower that was permanently stuck at 11:55. Or maybe it just happened to be 11:55 whenever anyone bothered to look at it. We lived by our circadian rhythms; classes happened whenever we felt like it, whenever we tumbled out of bed and decided it was time to go. Even the dining commons—staffed by students—opened and closed at odd hours. It wasn’t that long ago we had found ourselves having breakfast at four in the morning, prodding at cold French toast with our spoons, sipping evaporated milk. It was a mess. “Lunchtime!”

He said it with such enthusiasm I felt obliged to play my California bumpkin to the hilt. “Cowafuckingbunga, buddy! Let’s nosh!”

My high had smoothed out for a moment: Everything was crystalline and sharp, radiant and elegant; the tree bark looked supremely articulated. Even Microbe’s pallid Middle American face—frizzy hair, a turnip nose, button-black eyes—looked more human than Muppet. At last I’d found a world I could love!

“Don’t they have Jews in the Midwest?” My friend looked confused, so I added. “By ‘nosh’ I mean—”

“I know what ‘nosh’ means, you idiot! Look!”

I did look. I was looking. I could do nothing but look. But whatever it was he saw, I couldn’t find it. My world was crisp, and his, from the look of horror that was spreading across his face, must have been apocalyptic, melty and green. But it remained beyond the power of language to describe.

“Move it!” Inside the dining commons it was the hostile hour—lots of elbows and complicated maneuverings with trays, weird positions in which people were attempting to screen others out of line or else hide their food from grabbing hands. Which was weird because the commons never actually ran out of anything and all of the food besides cereal and ice cream—in fact, even that—was repellent.

“All right.” I took a plate of something writhing and red—probably lasagna, but it looked searingly, terrifyingly alive—and moseyed on over to the cashier who happened to be a girl I was in love with from afar. A sophomore, bare-armed in overalls, curls corkscrewing out from under a woolen hat. “Hi.”

I came from Riverside, California, and of the world—and by “the world” I mean absolutely everywhere that wasn’t the California desert, and this…mutant institution that was founded in the early 1970s, basically an Ivy college for people who hated rules—I knew nothing. I’d been to Los Angeles once. My father was a tenured professor of economics, and my mom, well, what could I say about her? Tennis player, drinker of vodka tonics, reader of many, many books. She had been his student when he was a TA, and now both were firmly committed to the rugged, weird part of the world in which they had each, somewhat accidentally, come to reside. Ours was the meth country, my mother used to sigh, affecting a sardonic wistfulness as we sat out on the back patio of our ranch-style home staring at the radio towers and phone lines, the infinite, hot, blasted landscape of the Inland Empire with its drab armadillo colors, Las Vegas without the neon or casinos.

“Hey, Foxy. Where’s your card?”

“I left it in the dorm. Can you comp me this delicious seafood salad?”

“Sure. Even though that’s not what it is.” She waved me past. In high school I’d had a girlfriend, or at least someone I’d slept with; that didn’t mean I’d been in love. Everyone here called me Foxy in part because of the reddish hair, in part because I was a desert creature, but also…well, I don’t exactly know why. Someone tagged me with it early on and it stuck. I was always sniffing under my pits to make sure there wasn’t some other, less comfortable reason. Do foxes stink? I took my tray and piloted it across the room, and found a table where I could sit by myself. I had no idea where Microbe had gone. He probably was still out there on the quad, watching the helicopters descend.

I had always wanted to be feral—to be, in some sense, an animal. Not just a mammal but a beast. I’d grown up in a civilized household, roughly middle class—upper middle class—and everything was so polite. No pornography, no violence, no shouting. No one had the initiative to be a monster. My father was a careless educator and my mom a lackadaisical low-wattage drunk; you couldn’t exactly rebel against that. You could try —there’d been a hardcore scene nearby when I was in high school, scads of bands with names like the Urnz and Smegmaniacs—but really, all that seemed stupid. The psychonauts of yore had something to push against. My parents, by which I mean America, weren’t positioned that way anymore. Which meant that this lysergic acid diethylamide that was sizzling through my system—the very shit that had set the Beatles on their collective Liverpudlian ass and made Bob Dylan write songs about the business of being born and driven Skip Spence to chase his bandmates around the studio with an ax and caused Syd Barrett to shave his eyebrows and melt Mandrax and hair gel over his face, the very thing, in whatever attenuated form, that had painted the culture day-glo— was nothing but a toy. An amusement. What a fucking waste.

“Hey.”

I looked up. The girl from the cash register was standing over me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the face of your beloved on a hallucinogen before, but it is surprisingly like watching the face of your beloved perfectly sober. I felt on the verge of tears before she even sat down.

“Oh, hey,” I smiled, or at least did something with my mouth that felt appropriately gummy and hopeful. Her name, her real name, was Lula. Nobody called her anything else. She was Portuguese—her family was, though she’d grown up in Providence, Rhode Island. That was all I knew. “What have you got there?” I said, looking at her tray. “An orange? You know, they used to dose those with LSD.”

“Yep. But not this one.” She scrutinized me; her lips flexed, her curls trembled. “You’re having an experience, aren’t you?”

“Little bit.” I glanced down at my plate and saw that I had, in fact, brought my fist to rest in the lurid red center of my lasagna and that I actually had managed not to eat any of it. I’d simply mauled and mashed it across my tray. “Nothing too hairy.”

“That’s all right.” She smiled. Her face had the soft glow of an environmentally-sound light bulb, a kind of gentle radiance; her hair spilled brown and unruly around her shoulders, and she looked, just a bit, like the figure of an Italian Renaissance painting, a Titian maybe. “I’ll help you through.”

“You will?” I must have sounded overjoyed because her face cracked wide open in a goofy smile I wouldn’t have suspected she had. (Titian, my ass—this was more like Bernadette Peters in The Jerk.) She was a hippie, of course, which was part of the problem. She probably had seen the Grateful Dead, perhaps even listened to them rather than having the common sense to loathe them preemptively. I’d seen her playing hackysack in front of the second year dorm, which was why we were in this Montague/Capulet situation. I was surprised she even knew my name.

“Sure.” On our hall there was a sign: DEADHEADS with an arrow pointing one way, TALKING HEADS with an arrow pointing the other. By this peculiar compass we lived our lives. Politics, culture, it was all one and the same. “I’ve done it a million times.”

Until this moment I’d managed to hold the rest of the local stimuli at bay. I’d focused only on her face, and before that the lasagna, which looked pretty much the same only bloodier—but now my attention flowered out and I took it all in: freaks, students, innocent shaggy kids all gliding around with trays in their thrift store coats and woolen caps, the backdrop gray and transactional like an airport converted into a picnic area. They all looked so purposeful, which was amazing, considering—like Olympians whose event was general competence: Lunch Buying; Walking Without Falling. “I need to get out of here,” I said. It was like being at confession. She was the cathedral and all of us were bits of stained glass. “I need to get closer to nature.”

“Oh.” She bobbed her head and I followed it up and down, up and down. “I can help you with that too.”

“Stop! Help! Wait!!” Getting out of my clothes turned out to be a serious operation. She was sitting upright on her bed, in her room that turned out to be a perfect facsimile of Microbe’s and my own: a bunk, desk, dresser, with some books and clothes and pajamas strewn all over, along with a poster I don’t have to tell you depicted Bob Marley.

She came over and—with that patient, elegant grace with which so many women attend to the difficulties of men, if they happen to be so inclined—untied me. All she seemed to do was tap me on the shoulder; it was like being knighted.

“How’d you do that?”

She shrugged. Every move now carried contrails, aftershocks; a simple shrug was like a dog shaking off water. There I was, though, naked in the middle of her room. “Come on.” She pulled me onto her bed; we’d come up here with the express purpose of having sex (“Closer to nature, huh?” was what she said when we stepped outside the dining commons), but now I just couldn’t remember how to do it. Or rather, why. I’d bogged down in the conceptual middle. Insert Tab A into Slot B. Were we making an origami plane? Why didn’t the acid visionaries talk about this? Surely it wasn’t all revelation. Even Timothy Leary needed to eat a TV dinner once in a while, didn’t he?

I looked at her. Lula. The room had taken on some of her soothing glow; even the mantis horror that was Bob Marley no longer appalled me. I just accepted that I was afraid, that all this chaos was ongoing and all the melty parts of the world were going to go on doing what they did, deliquescing and coalescing by turns until they…what? “Just lie down,” she said, “you don’t actually have to do anything.”

So we didn’t. I didn’t. Fully dressed, she put her head on my shoulder.

“I like you,” she said.

“Why?”

But there was no “why?” I understood. There wasn’t anything at all.

Eventually we had sex. Of course we did: We were eighteen living away from home; given time and drugs and inclination, anyone our age would do anything. Given none of those things, we still would. Lula and I would wind up dating for years until eventually she’d break my heart. That afternoon she was just a child who opened a door. We lay there until twilight with her stroking my head and my own acid seizures lasting well into the day.

At last I sat up. “Look!” I pointed outside.

“Yeah?” How did the two of us even fit in that bed? It was tiny, so narrow we had to lie on our sides, knotted up like pipe cleaners.

“Snow!” It was the first truly lucid thing I’d said for hours. It was the first ordinary perception, though it was metallic, magical: The flakes looked like silver. Then again, maybe they were. “I’ve never seen it,” I said, and she laughed.

“You’re cute, Fox.”

“Maybe.” This might not have been the word I’d have chosen to describe me in that moment, impotent and acid-addled, a shy desert rat who’d found his way into her bed and then, then—

Other people were so organized. Other students even, kids who’d come to this place because we’d flipped a coin between it and Bennington, because we were too antisocial or too unintelligent—who knew?—to go to Harvard. This, this chaos, this uncertainty was how I’d staked my claim in the world. Maybe acid was for people like us, confusion’s princes, as that band we were listening to—the one Lula would torture me with for years—would put it, back at the beginning when they were still called the Warlocks. Maybe all that visionary shit was created in just this way, and Bob Dylan wrote “Desolation Row” as easily as he sneezed. I didn’t know and just then didn’t care.

“Let’s go outside,” I said.

Lula, sweet Lula, was as gentle as they came. Her father was a mob attorney, and when I met him the following summer, he cupped my round and stupid little face in his palm. So you’re the one, he said. The invalid? We were in a cake shop somewhere on Federal Hill, and I felt like I’d earned that designation, sitting with this rubicund man in a pink shirt, his gold watch scraping up against my chin like I was stuck in some scene from The Godfather or, worse, The Freshman. I’d already ruined my future by then, so it didn’t seem to matter if I fell to my knees blubbering about how much I loved his daughter, or if I kept cool, decorous, knocking back an espresso and behaving as if my deformity were simply an affectation I’d assumed to amuse him.

“Come on!” I said.

“Honey—”

I was still pristine, at that moment: None of these terrible things had happened yet. I was still up in Lula’s room watching the first snow of the season, which really was the first snow I’d seen. It looked like fast-moving, magical hair.

“Babe? Foxy?”

She kept babbling at me, but I knew what to do. Was I conscious of it? Sort of. I mean “conscious” the way a drowning man is conscious of a surface or a saguaro cactus might be that there are other things without spines. I rocketed out of the room, loosely aware that I was naked—aware, I mean, that there were other ways of doing or being things, but also aware that these didn’t seem to pertain to me right then—as I sprinted down the hall and into the quad. Freaks were everywhere at my school. I don’t think what I’ve told you has even begun to give you an idea. There was a cat who dressed only in goat skins (at least that’s what he said they were) and a trio of girls who’d formed a pact around the business of drinking their menstrual blood. What was a little nudity?

As I bolted out onto the quad, my feet were raw against the wet, slippery brick. People did this stuff in California all the time, stripped down to their bare essentials and hightailed it outside because they knew if they ran far enough—and it was never very far—there’d be a swimming pool to jump in and they could play the whole thing off. No such luck here. I was naked and on my own.

It was colder than I’d anticipated. Even a T-shirt and some thrift-store corduroys provided more protection than I’d known. The chill seemed to seep through my feet and shoot directly, bitingly to my crown like a body-length ice cream headache. Plus, it turned out snow is only frozen water. It looked so magical from up in Lula’s room, like powdered salt or lunar dust; out here it was a soft slippery crust that disappeared every time I touched it, each footfall making it evaporate into mere mud and grass.

I kept running. There was a gargantuan tree on the opposite end of the quad that felt—to me in my agitated state—like home base, like that thing that would explain it all. I didn’t even believe I was tripping anymore, although of course I was, and I would be until I woke in the student health center the next day. Frostbite, pneumonia. It turned out those aren’t just myths! I charged through the gray afternoon, that lowering twilight that reminded me, for want of another point of reference, of television static. Snow! Flakes! They came at me as fiercely, as seemingly impenetrable as a blizzard; but that’s just because everything was enhanced.

People were filing towards the commons, since I guess it was dinnertime already, and surprisingly few of them even glanced my way at first. Hey, someone must have said eventually, check out naked Foxy over there, since I could feel the slow pressure of their attention. But their regard was casual. Haven’t you ever seen a naked Californian before? And all of my own focus was on that tree. I found out later it was a Parkhurst elm, that it had stood in that very place for over a hundred years, but just then it was Gethsemane, a gargantuan set of antlers sprouting out of the earth. To my left, the people who lived on the TALKING HEADS side of my hall, those spectral, overcoated figures, were pausing on their way to the commons, tugging on their Export A cigarettes and checking me out, the year’s first real casualty; behind me, Lula came flailing out of her dorm, her voice rising reedily to the sky. I heard her calling my name but also laughing. It was too late to save me from humiliation; in fact it was too late to save me from anything. I swept my tongue behind my teeth riddled with her pubic hair. The tree rose before me, terrifying in its granite physicality. Flakes rained through its branches, pelting my bare skin. These felt amazing. And in the onrushing darkness, the collision of nightfall, LSD and freezing light, I heard Microbe approaching.

“Foxy, man, what are you doing? I was looking for you earlier. You won’t believe what happened to me!”

That’s the last thing I remember, before I reached the tree and started shimmying up the trunk. It’s hard enough to climb a tree with your clothes on, but I made it, or so they told me. My palms and chest would be completely raw once they got me back down, my thighs and biceps riddled with gashes and cuts. Eventually I got up there and squatted, hugging my knees in the crook of a branch and staring up towards where there should have been stars but weren’t. All I saw were streaks and holes.

“Come on down,” they said, the people who had come over to watch like a little mob of game-show hosts. “Come on down now.”

Meteors! Falling stars! Constellations of frozen fire!

“Come on down!”

But I stayed where I was, shivering as I watched these worlds—one after another bursting into the air—being born, never dying.