"Amazing waste, how sweet the monkey
I once was a drunk, but now I’m a junky
I once was a junky, but now I’m a maggot
the world is a toe, an’ we’re all gonna tag it”
Pablo Smog

I have always liked Tucson.  While some of the dumbest, most miserable experiences of my life have taken place there, Tucson has always held a special place in my arid, burning heart.  From drinking at The Hut with Trainwreck, the punk-rock refugee who passed out on the railroad tracks and lost a limb and was seriously messed up, to driving into Reid Park at dawn to find a cool, shady place to drink instant coffee and write, to hanging out with Rudy from Cadillac Mountain, who lived in his car but had won some kind of Arizona banjo award, several years in a row,

Tucson has always been one of my favorite American cities.  It's full of Communists, and so is like the Portland, Oregon of the desert, but the climate is harsh and unwelcoming enough to give it a postapocalyptic vintage car show vibe, which I find appealing.  The hippies there are of the sun-dried desert variety, which is better than the gloomy, waterlogged, junkie-style vagabonds that proliferate like Marxist bedbugs in the Pacific Northwest.  Tucson is the kind of town from which you can hitch a ride into an old noir film from the 1940s.  You can stand on the side of the road in Tucson and find yourself hitching a ride to L.A. in a pirate ship piloted by a buxom blonde who's in trouble with the cops, without even trying.  You'll wake up in a diner, and the waitress will light your cigarette with a small flask of rocket fuel, and you'll order hot dogs and coffee in a retro American setting, and before you can make it to the restroom jukebox to relieve your coin bladder of quarters, you'll be jamming to some desert bluegrass in a room full of heavily-altered space aliens, waiting for a train, or a flying saucer to the stars.  Tucson is an oddly translucent town.  It's like a mirage made of bus fumes and concrete.  A lost oasis full of missing people nobody can find.  A trippy, flattened wasteland on the sun.  Tucson is a flickering neon sign that never dies, even if it isn't plugged in.  It's a sunburn with a zip code.  You have to use a rattlesnake to cross the street.  But don't worry. 

It's only freaky if you're crazy.

Tucson is also where I spent my last drunken New Year's Eve, at a trendy bar I used to frequent on N. 4th Avenue.  I'd moved out of the luxurious flophouse in S. Tucson, where I'd spent a miserable Christmas drunk on unrepentant anger and boxed wine, and was back in the van.  Towns that resemble dusty, flattened hairballs are custom-made for van life, and I cruised the streets like a singing pirate in a noir film from the future.  I was working to establish myself in the local scene, and would hit up all the open mics.  Occasionally I'd head up to Catalina State Park and "go camping" for a couple days, so I could take a shower.  I'd hike through the hills like a ghost, inventing constellations after the sun went down and the sky flipped under me, so that I was walking on the stars, and the ground became the sky.  The line, "wrapped in blankets, we will start bonfires under our skin and observe the fireworks show sparkling high above us like a distant ocean floor" from "Time is a Floating Menace" was written in the blissful throes of this imaginary phenomenon at Catalina Park.  As were most of the lyrics of "Free At Last," even though "Free At Last" was written in another desert, nowhere near Tucson.  Not far from Tucson, I suppose, if you're looking down upon the revolving cemetery of the world from a lawn chair on the moon.  But nowhere near it, if you measure the distance in ghost miles.

Same vibe though.

So on New Year's Eve 2013 I walked into the trendy bar on N. 4th Avenue which I for whatever reason favored, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a Baby Blue Blackout Juice.  Baby Blue Blackout Juice was the name I'd given to the unnamed mystery potion invented by the bartender, a sexy blonde who smiled at you because it's more fun to tip a smiling blonde than a surly one, and its contents were a total mystery.  All I knew was that it was light blue, tasted better than unrepentant anger or boxed wine, and that it invariably made you black out, every time you drank it.  It was weird.  Every time you walked into the bar and ordered a Baby Blue Blackout Juice, you'd wake up hours later on a pirate ship, headed to Los Angeles.  Or possibly Toledo, or Shanghai.  Wherever you were, under no circumstances was it ever possible to remember how you got there.  Since being a drunk is like being an archaeologist for your own life, sifting through the ruins, analyzing layers of broken evidence to piece together a workable narrative of the previous night's events, Baby Blue Blackout Juice provided the thoughtful, studious drunk with the ultimate archaeological challenge.

How did I get here?  Do I live in this toilet?  I have visually confirmed the presence of my own hand, which appears to be humanoid in form.  Ergo, I am probably a human person.  Caucasian and male, in general form and appearance.  Apparently.  With the capacity to process the local atmosphere, so far.  Though whether this atmosphere is smoke, earth, or vaporized rattlesnake venom, has yet to be ascertained.  Do I have communication faculties?  Shall I attempt to use them on the grinning, masked homunculus, crawling at my feet?  Is this a sidewalk, or the side of a boat?  Shall I christen it with my skull, my bottle full of liquid opium?  Or should I sleep it off?  The sunshine, and the nightmare.  Why do they overlap?  Is it yesterday, already?

I had walked into the bar hours before anyone else had even thought to arrive, and started drinking immediately.  It might have even still been daylight.  Festive New Year's balloons were suspended in a fishing net above the main room.  They were obviously intended for release at the midnight hour, the ostensible peak of everyone's ecstatic, dissipated New Year's Eve experience.  Hooray, it's here.  The end of the world.  I propose we shout, we yell, we dance and stomp and kiss.  Another time unit has passed.  Old Man Winter becomes an infant.  The Teenager of Time is likened unto an embryo, again.  The Infant of the Ages is translated into a cloud of stardust, a plume of smoke exhaled from a runaway blonde in an old, forgotten movie. 

Don't look now, but the guy with homeless-people hair is swimming in a glass of baby-blue ghost potion.  He's ignoring the balloons.  He must be celebrating New Year's Eve on Shanghai time, 14 hours early.  I saw him here on karaoke night, singing a duet with someone's boobs.  It was mildly amusing.  I want to see what your forgetfulness tastes like, without putting your hands in my eyes.  I want to see what your forgetfulness tastes like, without... wait,

What?

That's what he said.  Don't ask me.

I have no idea.

"I want to see what your forgetfulness tastes like
Without putting your hands in my eyes"
En El Último Trago

I woke up on New Year's Day 2014 in my van, with no recollection of anything that had transpired the night before.  I was parked on N. 5th Avenue, which is where I was parked when the night began.  Only a block or two away.  Thank God, I didn't go anywhere.  But I had no memory of midnight, or any balloons, or countdowns, or anything.  One minute I was sitting at the bar nursing a glass of witchcraft amnesia, the next, I was laying in the back of my van listening to the road crew in my head, a million angry little men hammering out a highway to hell from the sheet metal that lined my skull like a sad and terrible dream.  My head was a pillowcase of fire.  To pull out the stuffing was to risk igniting the inside of the van and, indeed, the entire world.  A passing train screamed at me like an angry wife.  I pulled myself together, and made my way to the driver's seat.  Welcome to 2014.  If this is how it's going to start, this just might be the year I finally sober up.

To my amazement, I'd locked the doors behind me before I passed out in the back of the van.  I wasn't missing so much as a shoelace, or a dime.  Incredibly, the structural integrity of my skyscraper frame was intact.  The upper floors had been gutted, and many important files had been destroyed in the flames, but the building had not collapsed.  I was even fully dressed.  There was some smoke damage, and the wallpaper and carpet would need to be replaced, but nothing permanent.

Decades prior, I'd driven a motorcycle home in a blackout.  Granted, it was through a quiet, rural area, with almost no traffic of any kind, and the trip was only 5 miles, but I remembered none of it.  I only remembered the view of the asphalt, roaring like a river of death past the front wheel.  You're not supposed to look down when you're on a bike.  But I was looking down.  I woke up and saw my motorcycle in the driveway, and it wasn't easy to believe.

Waking up in my van on New Year's Day in Tucson was like that.  It only occurs to me now, exactly 10 years later, but thinking of dragging my guardian angels into a den of deadly mistakes like that again is a thought that fills me with extreme terror and embarrassment.  You couldn't pay me to break 9 years of sobriety.  All the money in the world isn't worth my soul.

The next day, January 2nd, I saw a broken bottle on the sidewalk.  It wasn't mine, but it struck me as an omen.  It was like a message in a bottle.  Dropped, perhaps, by the guardian angels who kept my bike from sinking into an ocean of hellfire in the 90s, and who kept the demons from taking advantage of me the night before.  And God knows how many other times.  Instances of mercy as countless as the stars, like balls of heavenly fire floating in the forgetful, sky-blue sea.

I wrote a poem about it.  It's in my book Watch For Melting Stars.  It's called "Message in a Bottle," and William Blake it obviously ain't.  But it reminds me that there is freedom in going home alone.  Which I'm not saying for my own sake.  New Year's doesn't mean anything to me.  It hasn't for a long, long time.  If indeed it ever did.  But if you're feeling down, take heart.  There Is Freedom In Going Home Alone. 

The alternative to going home alone might be the biggest mistake of your life.  So don't feel bad if you miss it.  That "loser" feeling might be how it feels to dodge a bullet.  It might be a blessing in disguise. 

And if you find yourself in a bad way, I'm telling you:  Guardian angels are definitely real.

But don't push it.

Thanks for listening.

Message in a Bottle

Parked by the railroad tracks,
freight trains
roaring through the afterlife,
broken glass on the sidewalk,
someone's message in a bottle, dropped
from a liferaft in the
sky,
or maybe
heaven

January 2, 2014
Tucson, Arizona