The Birth of ...The Weird

The Birth of The Weird.

When the Samurai Cowboy’s parents were out of town, given the fact that they lived in a beautiful house in the middle of nowhere, with nature, beauty, and the cops completely absent from this scenery, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to drop acid.
As I type this, Clarence Carter belts out, “How sweet it is.”
Of course like all stories and memories that become fogged and not necessarily forgotten but not completely remembered, I’m pretty sure it starts out with pot smoke.
Dashing back a few years, this is the same house that when I was a child, before I knew the Samurai Cowboy, he was the nerdy goofy kid who had trouble making friends, and then there was me, the kid who knew everyone’s name, but cared not to interfere with something so troublesome as friendship. I liked people, but I usually hid from everyone.
But our mothers decided we should hang out.
Me and the Samurai Cowboy got to be pretty good friends. Freaks, we found ourselves to be and a Tribe we found ourselves to create. Many nights together we would stargaze and speak of UFO’s and Bigfoot and how scary teachers and fathers could be. We would draw art and write hellish poetry that paralleled our devilish minds and devious thought.
BURN by Nine Inch Nails became something of an anthem between us and our young, aloof minds.
We became inseparable. I remember how as young adults how he could remember moment for moment that fateful day in elementary school when one of the school’s retards, Eddie, walked out of the bathroom at the precise moment, this impressionable young man was walking, steadfast and late to his homeroom.
This other boy, Eddie, walked out of the bathroom, armed and dangerous. Luckily for the Samurai Cowboy, having watched too many movies featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kurt Russell, he knew that the world still revolved outside of his peripheral, the young Samurai Cowboy dived out of the way of flying feces. The young boy, laying on his stomach on the hard tile of an elementary school floor, got up feeling a cross between pride and embarrassment, dusted the leftover puke powder off of his chest and scurried to his class while the special Ed. teachers, they them selves armed with rubber gloves wrestled and detained Eddie, the poo tosser and unbeknownst to him Sculptor of the mind of the Samurai Cowboy. Student and …Teacher.
Not far after that, in the long run of classes, memories, and joints, we found ourselves, somewhere else, down the road, high on gas station cappuccinos, bound and banded together with the rest of the Tribe we grew to know as brothers.
The Tune had changed, Trent Reznor no longer ruled our thoughts and sculpted our teenage angst,….well, except for the Silent painter, that no longer walks this earth, but his story can be suggested later.
We enjoyed the angst, we enjoyed the fact that we knew we belonged to each other, mentally and spiritually, and we wouldn’t make a move or act out on thought without the others in mind. We had formed a band that wanted to hit back and burn those that hit us and burned us. But the truth was, we weren’t beaten, we were just socially out of place, we found what we wanted and didn’t strive for more, we found peace in the restless hearts and minds in the others that surrounded us. We were finally happy to have found someone to shoulder our fears, self hatred and hold us up when we were down, which was often. And we were happy to do that for those that would do it for us. Brothers are what we became and to this day, brothers are what we still are.
But we don’t speak much these days . I myself have gone back into the old familiar way of polite hugs and weekly phone calls to family, but being in touch with my old extinct tribe, I sent a text message every now and again speaking of brother hood, but when a response is passed on, it’s rarely because of young men with old souls are still grateful they still have you pinballing around in their head, they now see a hermit their angst has outlived and feel a moral responsibility just to make sure that the old familiar hell doesn’t plague you as much as it used to.
And then soon the phone calls decrease and the texts go unanswered.
But then every now and again, you get one of the above reminding you that even though the relationship is silent, every heart beat in each and every one of us still beats every one else’s name. Life can never be so cruel and yet so kind. Maybe I should take this up with my other pal, who was at this moment when we did our acid drop, the Brother we Call God. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. Maybe he deserves a text.


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The time was great, it was the bloody ‘90’s, we were graduating High School, we had shit classes and each other, what else could we ask for, especially when our best friend was the Samurai Cowboy, the same fuck that was best friends with the best drug dealer in town. Purple Haze, That is. In a town like ours, it couldn’t get any better than that. Drinking beers, playing checkers and babysitting a baby crow when the Samurai Cowboy and our dealer, we’ll call him Everett, watched NASCAR and drank Red Eyes while the J passed around, we didn’t have anyone else, didn’t need anyone else, we just had Everett, the guy who took us in, let us smoke in his house, sleep on his couch, and shake his hand, as long as we kept it in the family. He trusted the Samurai Cowboy and the Cowboy trusted us, we made affiliates, we made friends, we were a part of a stomped, underworld dream, but it felt good to us, and it made sense, we were brothers, and we had a father (Everett) that would take care of us, and watch out for us. Everett never fully put his trust in the rest of us, but if we were with the Cowboy, we were taken care of. Come to think of it, the first place I went after watching my father cry for the first time, when my grandmother died, the Cowboy uprooted me from all the negative and sad feelings, and took me to Everett’s, we smoked the purple and they made sure I was happy. They made sure that I knew that death made sense, and that death was inevitable.
The Crow, a few Red Eyes, and a couple of puffs and the lazy summer sun made me realize that not only life is beautiful, so is death. I had a beautiful day after the death of my grandmother, especially since I knew how unhurried she was. I got a purple haze sense from my best friend and our much older dealer and mentor that life should be celebrated, not mourned. My grandma and grandpa were finally together. When I think of her, the first two things I think of are me and my brother pissing her off so much that she called and demanded my other grandma to come and pick us up because we were too much for her to handle and how, my brother and I, children of rock, influences of the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, and Bruce Springsteen came to sedation when she and grandpa played what we called ‘The Superman Song’ via tape player whenever they drove us around, her deaf and him blind, shooting around town, lord knows what the fuck classical music they had to put us in restraint, but it was beautiful and we requested it every time.
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Back to the operation, the situation, the limelight, the Acid.
The Cowboy’s parents and sisters were out of town. Some of them. For a while.
Lord knows where we found it, found it, bought it, but his house was the stable, and this is where we gave him his new name, where each of us discovered a new identity in ourselves, Once weak and riddled with rumors and disgrace, we stuck our tongue out and with the sugar cube melting between our teeth, we grinned at each other, and the rest is history…..a very small piece of history, that not a soul will know about, but a piece of history, nonetheless.
I remember placing a rotting and dusty carpet over my back that was laced with laundry rope and referring to it as my Papoose. The next thing I know was, ‘God was complaining about his horrible day and all the King cared about was getting his way…’
From then on, The Prophet, just preached and smoked and bantered incoherently about the clouds, about the sins, about the beauty of insignificance and about the beauty about being lost. For a few hours, about five or eight, we were a tribe of God-Less Tulpas that could make laughter start and stop, stop the rain with our wishes and face our sadness with no problem, we were the kings of Gonzo, we were the amazing beasts that were never meant to be, but we were, ……for just a few hours.
Good enough for us, those that were physically beaten, mentally tortured, spiritually taunted and generally despised, we were the weak becoming strong, the soulless emerging as Gods, the ones once born to endless night, now finally opening our eyes to sweet delight, we emerged like foul creatures with a smile on our faces and the reflection of open arms on each of our retinas. We found something more than each other, we helped each other discover that dark pit in the heart of each other, we made heaven out of hell. With torturous tears and sad smiles. We welcomed it, we knew it, we knew nothing else. Sadness was a beautiful thing, but only when you had someone else to share it with.
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At some point, I “The Prophet” and God cursing with mumbles below me because I could not drop enough cigarettes to him, he rattled and bitched like a new found bitch in an un fill able position; this is God we’re talking about. I scribbled in my notebook, with Jim Morrisone-esque notions, enjoying God’s pleas, his worries, his distaste of how things worked.
Fuck it, I thought, He cant touch me, he’s way down there. Bitch.
As long as I keep dropping smokes, he wont care, he’ll just whine, which is what I imagine the real God to do. After a few smokes I refused to drop him anymore just to see if the real God would do anything. Nothing happened. But my Friend God got violent.
While I was being dangled over the very same banister that I’d been tossing cigarettes to satisfy my own personal God, It was then that we finally named the notorious demon belcher we now refer to as The Samurai Cowboy.
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On the horizon we saw two fully grown horses stamping and shaking their heads in disgust, and pity for the fact that they had more power than we had over them. They only half trotted when The Samurai Cowboy chased them across the empty field, waving a machete while driving a lawn mower that was almost as old as we were.
The Samurai Cowboy stood up as he gave his best Walt Whitman YAWP as the giant creatures trotted slowly just to appease his madness. A young man riding a dusty old piece of shit to herd a pair of animals that could easily crush him without any sense, but this fucker, tailed behind them with his foot on the gas, his arm in the air, a machete slicing away the thought clouds that he may or may not have, all the while, mowing the pasture.
While God lowered me down, He noticed the shock in my eyes, just as I did in his.
We broke out into supreme laughter.
The Samurai Cowboy was born. Whether the Horses liked it or not, The
Prophet, God, and The King Sure as hell loved it.

To be continued...Maybe?