In January 1968 I was twenty years old and a professional hippie. I travelled around the country living cheap and easy, supporting myself when necessary by buying and selling marijuana and psychedelics. The authorities thought I was a diabolical drug pusher, wrecking the lives of innocent young people for my own profit. But I never pushed anything or anybody. I was just one of a huge number of people who took a lot of recreational drugs. Since they were also illegal, we had to have our own economy and distribution system. So many of us bought more than we used, if we ever had the money and the opportunity at the same time, and resold it. But the money I made just went for groceries and more drugs. I wasn't in it for the money; on the contrary, I was doing it to get rid of money forever. I was a missionary.

It was an exciting time. I was part of a subculture that was changing the world. We were a worldwide nation without borders or laws or government, and our capital was San Francisco. I had spent six weeks there the previous summer, the famous Summer of Love, when food, drugs, and sex were handed out free on the street, and the ocean of love and oneness with each other had pervaded the very air of the Haight. I still carried that feeling within me, and I was intent on spreading it throughout the world.

It was a wonderful, hopeful time for us hippies. We truly thought that we had created a new world order; a world in which war, violence, racism, governments, and working for money all would fade away. And it was a revolution like none other in history - without violence, without speeches and activism and politicking; a revolution created solely by our own living example. And it was psychedelic drugs that had made it all possible.

People tried psychedelics for every kind of reason: some wanted to learn more about themselves; others just wanted a thrill; many just wondered why the governments were all trying to make psychedelics illegal. Timothy Leary was urging everyone to turn on and drop out, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was touring the country passing out acid-laced Kool-Aid from a washtub free to all takers. But whether their motives were sacred or profane, just about everybody who went on a trip came back fundamentally changed. Material possessions and financial success were less important. What mattered was personal relationships, love for the Earth and its inhabitants, and delving ever deeper into the nature of reality with the aid of these marvelous new tools.

It was a heady concept. All through history, reasonable minds have wondered why people can't just stop fighting and live in peace. We had the answer - they hadn't taken acid yet. And we didn't need to form a party and join the political struggle to effect our program. Politics too was irrelevant. All we had to do was to continue living the way we wanted, and everyone would eventually join us. Simply by living in peace and love, without money or jobs, without ownership, guided by the golden rule and our trust and belief in ourselves, we would prove to the world that it could be done.

And the world really was changing - the Prague Spring, the student uprisings in Paris and Berkeley, the anti-war demonstrations drawing millions to the streets of New York and Washington. It was clear the movement was growing. Soon the world would be at peace for the first time since our species arose. The Damocletian sword of nuclear annihilation would be beaten into a peace sign. For young people who had grown up assuming that we would never live to grow up, who were being shoved unwillingly into the meat grinder of Vietnam, it was our hope and our life.

For about a year, from early 1967 until mid-1968, it was possible to believe this dream. Then in one year it was destroyed forever - the assassinations of King and RFK, the burning cities, the crushing of the young people in Prague, in Paris, in Berkeley, in Chicago; the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison; the arrests of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey; the ongoing slaughter in Vietnam; and finally the massacre at Kent State, making it all too concise and too clear, as Dylan said, that the world wouldn't tolerate love.

But in January 1968 the dream was fresh and alive. I found myself in Boulder Colorado, and glad of it. It had been a long strange trip across the country from Ohio, and Boulder felt like a safe haven after the redneck horrors of the great plains. Boulder is a college town, which always helps liberalize the atmosphere, but it was also a town with a significant hippie population, one of the few way stations on the great underground railroad between the East Village and the Haight-Ashbury. It was a pleasure to see other hippies on the streets again, and to be able to resume trade again.

I was travelling with a girl, Elissa, a college freshman I had met the summer before while peddling LSD on the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. I had walked onto the campus cold and started looking for possible buyers. In those days it was generally safe enough to approach strangers on the street if they looked like hippies, but it was a pretty straight campus and I was nervous. Then I spotted a girl coming out of the student union, her braless breasts swaying under a very short Indian print dress, hippie love beads around her neck, a tie-dye headband around long straight brown hair. She was a welcome sight for more reasons than one, and I approached her. She introduced me to her friends and within twenty-four hours I was on my way home with an empty stash, three hundred dollars and a record collection that had been traded to me in desperation for a bag of Vietnamese black, plus fresh memories of a magical night introducing an impressionable young Elissa to the joys of sex in the land of Lysergia.

I was still nominally in school at Antioch College at that time, but by the end of fall quarter I had given up even the pretense of study. I enrolled in what was known as an interim quarter, ostensibly a break to "find myself," but actually a way to avoid being found by my friends and neighbors at the local draft board. At that time every male not exempt was being shipped out to Nam as fast as they could load the planes, and undesirables like blacks and hippie drug-dealers were first in line. With the tacit cooperation of my bleeding heart liberal arts college, I could retain my 1-S student exemption indefinitely.

The sniffing of the draft board, the lure of streets paved with Acapulco gold in San Francisco, and all my natural inclinations combined to cause me to follow Horace Greeley's advice. I went west right after the holidays.

I was travelling light, with only a solid body bass guitar and a beat-up old army duffel bag containing my clothes, three Baroque recorders, and my samples case. I would be travelling hard, but I saw no reason to forego female companionship. I called Elissa and asked if she wanted to go west with me. She packed a bag, snuck out of her father's house in the dead of a cold winter's night, and met me at the bus station. By morning we were long gone into the wastes of Iowa, after having proved that, yes, you can do anything you want in those big back seats of a Greyhound bus at night.

We reached Boulder the following night. At that time there was a thriving hippie street scene going on along Pearl Street in Boulder even in the depths of winter, and soon we were doing good business in grass, hash, and psychedelics. The locals had a lot of psilocybin from Mexico, which had been rare and treasured in Ohio, but they had rarely seen good USP quality Owsley acid, and Elissa and I were welcomed into the bosom of the community.

We found a place to crash in a hippie house on the aptly named Pleasant Street. The other denizens were an interestingly motley bunch from the far reaches of the hippie world, each with great raps about their home scenes. We felt right at home and soon had many friends. When not dealing, we would often hike up into the Rockies which reared abruptly out of the great plains right at the end of our street, and we had many a mystical experience climbing on the snowy Flatirons or exploring abandoned gold mines with our heads full of chemicals.

While we loved Boulder and our friends there, both of us were anxious to push on. The lure of San Francisco was incredibly intense then. It seemed a magical city, beautiful and remote. It was also the source of so much of our music and posters, the art forms that served as the communication channels linking the far-flung colonies of hippies around the world. San Francisco was our Mecca, and we all had to make our pilgrimage. We began passing the word on the street to find us a ride to California, but before anything turned up, a man came to town with a treasure of legendary proportions.

I was in my usual haunt, a corner coffeehouse which commanded a view of the prime dealing territory. A friend named Ollie came in, looked around, and hurried over to me.

"Brian, listen. Have you ever done peyote?"

"No, man, but I've always wanted to. That's the Indian magic cactus, right? It's where mescaline comes from. I keep hearing stories about how righteous it is, but I never met anybody who actually tried it."

"You want some, man?"

"You have some?"

"I can get it."

"Out of sight. How much is it?" I had fears of some exorbitant prices. Even hippie commodities tended to be based on supply and demand, and something as rare and legendary as peyote could command just about any price.

"It's cheap. Five bucks a trip."

"That can't be, man. That's cheaper than plain old acid. Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I met this dude. Never seen him before. He just walked up to me on the street and says, 'Wanna cop some peyote?' Just like that."

"So you get some?"

"Shit, yeah, I bought a hit, but now I've got no more bread. I thought you might get into it. You always go for the exotics."

"Damn right. One book I read said it's at least as strong as acid, but completely natural and organic. It's mainly mescaline, but with dozens of other psychoactive alkaloids in it. The Indians do it, for Chrissake, how much more natural can you get? Where is this dude?"

"Down at the laundromat. Come on."

"My feet have wings."

I was excited as we hurried out into the falling snow. I had always wanted to try peyote. It was one of the few psychedelics I had never tried and I wanted to both see what it was like and if at all possible to add it to my inventory. In my trade it was very important to have both a wide selection and to be as knowledgeable as possible. I had developed a great drug rap, a sort of sales patter full of drug trivia and anecdotes, that knocked the socks off the provincial hippies in places like Boulder. A good drug rap always fascinated the hippie ladies, too. It definitely added to one's coolness factor. Being able to add something as rare as peyote to my repertoire would be a real coup. So I really wanted to meet this guy. I had a bad feeling he would be gone, that this would turn into one of those sad "the one-that-got-away" stories.

In moments we were at the Boulder Laundry (a name that had struck me as hilarious one night on a trip), one of the few free places to get warm on bitter winter days. The guy was still there. I looked him over. He was older than most of us, probably thirty. He was in traditional hippie attire: a fringed buckskin jacket over a paisley shirt and several strings of beads, and bellbottom jeans with lots of holes. But he also wore a very authentic-looking Indian medicine pouch on a thong tied tight around his throat. I was impressed. The guy looked cool. Ollie introduced us in standard dealing protocol, without using names.

"This is the dude I was telling you about, man."

We exchanged the hippie handshake, but he added a funny twist at the end that made me think that he came from places I hadn't been to. I usually felt cool and in charge in my deals, and it made me uncomfortable to think this guy was hipper than I was. He looked me over as well, but I couldn't tell what he thought.

"So you want buttons," he said, immediately putting me at a disadvantage. Drugs were always referred to by their street names when dealing, partly out of discretion and partly to establish oneself as a knowledgeable authority. I collected street names assiduously and I could talk about dope all night without ever calling it the same name twice. But I'd never encountered peyote before and I had never heard any other name for it. Unwilling to admit ignorance, I assumed we were both talking about peyote and ignored the unfamiliar term.

"Yeah. You holding here?" I said, though I was aware of the telltale pause in my reply. Did he know I wouldn't know peyote if I saw it?

"In my wheels." This was a bad sign. He didn't have any peyote to show me, and he wasn't likely to take me to his car. A dealer wouldn't normally take the risk of letting an unknown customer be able to identify his car. It also sounded like the beginning of the old "give me the money and I'll go get it" scam. We were all brother hippies, but I'd been burned on that one before.

"Hey, I don't front, man," I said.

"That's cool. Come on out to the car."

So the three of us buttoned up our coats and went out into the snow. He led us two or three blocks through residential side streets. I was just getting nervous about being led to either a bust or a ripoff when he stopped by a car. It was a Travelall, one of those humongous ugly station wagons put out by International Harvester or somebody. The back and side windows were all painted black. Mud was smeared casually on the license plates to make them illegible, but I could see they were Texas plates. It sure didn't look like a hippie car. My nervousness increased. My bust antenna were twitching. I glancedat the houses around us, half expecting to see a cop camera peeping out from behind a curtain. He led us around to the back and swung open the big back door of the wagon. A musky, earthy odor drifted out into the night air. I stared in astonishment. The entire car was full of brownish green lumps, from the back of the driver's seat to the back door and all the way to the ceiling. Two or three dropped out on the pavement. He bent and tossed them carelessly back in.

"How many you want, man?"

"Jesus," I gasped, all attempts at outcooling him forgotten. "Where the hell did you get all that?" It was a question one never asked in a drug deal, of course, but he just smiled.

"Well now, that wouldn't be wise for me to spread around, would it? But I'll say one thing, and you can take it from me. I know, cause I cut 'em myself. These are Roma buttons, and there's none finer in the world."

Roma. I committed that name to memory. If nothing else, it would be an impressive bit of trivia to casually let drop in future raps. Right now I was more interested in the deal. I found I only had sixty bucks on me, so I bought a dozen on the spot. He dug through the pile and pulled out some big ones one at a time and handed them to me.

"I can get more money tonight," I said. "Hell, I can have five hundred by tomorrow."

"No, man, I'm rolling now. This load won't keep much longer. Best to eat 'em fresh. I got to move on. Enjoy. And don't eat the fuzz!"

He drove off into the snow flurries and into drug legend. I looked down at the peyote clutched in my hands. They were unimpressive and unappealing: flat round disks of a consistency like an overripe apple, dark green on top, a sickly yellow-green below. The top was divided into lumpy segments, each with its tuft of dirty white fuzz, and a larger knot of prickly thorns in the center. The bottom surface where it was cut was slimy. All the buttons were smeared with a reddish mud that didn't rub off. They had an unpleasantly rank earthy smell, like that under an old house after a long rainy season.

"What the hell do I do with them?" I asked Ollie.

"Eat 'em. He showed me how to cut the fuzz off. Don't eat that. He says it has strychnine in it. I tried to wash the mud off mine, then closed my eyes and ate it as fast as I could."

"Why fast? Is it stronger that way?"

"No, man. Because it tastes so bad. You won't believe how bad it tastes."

My heart sank. This was the pure magical food of the Indian gods? "It tastes bad? How bad?"

He considered for a few minutes. "Let me put it this way. If it didn't get me to such a beautiful place, I'd rather eat a dog turd than eat another one of those things. And I'm not kidding."

"What? Really? What's it like? The high, I mean, that's enough metaphors on the taste."

"Well, first you feel kind of nauseous from eating the disgusting slimy thing. Then you feel like you're going to get sick."

"But that goes away?" I asked hopefully.

"No. Then you do get sick. I barfed my guts out. But try to keep it down as long as you can so you can get as much of the good stuff out of it as you can. When you have to, let it go. You'll feel a little better, but still sick for a while. Then after a while you realize you're high. Then you realize you're so high it doesn't even matter that you still feel sick. Then you forget all about being sick."

"Christ almighty. You sure it's worth it?"

"Try it. You'll see. I just wish I could afford more."

"Oh here, man. Take these two. You deserve it. Thanks a lot for turning me on to that dude. But I've never been much into nausea as recreation. I hope I still thank you after I eat these lunch launchers."

"You will, brother, trust me."

I hurried back to the crash pad to find Elissa, not without some misgivings. She was there, curled up in a big overstuffed easy chair, reading. The place was quiet except for a couple screwing noisily in one of the bedrooms. A tall skinny kid who always wore a Greek captain's cap and was thus known as Skipper looked up from cleaning a lid of weed on an album cover, carefully rolling the seeds into a film canister. Angel, an Italian kid from New York, and his chick Sunshine (one of about a dozen girls of that name I met during those years) were at the water pipe, bubbling merrily as usual in the center of the room.

I walked in and kicked the snow off my boots. "Hi babe," I said to Elissa, "take a look at this." I went to the old kitchen table and emptied the ten buttons out of my coat pockets. They tumbled soggily to the scarred formica. Everyone gathered around.

"Yuck," said Elissa, wrinkling her nose. "They're disgusting."

"Guess what these are?" I asked, enjoying the blank stares of all these experienced druggies.

"Petrified elephant snot?" asked Angel.

"They look like the buds of those pod things in Invasion of the Body Snatchers," suggested Skipper. "What the hell are they?"

"This, ladies and gentlemen," I said, "is the spirit cactus of the Navajo. The food of the gods of the Anasazi. The key to the gate of the spirit world. Behold peyote."

"Wow," gasped everyone together. Everyone had heard of peyote, but only as a semi-legendary Indian sacrament, not something slimy on their kitchen table.

"Far out," said Elissa, looking at them dubiously. "Where'd you get them?"

"Some dude passing through town. He's gone already. This is all I could get."

"They smell like they look," said Sunshine, wrinkling her nose.

"No, man, they're supposed to look like that. They're Roma buttons. That's the best in the world, you know."

"Roma? That's a tomato," said Angel.

"Whatever. There they are. Let's do 'em." Since I had revealed my stash in the crash pad, it was rightly assumed that they were to be shared by all.

"What do you do with them?"

"Eat 'em."

"Really?" Everyone stared at them. Skipper reached out and gingerly touched one. He pulled his finger back quickly.

"Shit. They're slimy. They're covered with mud and slime."

"Well, we can wash the mud off. Maybe that'll get the slime off too. And we're supposed to cut all that white shit off. Don't eat that."

"Oh, great. These are sounding better and better."

"It's supposed to be one of the best highs ever."

That did it. The five of us divvied them up. We got a pot of water and we all sat around the table, scrubbing the buttons with a dish washing scrubby. I got out my long evil-looking pocket knife and we dug the fuzz out. The little tufts scraped off, but the central clump went deep and had to be cut out like taking the eyes out of a potato. Worse yet, the fuzz turned out to be microscopic cactus thorns that stuck in our skin and stayed there, hurting invisibly for days afterward. We ended up cutting the buttons into bite size chunks. They were slightly more presentable, but the act of handling and cutting them had greatly intensified their odor. A rank smell filled the room.

"Shit, are they supposed to smell like that or are they rotten?" Elissa gasped. We were all feeling a bit nauseous just from handling and smelling them. No one looked very anxious to put one in his mouth. But I had bought them and I had a rep to maintain as a guy who would try absolutely anything. Besides, it was clear that they were rancid. If we waited they would only go bad and I'd never know what peyote was like.

"Right, then," I said with much more enthusiasm than I felt. I picked up the largest piece, looked at it for a second, and popped it into my mouth. It was even worse than I expected. It had an earthy, gritty nauseating taste, the smell became a hundred times worse when I bit into it, and the texture was like a mealy rotten potato. The combination was hard to handle. Still, I suspected that the more I chewed it the more psychoactives I would extract, so I gamely masticated it into a slimy mess and swallowed it. My stomach immediately let me know it was not enthusiastic for more.Everyone was watching my face. I smiled weakly.

"Not so bad," I mumbled, then decided I should keep my mouth tightly closed for a while. After a few minutes had passed and I kept it down, the others each tried a piece. Their faces paled at the first taste, but we all plowed on, resolutely eating one lump after another until the ten buttons had been forced down five throats. Elissa's normally golden complexion went green, but she bravely continued. We sat back, waiting to see what would happen.

Nothing did for a long time. The couple that had been fucking finally emerged from the bedroom. None of us knew either of them. The girl looked about fifteen.

"God, man, what's that awful smell?" asked the rumpled Lolita, looking around as if she expected to find a long-forgotten corpse in the corner.

"Uh, we just did some peyote," mumbled Skipper.

"Damn, smells like it just did you," said the guy. The two of them hurried out into the cold. We continued to sit staring at each other and trying vainly not to think about throwing up. After a while it was impossible. First Sunshine, then Skipper and Angel struggled to their feet and rushed to the bathroom. The sounds they made in there did not help Elissa and me.

"Try to keep it down if you can," I suggested helpfully, and she certainly did try, but soon she clutched her mouth and ran out. I didn't last much longer, and soon I was also talking to Ralph on the big porcelain telephone. As disgusting as the stuff had been going down, it was much worse coming back. It did give immediate relief to be rid of it however.

I had a big drink of water and washed my face. Feeling slightly better, I returned to the living room. Four large grins met me. Not until then did I realize just how stoned I was.

In those days we were literally always stoned. Grass was a constant, and there was at least one pipe or joint being passed around every hour of the day and night. Hash or opium was sprinkled into the pipe occasionally if we had it. Speed, either in pills called white lightning or as pure methedrine crystal to be snorted or shot, was common, often leading to several consecutive days of twenty-four hour drugging, uninterrupted by the need for sleep.

Against this background the psychedelics were the main events, lasting from an hour or two with the tryptamines like DMT or DPT, six to eight hours for psilocybin, twelve or so for acid, up to twenty-four or more for STP. Most of these trips were simply recreational - enhancing a rock concert, a lovemaking, or a night on a mountaintop; or just enjoying the colorful and fascinating visuals. But a few were intense, soul-changing events. Sudden insights into the nature of reality and the oneness of being would stand revealed with a crystal clarity of self-evident truth. These epiphanies, what Zap Comix called "kosmik trooths," were the things I lived for - to push the envelope, going further and further inward, trying to find at last The Meaning of It All. These experiences gave significance to a lifestyle otherwise merely hedonistic.

Now as I stood looking at my friends there in that crash pad in Boulder, I knew that I was off on another of those voyages of discovery. If you've never tripped, I can't tell you how I knew that or what it felt like. If you have, I don't need to. The visuals were coming on nicely already - pleasant, organic, earth toned. Everything was surrounded with concentric bands of color, as if outlined with several magic markers. Living things, specifically the five of us and a much put-upon communal cat, seemed to pulse with a golden glow from within. There was none of that frenetic jittering, sharp angles, and dayglow colors of LSD, and none of its nervous intensity. I was calm and peaceful and suffused with affection for these dear friends, most of whom I had known less than two months.

Elissa looked especially beautiful; warm and soft and female as she smiled up at me from the ratty old couch covered in an ancient Madras woodblock print. The psychedelic posters on the walls glowed in their usual garish colors, but what appealed now was the gracefully curving letters twining around them. I felt wonderfully content. I found that Ollie had been right. If I thought about it I did still feel sick, but I also felt so good it didn't matter.

After the initial rush was past, we started talking, each trying to tell the others what he was feeling, what was happening to him, but it couldn't be done. We also realized that our feeble attempts to verbalize the experience were distracting us from it. We fell into that strange companionable silence common only to people who get very stoned together frequently. Elissa and I sat side by side, holding hands, and that contact was intense enough to occupy us both for what seemed like hours.

One's sense of time is one of the first casualties of a stoned lifestyle, and hippies rarely wore watches or had clocks. Timepieces were suspect. There was something vaguely fascistic about their measured uniformity. Also, there was nothing like a startled, "Shit, look at the time!" to shatter the fragile shell of timelessness that surrounds a tripper. So none of us had the slightest idea how long it had been since we dropped. Suddenly Skipper groaned and sat up.

"You know, I think I'm getting sicker."

This was both a bringdown and a surprise, since I had been too stoned to think about my stomach for hours. The rest were in my camp, mildly nauseous but not uncomfortable. There didn't seem to be anything to do about it, so we continued contemplating the wonders of the universe. But Skipper seemed to be getting worse by the minute. We all forced ourselves to concentrate on the problem.

"But we all ate about the same amount," said Sunshine.

"And I don't think it's an overdose," I added. "The girls are okay and they had bigger doses by body weight."

"Maybe his stomach is just more sensitive," said Elissa. "That happens."

"Maybe you're just thinking about it too much. Maybe you don't really feel any worse than we do but you're not letting it go."

"Yeah. Think stoned, not sick."

He tried that, but it didn't last. Soon he was holding his belly and groaning. Then he got the dry heaves.

"Hey," I said. "I have a thought. Did everyone cut all the fuzz off the buttons?"

Everyone nodded but Skipper. "I started to, man, but they kept getting stuck in my fingers. I scraped most of them off, but I passed on the middle part."

"Shit, man," I said. "That's it. The fuzz has strychnine in it."

"What?" they all gasped.

"Yeah. Dig it, man. You've been sitting here half the night with strychnine poisoning and you're so stoned you didn't know it."

"Damn, what are we going to do?" We all knew we couldn't go to a hospital. In those days going in with a drug-related emergency meant you were released after treatment straight into jail. Skipper jumped up.

"Well, I gotta do something, man. This shit is killing me." He went to the door. We were all amazed that he could even stand up, much less go out. Before anyone could say anything, he opened the door and immediately disappeared. A tremendous thumping and crashing ensued.

"What the fuck?" said Sunshine, jumping up.

"Shit, the silly bastard fell down the stairs."

We all struggled up and went out onto the landing. There was Skipper, piled up at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at us in surprise. His back had slammed against the door of the downstairs apartment. As we stared, the door opened and Skipper rolled into the apartment and against the legs of a pretty girl in a nightgown. She looked from Skipper to us. I led the rest of us carefully down the stairs.

By the time we got down there she had him stretched out on the floor and was examining his head with assured competence.

"What happened?" Skipped groaned. "Oh, my stomach."

"Is he okay?" Elissa asked.

"I think so," she said over her shoulder. "Nothing's broken anyway."

"Are you a doctor?" asked Sunshine.

"I'm a nurse. I think he'll be okay. He keeps complaining about his abdomen, but I can't find anything wrong." She was checking his ribs and palpating his stomach.

I looked at her. She seemed nice, and any neighbor who had lived under that apartment for very long without complaining to the cops couldn't be all bad. I decided to tell her.

"It's not the fall. It's strychnine poisoning," I said. "He ate peyote and he didn't cut the fuzz off."

"Peyote? No wonder he was so relaxed when he fell. Well, so much for the ER. That's a sure bust. Where the hell did he get peyote? I've never seen it around here." I shrugged.

"How much did he take?"

"Two buttons, about this big around. But he threw them all up a while ago."

"Were they fresh?"

"No. I think about a week old."

"Hmm. That's probably not too dangerous. It loses most of its potency after a few days." She looked at me, then the others.

"Did you all do it?"

I nodded. I still wasn't sure we should be telling her all this, but we had to do what we could for Skipper. She studied me.

"Did you do all of it?"

I nodded again.

"Shit," she said. "Next time score some for me."

We stared at her in amazement, then grinned.

"Well, you guys are too messed up to be much use to him. Leave him here. I'll take care of him."

Heaping thanks on her, we helped lift him onto her couch.

"You okay, Skip?" asked Angel.

"Yeah, I think so. I'll be all right. She's nice, huh?"

"The best, man, the best. We'll see you in the morning."

We trooped back upstairs with relief. We were still flying, but clearly on the way back down. Now we just felt happy. Suddenly Angel laughed.

"Shit, man, can you believe that Skipper? He staggers out of the place poisoned and falls right into a nurse's apartment. And she's a doll. Wow, maybe I should have eaten the fuzz, too."

Sunshine elbowed him for that, but we all laughed together. Now that the scare was over, I thought about the trip we'd just had. There was something about peyote that struck a chord in me. I knew that what I wanted to do now was to find out how to get more peyote.

A week or so after that trip Elissa and I gave up on getting a ride to San Francisco and hitched the thirty miles to Denver. We found a fair-sized hippie scene in a rundown neighborhood. We asked around and found a crash pad. It was ratty and Denver didn't appeal to either of us, so we spent most of our time putting up cards in restaurants and on college bulletin boards, trying to find a ride. I did take time to add the Colorado statehouse to my collection of state capitols I had done acid trips in.

We had been there four or five days when a guy Elissa had met came up to us one morning in a coffeehouse where we had taken to hanging out.

"Hey, Elissa," he said. "You still looking for a ride west?"

"Sure," she said.

"Well, there's these people I met who are going to LA."

"They got room for both of us and our shit?"

"I think so. They're driving an ambulance."

"Well, that should be inconspicuous," I said.

"Yeah, but you'd never get caught in traffic jams," added Elissa. "When do they want to leave?"

"Right now. They were just going to get gas."

"Damn. Where are they?"

"I asked them to stop by here on their way out of town. They said they would. They need someone to help with the gas."

"Far out," I said. "Elissa, stay here and wait for them. I'll go get our shit."

I ran out and jogged the two blocks to the crash. Soon I was galloping awkwardly down the street, the guitar case, my duffel, and Elissa's old red suitcase flapping in the breeze. When I got back to the restaurant there was an ancient Cadillac ambulance parked in front. Elissa was talking to a tall man with a heavy black beard and a thin blonde woman in a moth-eaten fur coat.

"Babe, this is Sean and Wendy," said Elissa as I puffed up. "This is my man Brian."

"Hi," I said with my best ingratiating smile. I wanted to get out of Denver and the cold.

Sean looked at me without a hint of a smile. "You got money for gas?"

"Some. Not all of it."

"There's two more coming. We don't have no bread ourselves."

"So it'd be split four ways?" I looked at the car dubiously. It was rounded and curvy in what once was called futuristic streamlining, but now just looked funky. One window was cracked and taped together. The paint had faded to a blotchy flamingo pink. The car was obscenely long, with a hood that went out forever.

"What kind of mileage do you get? Will it make it?"

"It'll make it, man. I keep it running good and I got my own tools. It's a '47, with an inline eight. I guess it gets about ten."

"Ten miles a gallon?"

"Ten to twelve," said Wendy.

I calculated rapidly. Elissa had no money of her own, so it would be split between me and the other two passengers. It could be two thousand miles to LA, at 50 cents a gallon for the cheap gas, came to maybe thirty to forty bucks apiece. I had around a hundred from selling out my stock in Boulder. I only had my sample case left. Close, but we could make it.

"We can do that," I said.

"Right. In the back," said Sean, and he and Wendy went and got in the front. I opened the back door, one of those big wide mothers that swings around and almost pulls you over. The back of the ambulance was a jumble of bags - duffel, sleeping, and garbage, mixed with an assortment of winter coats and other unidentifiable items. I threw our stuff in along one side, we climbed in, and I reached out and pulled the door shut. The car swerved out into traffic before I could sit down, and I tumbled across the piles of stuff.

"Ow! Hey, shit, man!" came a muffled voice, and a gaunt, hairless figure sat up in the half light. Elissa let out a squeak, and I tried to crawl back to her where she sat against the back door.

"Fer chrissake!" said a woman's voice, and the pile shifted under me again.

I crawled on and flopped back beside Elissa. A very pretty blonde head emerged from under a pile of coats.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't know you guys were under there."

"Well, we spent the night in here and it's colder than a teacher's wit out there." She sat up and the coats fell from her. I gulped. She was naked, and she seemed unconcerned that I was staring at her as she dug a brush out of somewhere and started brushing her hair. I could feel Elissa watching me in disapproval, but I had to stare. She was really a lovely girl about my own age, with long shining blonde hair and absolutely perfect breasts, her nipples stiff in the cold air.

"Uh, I'm Brian, and this is Elissa," I stammered.

"I'm Sarah," she said, not glancing toward Elissa. "I don't know his name."

I had forgotten the other resident of the car. I peered forward to where he sat, as straight and motionless as a statue. The likeness to a mannequin was emphasized by a head that seemed to be clean-shaven. He was thin and wiry, with a lined face and dark eyes a lot older than the rest of him.

"Mike," he said.

"Hi," I replied, then we all settled into silence while the ambulance worked its way out of Denver. I wiped the frost from one window and peered out.

"Hey," I said. "That sign said I-25 south. I thought we were going west."

"Sean said they were going south through New Mexico and Arizona," said Sarah. "Stay out of the snow."

"Suits me," I said. "I'm tired of the cold. Aren't you, babe?" Elissa nodded.

"I like the cold," said Mike. That killed the conversation again. This could prove to be a long trip. Mike seemed strange, maybe even hostile, and both of them clearly made Elissa uncomfortable. But I sure liked looking at Sarah, though she had snuggled down into the blankets again. But we had many days to spend cooped up with these people and I was determined not to ride in silence.

"So, how long have you known Sean and Wendy?" I asked Sarah.

"Just met them yesterday. I dumped my old man in Laramie and wanted to go to Santa Fe to see if I could find an old friend. They had a car. They picked Mike up at the same time."

"How about you, Mike?" I was much more interested in talking to Sarah, but I thought I better keep up an appearance of equal socializing. "Why are you going to LA?"

He shrugged. "I just wanted to move."

"So, are you and Sarah travelling together?"

"No, we're not," said Sarah pointedly, looking at me. I tried to read her eyes. Was it just my pornographic fantasy, or was she actually coming on to me? At any rate, with all of us in the back of an ambulance for the next few days it seemed a moot point.

We rolled through southern Colorado, stopping fairly frequently for gas and pit stops. We ate candy bars and cold burritos out of the vending machines in the truck stops. The truckers stared at us when we came in, but they were too busy looking at Sarah to take the trouble to harass a bunch of hippies. When we stopped she always pulled on a beaded Indian dress that was so short it barely covered her ass. Knowing as I did that she was naked underneath, I always gulped when she bent over to get the candy out of the vending machine. I couldn't help wondering if she was doing it for the truckers, for me, or if she was even aware of it. She just seemed totally unconcerned about her body. As soon as we were back in the car, she took the dress off and crawled under the blankets. Elissa disliked her for some reason. Mike seemed totally unaware of her. I was fascinated.

Sean and Wendy rarely spoke with the rest of us. There was only a small window communicating between the front of the ambulance and the back, and they kept it closed. We'd knock on it if we needed to stop. They kept to themselves even at the stops. They seemed to think of us only as cargo to pay for the trip.

Sean drove long into the night. Then the car slowed and turned off the highway onto a dirt road. We bounced around in the back for a few hundred yards, then the car stopped. Sean slid the window back.

"We're stopping here for the night. I'm too tired to drive any more."

We were all anxious to get on with the trip, and particularly to get out of the snow country. Both Mike and I volunteered to help with the driving, but Sean refused without explanation. He and Wendy got out, locked the doors of the cab, and got in the back with us. There was plenty of room, even for six people. We passed around a pipe and got stoned, and fell into the usual getting-stoned-to- gether-for-the-first-time rap.

Elissa and I briefly told our stories. Sarah had been living with a guy on a commune in Wyoming, but he was a jerk and she left. She wanted to go to Santa Fe because she'd heard an old flame of hers was living there. Sean and Wendy were from Chicago, stone broke, and wanted to go to LA to check out the scene there. Mike just listened in silence until every one else had told their story.

"What about you, Mike?" Elissa asked. "Where are you from?"

"I'm from LA," he said after a long pause. "I was into the scene there on Sunset Strip, getting high a lot. Then I got drafted. I was afraid to go to jail or to try running to Canada or something, so I thought I'd go get it over with. So they sent me to Nam."

"Wow. You were in Vietnam?" I asked. Lots of my friends had been sent over, but I'd never heard from them again. If they'd come back I hadn't heard about it. It was as if they'd left the Earth. This guy had actually been there and come back. "What was it like?"

"Shitty. The brass are sending units into places where they know they're gonna take heavy hits."

"On purpose?" asked Sarah. "Why?"

"Because Johnson wants to get a lot of American kids killed."

"Oh, come on, why would he want that?"

"Two reasons. First, it's a great way to get rid of his enemies. Who really hates Johnson? Kids, blacks, and hippies, right? So who do they send to Nam? Who doesn't come back? Think about it. He can't have us hanged or transported to Australia like the Brits did to keep their dissidents down. And who's to complain? They weren't executed, they were heroes sacrificing for their country. Shit. You don't have to draft heroes. It's a simple choice: two years taking your chances with Charlie, or ten years certain in Leavenworth."

"You said there were two reasons," I said, after we all thought about that for a while.

"Johnson wants the war to escalate. He wants all of Southeast Asia to go up in flames, with lots of GI's killed, civilian atrocities, genocide. Then Johnson's really in business. He can go crazy, sending in armies here, carpet bombing there, assassination units to capitals. The CIA gets permanent work, the Army is fully geared up, American arms merchants are making a killing, so to speak. And Congress authorizes any appropriation he requests, no questions asked, no oversight committees. After all, it's a national emergency. Security is at stake."

"Damn," muttered Sean. "Is that what it's really all about?"

"Shit, yeah. Only now some of us who did somehow survive are coming back, telling their friends what they know. People are starting to say, "Hey, Lyndon. Explain again the part about why we're supporting a puppet dictator who's killing and ripping off his own people to stop a free election, just because the people might elect a communist? How many people do you know who have really been worried about Vietnam attacking California? I mean, for most wars they at least tried to come up with an excuse why we should fear and hate the enemy. Now they don't bother."

"Wow. Did you do your whole two years?"

"No, man. I knew I'd never survive that many patrols. They have it figured. The odds are one in twenty that a guy won't come back from any particular mission. So they send you on fifty, just to be sure. I knew one guy who went on sixty-three before he got killed. We called him 'Lucky.'"

"How did you get out?"

"I got a section eight."

"What's that?" asked Sarah.

"I was so crazy the army didn't want me."

"Wow, that's really crazy," I said. "I thought it was almost impossible to get out that way."

"It is. I got pretty extreme there."

"What'd you do?"

"Suffice it to say I finally convinced them."

"Did you actually fight the Viet Cong?"

"Hell, yes. I went out on twenty-three patrols."

"Did you see anybody get killed?" asked Elissa. It was hard to believe that this guy our own age was actually a combat veteran. Veterans were big fat old guys in loud suits who hung out at the VFW bars.

"Yeah. Plenty of Charlie and too damn many of my buddies. Let's talk about something else."

"Yeah, this shit is too heavy," said Sean. "Speaking of heavy shit, whose hash is this we're smoking? I'm fucked up."

"Mine," I said. "It's Lebanese brown. Know how they make it? When the dope is in flower, these young Lebanese girls run naked through the fields and they scrape the pollen from their skin."

"What?" said Wendy. "Is that really how they make it?"

"I haven't a clue. But somebody told me that once. If it's not true, it should be. It's appeal goes beyond mere truth and it's sold many a block of hash."

"Good shit," everyone agreed. I was pleased my rep for always having the best was sustained.

"Hey, guys," I said. "Elissa and I just got into something great in Boulder. Anybody ever do any peyote?"

"Yeah," said Mike enthusiastically. "I just got some a week ago in Denver. Wild, wild, trip." The others had never done any, but when Elissa and Mike and I raved about our trips long enough they were anxious to try some.

"Where did you get it?" asked Wendy.

"Some dude came through town in a big station wagon stuffed to the top with buttons. He was heading out of town when I scored, so I couldn't get any more."

"Hey, that's the same guy I got it from," said Mike. "We tripped together. Did you ever see anything like that car? There must have been ten thousand buttons in it."

"I guessed twenty-five thousand," I said.

"Wow. At five dollars a pop," said Wendy in awe.

"I wonder where he got them," said Sean.

"I don't know," I answered. "He wouldn't tell me anything."

"Well, he talked a lot when we tripped together," said Mike. "He told me all about how he found them and picked them. He said he followed a line of high tension wires west out of a town, over three ridges, and then the ground was covered with buttons. He just cut 'em off right at ground level. But he wouldn't tell me anything about where it was."

"Is that right?" I said. "All he told me was that they were Roma buttons. Could that be the name of the town?"

"Hey, could be," said Sean excitedly. "I wonder what state it's in?"

"It sounds Spanish," Wendy suggested. "It could even be in Mexico."

"I don't think so," said Mike. "Can you imagine crossing the border with a car wedged full of buttons? Not too smart."

"He had Texas plates," I suddenly remembered.

"Far out!" shouted Sean. He went and got a Texas road map out of the cab. We gathered around him as he spread it out. Elissa hurriedly scanned the index of towns. She let out a squeak.

"Here it is! Roma, Y7!"

"Man, that's way down here," said Sarah. "Let's see, Y... 7!"

"There it is," said Wendy, pointing.

"Damn, it's right on the Rio Grande," I said. "That looks like some empty country."

"All the better," said Sean. "Listen, are you guys thinking what I'm thinking?"

"If we know the town and we know how to find them from the town?" I asked. "How can we miss?"

"Hey, there could be big money in this," said Sean. "We could fill this old ambulance to the gills."

"Yeah, man," said Mike. "We could get all the peyote we want and we could all be rich, too."

"Right on!" said Sean. "Who's for going down to Roma?"

"I don't know," said Sarah. "That's a long way out of our way. It'd take a week at least, maybe more. I really wanted to get to Santa Fe."

Elissa said she was afraid to go to Texas. It was definitely deep in redneck country, the kind of place hippies avoided. There were rumors of longhairs disappearing down there. But everyone else was for it.

"Look," I said. "Peyote grows in the desert and we'll be going through a lot of desert. Maybe we don't have to go all the way to Roma. How about if we look for it on the way south? If we find it we'll pick a load and take it to LA. If not, we'll go down to Roma and see what we can find."

Everyone agreed to this, and we gradually faded. Sean blew out the candle. We all made nests for ourselves and snuggled down into the dozens of sleeping bags, luggage, and blankets that covered the floor of the ambulance. We were all naked, and it felt good when Elissa curled up in my arms. But I had trouble sleeping because I could feel Sarah's bare bottom pressed against mine.

It was a long cold night and we were all anxious to get going, so as soon as we were awake Sean and Wendy moved back to the cab and we were off at first light. Some of us had heard of a hippie commune in southern Colorado at a place called Trinidad, and we planned to stop in there to see if they knew if peyote grew around there. But when we got to Trinidad none of the locals knew, or would tell us, where the commune was. We decided to spend a few hours walking around in the desert to see if we could find any.

The snow was gone now, but it was still cold. Sean turned off on a dirt road and we bounced along until we were out of sight from the main road. Then we all wandered off looking under bushes for the little green bumps of peyote sticking out of the sand. Elissa and I started following a dry wash, but after a few hundred yards with no luck I climbed out of the wash and started combing the plateau. Elissa continued up the wash, poking along with a stick.

A little later I noticed motion out of the corner of my eye and saw Sarah a little distance away, kicking over stones. I moved toward her and she soon looked up and saw me. She waved and dropped down into an intervening wash. I headed that way too.

When I scrambled down the steep bank to join her, she came over to me with a big grin on her face. I thought maybe she'd found peyote.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"I was hoping to get you alone," she smiled.

My heart jumped. So my imaginings hadn't just been wishful thinking. But what could we do here? It was bitter cold and windy, and the ground was all little sharp rocks covered with broken twigs and thorns. I looked around, then turned and shrugged at her.

She knew exactly what she wanted. She pulled me to her and turned, pressing her back against me. She opened the sides of her poncho. Beneath it she wore that short Indian dress. She took my hand, slipped it under her dress, and put it between her legs.

I was taken completely by surprise. It was like holding a small warm furry animal cupped in my icy hand. She put my other hand flat on her belly, then slid it up under her dress to her breast. I thought I was going to explode, but I still couldn't figure out how we were going to do anything.

She started moving my hands on her, and I realized she just wanted me to stroke her. That was fine with me. We stood there in that frigid Colorado high desert wind with her poncho flapping around us, and I used every technique I knew to make it good for her. Soon she was coming, gasping and pressing herself back against me as my hands worked frantically on her body. When she was through, she twisted her head around and gave me a passionate kiss. I let go of her and she buttoned her poncho. We both went back to hunting for peyote, though I was walking with a decided limp. Soon after that I came upon Elissa and Wendy. I saw Elissa eyeing Sarah when she saw the two of us together.

"Anything?"

"No. Maybe it's too cold here."

"It's too cold for me," said Sarah. "Let's go further south."

We rounded up the others and headed for New Mexico. My thoughts were whirling as I lay between Elissa and Sarah. We passed around another joint to get warm.

We crossed into New Mexico and the landscape gradually changed. Soon we were in high mountains with lots of pines. We arrived in Taos in mid-afternoon after another night in the car. Taos did have a hippie community and we spent a day there nosing about checking out the scene. None of the local hippies knew of any peyote in the area. They said that the Navajo were known to use it, but they didn't know where they got it.

Disappointed again, we headed toward Santa Fe. As we left town we spotted three teen-age Navajo girls walking along the road laughing. Sean pulled up beside them and rolled down his window. He had a dark threatening look with his full black beard, and the girls drew back. One, however, gave a friendly smile and came over when he beckoned her.

"Yes?" she said, "Can I help you?"

"Yeah," said Sean. "Know where we can get some peyote around here?"

It was exactly as if he had slapped her. Her smile disappeared, her face darkened, and tears came to her eyes.

"No! Get out of here! Go away!" she shouted, and the three of them ran away as fast as they could go.

"Well, shit," said Sean. "No need to get so damn huffy. She could have just said no."

"Hell, man," said Wendy. "It's a sacrament for them. It's probably like a dude coming up to some Catholic kids and asking if they knew where he could go to fuck the Virgin Mary or something."

We drove on, but the look on that girl's face has always stuck with me. I felt so sorry for having hurt her that I've always wanted to go back and apologize. So much for consideration of another culture's values. But we continued looking for Virgin Mary.

The thing with Sarah was driving me crazy. I still liked Elissa a lot and we were great together, but the memory of that strange trip out on the desert was always in my mind. And it didn't help that Sarah was always bouncing around naked in the car. I was so hot and frustrated I thought I would jump her any minute.

I think Elissa was very aware of the heat between us. She snuggled up possessively against me as we bounced along. That last evening before Santa Fe, she began to stroke me under the blankets. I never knew if it was simple lust or if she wanted to prove to Sarah that I was her man, but she soon had me more than ready. She was being fairly discrete, but it was perfectly obvious what was going on under the blanket. Then she slipped her head under the blanket and a moment later I felt her mouth on me. I closed my eyes in pleasure. When I opened them, both Mike and Sarah were watching my face; Mike with amusement, and I couldn't be sure what I saw in Sarah's eyes. Then as I watched, Sarah shifted over beside me. She threw the blankets off herself and again pressed my hand between her legs. Then she slid up a few inches and pressed her breast into my mouth. Mike's mouth dropped open.

It was the strangest sensation, and it didn't help to have Mike watching. No one said anything as the pace accelerated. As one might imagine, it didn't take long. Sarah and I came together as Elissa's head bobbed furiously up and down under the blankets, then finally stopped. Sarah kissed me and shifted away back under the blankets. A few minutes later Elissa came up for air, a pleased, contented look on her face. She never glanced at Sarah, but I'm sure she thought she had put the hussy in her place. She never found out what went on that night.

The next day we reached Santa Fe. Sarah's deal was that she had the address of an old lover there, but she wasn't sure he was still there, unattached, or interested, or if she was still interested in him. She wanted to look him up, check out the feelings, and make up her mind then. If it was cool, she'd stay with him. If not, she'd continue with us. I desperately hoped she'd find he'd joined a monastic order. Although I'd had sex with her twice already, I'd never really made love to her, and I was terribly frustrated and hot for her.

We cruised for hours finding the address, a rundown adobe on a back street. She went to the door, a guy came out. They talked for a few minutes, then she came back to the car.

"It's okay," she said. "Can you pass me my stuff?"

I handed it through the window. She said goodbye to everybody, then she went into the house and closed the door. Elissa, and perhaps Mike, breathed a sigh of relief. I never saw Sarah again, outside of erotic dreams.

The rest of us went to a restaurant to plan our next move. We'd talked to a number of hippies in Santa Fe. Some of them had done peyote, but they were sure it wasn't local. The consensus was that all peyote in the states came from either Texas or Mexico. So it appeared that we'd have to go to Texas, though there was still hope we'd find some before we got all the way to Roma. Two of our contacts had mentioned Big Bend State Park as a possible source. Elissa was still dubious. She'd signed on to go to San Francisco with me. This was the wrong direction and sounded too scary for her. But the rest of us all wanted to give Texas a shot and she wanted to stay with me, so in the morning we were on our way east.

It was a long drive to El Paso and further to the turnoff south to Big Bend. We drove several more hours before we came to the ranger station at the entrance. We picked up a map and some camping supplies, then headed on. The road from the entrance gate to the river must be fifty miles of the flattest, loneliest desert any of us had ever seen. We couldn't believe we had gone so far and still hadn't gotten to the river.

At last we came to a dirt road that led to the camping area we had picked out on the map as the most remote. Yet more hours of bumping, this time on a rutted gravel road, then we came out on the edge of a steep valley and saw a line of green trees far below us. It was nearly dark by the time we pulled up on a small beach on the bank of the Rio Grande. We all got out to check it out.

The river at that point was unimpressive, perhaps fifty yards wide but nowhere more than a foot deep. A wagon track went across it, disappearing into the low rolling hills of Mexico on the other side. Mexico! Land of great marijuana and lax enforcement, of Michoacan green and Acapulco gold and the legendary Sinsemilla - lovely names that rolled off the tongue.

"Shit, man," said Sean. "Why does everybody try to mule it across in California? Nothing could be easier than bringing it across right here."

Mike looked at the map. "There's a little town on the other side, San Vincente. Looks like it's only a mile or two from here."

"Far out. Let's go over there tomorrow and see if we can set something up. If they don't have any shit we can have it trucked in there. What a setup. That ranger didn't give us a second look."

"It can't be that easy, can it?" I asked. "Let me see that map."

Mike passed it over. "Yeah, there's a town over there," I said, "but there's no roads to it. None at all."

"Bullshit. You can't have a town without any roads. How would people get there?"

"Look at the map. This wagon track is the only way in. It's two hundred miles of desert mountains between here and the next town."

"Far out, man," said Elissa. "What a neat place. Let's do go see it tomorrow."

"Maybe they know where the peyote grows," added Wendy.

We built a fire, fixed a quick meal, had a companionable smoke, and turned in. The stars burned down out of a sky clearer and darker than any of us had ever seen. We heard coyotes howling during the night.

In the morning we filled some water bottles and splashed across the river to Mexico. We followed the wagon ruts for an hour or so, then could see houses up ahead. There were five of them, all identical small adobes with corrugated iron roofs. They were arranged haphazardly; two facing each other, the others facing out toward the desert stretching away to the horizon in all directions. There were no trees. There was no store or post office, no church, not even a square or main street. The wagon track went between two of the houses, circled around one, and doubled back on itself.

We trudged up to the turnaround before anyone appeared. Then an old man came out of one of the houses and stood looking at us. Mike knew a few words of Spanish so he walked towards the man.

"Hola," he called out when they were twenty-five yards apart.

The man continued to stare.

"Buenos dias," Mike tried again at five yards.

The man nodded. Mike went up and shook his hand, then they carried on a long painfully slow conversation with much gesturing and sign language. After a while Mike beckoned us over.

"He says they get everything on the wagon from the U.S. side. He doesn't know what peyote is. He has horses we could rent if we want to look around."

"I don't know, man," I said. "That can be expensive. I've been riding a few times and it always cost six or eight bucks an hour."

Mike and the old man talked some more.

"He says a dollar a day per horse."

"Shit, let's do it," I said. "We could cover lots more territory on horses."

"Hey, me and Wendy, we've never ridden," said Sean.

"Me either," added Elissa.

"Hey, it's easy. We'll just go slow and walk around looking for buttons."

So we struck the deal. The old man said he couldn't have the horses ready before tomorrow, so we asked him to bring them down to the river early the next morning. We walked back to camp.

We spent a very pleasant afternoon wandering around under the cottonwood trees and playing in the river. We each made several forays into the desert on the U.S. side, but no one saw any peyote. We fixed a good dinner for a change and slept under the stars again.

The next morning at dawn we heard the neighing of horses and got up to see the old man and a boy leading four horses down the bank. We went over to meet them.

"He says they couldn't find the other horse," Mike explained after a short talk.

"That's okay," said Elissa. "I'll ride with Brian."

We paid the man four dollars and he and the boy turned back to the village. We led the horses across the river to camp, had breakfast, packed a lunch, and then mounted up, not without some amusing scenes. Finally we set off west, up the middle of the river.

Since I had had two pony rides as a child and was therefore the experienced horseman, I led the way. The horses were trudging along through the water, no faster than we could have walked. I kept shaking the reins and shouting Giddyap, but nothing happened.

"Hey," yelled Mike. "I know. These are Mexican horses. They don't understand English."

"That's silly," I said. "Giddyap isn't English, it's horse. All horses understand Giddyap." But just then Mike yelled "Andale! Andale!" and all three horses broke into a run.

We flew up the river, water flying up above our heads, forming rainbows before us in the clear morning air. Everyone was shouting, either in delight or terror, and my heart was pounding. I suddenly realized that it could be dangerous for the horses to run like this where they couldn't see the footing, and I managed to get mine stopped. The others dropped back to a walk as they caught up.

After a mile or so in the river we found a dry wash coming in from the south and went up that until we climbed onto the plateau above the river. We went along slowly, looking for the peyote, but we had found none by the time we stopped for lunch on a high hill overlooking the river. As we munched our apples and trail mix, Mike pointed up the river.

"Hey, what's that big yellow cloud?"

Sure enough, a big bank of what looked like sulphur-yellow fog was heading down the river some miles from us.

"Could it be a rain storm?" asked Wendy.

"I don't know. Sure looks funny. It's following the course of the river. Wonder what it could be?"

After lunch we doubled back toward camp. We came out on a bluff towering above the river. The yellow cloud was directly below us, moving down the river. The slope was steep and covered with mesquite and cholla. I started toward the edge, but my horse balked and refused to step over the edge. The others refused as well. We must have spent an hour trying fruitlessly to get the horses started down that slope. I've heard since that horses won't go down a steep slope with an inexperienced rider because they can't see their footing without risking a somersault.

In the end we dismounted and led them down, zigzagging back and forth across the slope. As we went down the wind kept increasing. Soon it was blowing like hell, driving sand into our faces. We realized the yellow fog was a dust storm. By the time we got down it was nearly dark and we still had a mile or more to go in the river, right into the teeth of the sandstorm. It was well after dark that we finally straggled into camp and climbed down thankfully from the horses. We tethered them in some long grass under the cottonwoods and set about making dinner.

We opened the car to get dinner out and found that someone had left one window open a quarter inch to keep the car from getting too hot. The dust storm had deposited a three-inch layer of sand on everything in the car. All hands fell to dragging everything out and flinging the sand into each others' eyes. We never did succeed in getting all of it out of the sleeping bags. Elissa tried to shake out a blanket and the wind dragged her thirty feet before she let go.

We'd bought tortillas and canned refried beans, so we broke out a big cast iron frying pan Wendy had and tried to light a fire. It took at least an hour. We had to build a windbreak by piling up river rocks and driftwood upwind of the fire. All nonessential personnel were stationed to windward to try to break the wind. We must have used two boxes of matches before we got the fire lit. Fortunately even impoverished hippies always have plenty of matches.

Finally the fire was going well, but the flames were whipped out flat along the ground for ten or fifteen feet downwind. The only solution was to go down there to set up the frying pan. With the pan resting on some rocks, the flames flickered all around it with a noise like a blast furnace. We put a deep layer of oil in the pan and tried to deep fry the tortillas. Several times the oil caught fire, and occasionally we'd use the spatula to shovel off the sand that tended to bury the tortilla before it could cook. Those were memorable burritos, but we were so hungry even the spoonfuls of sand in each one didn't stop us.

We had a wild and uncomfortable night in the ambulance as it rocked and rolled in the wind. The storm died during the night and we piled out in the morning to a clear sky. The Mexicans reclaimed their horses, said they hadn't had the duststorm in San Vincente, and left. We'd had enough. We packed up and headed out.

The car was a mess. It had been bad enough when we started, but a lot of unwashed hippies, moldy sleeping bags, and hundreds of potato chip and Frito bags had made it truly rank. Now everything was covered in sand. We decided to splurge and get a motel room.

We found a little place in Alpine just outside the park and the rest of us laid low while Sean rented a single room. He backed the ambulance up right to the door and we unloaded everything. The girls washed clothes in the tub while the guys shook out the bags, blankets, and clothes. The old mattress that we discovered in the bottom of the pile was too disgusting to try to save, so we squeezed it out through the back window of the room and left it. We shovelled and swept out the back of the car and put everything back in. We all had showers, leaving dunes in the tub. Then we all squeezed into the one double bed and slept like logs. We were out before the sunrise and the proprietor could catch us.

It took another entire day of driving before we reached the border town of Eagle Pass. It was a scary, redneck-looking place, with rusted-out pickups on blocks in front of ratty little frame houses with peeling paint. We thought it would be fun to cross the border into Piedras Negras, but the American border authorities suggested we get out of town instead. We continued southeast, paralleling the river, to the next border crossing at Laredo to try again.

Since the car was even more conspicuous than we were, we parked it a few blocks away and walked across the bridge. This time the Americans only eyed us with suspicion, and we went through the Mexican customs with only routine questions. Feeling pleased with ourselves, we strolled into the bustling market area of Nuevo Laredo. We wandered along, peering into the shops, soaking up the experience of being out of the U.S. It felt comfortable to be there. We were brothers with these people - both hippies and Mexicans were being oppressed by the Norte Americano military-industrial dictatorship.

We had gone about a block and a half when we heard a commotion behind us. Everyone on the street turned to look back toward the bridge. A half dozen brown-shirted Federales were running down the street, shouting and waving their weapons. We moved up against the shop windows to let them go past us, no doubt in pursuit of some felons. To our amazement, they stopped and started shouting at us. We couldn't understand what was going on, but they hustled us all back to the bridge and made it more than clear that we were not welcome in Mexico now or in any conceivable future administration.

Disappointed and a little hurt by this hostile treatment by our brothers to the south (after all, we were dedicated consumers of Mexican produce), we trudged back across the long rusty bridge. We assumed the American authorities had called the Mexicans and pressured them to expel us. As we entered the U.S. Customs building for the second time in five minutes, an officer looked up at us.

"How long have you been in Mexico?"

"What?" said Sean. "You just waved us through."

"How long have you been out of the U.S.?"

Sean took a breath to shout, but Wendy wisely shushed him.

"Five minutes, officer," she said in her sweetest voice.

"Where did you go in Mexico?"

"About a hundred yards."

"Do you have anything to declare?"

"We didn't have enough time to pick up so much as a coating of dust." Her nice girl tone was wearing thin. The rest of us stood there uncomfortably shuffling our feet.

"Passports, please."

"We don't need passports. We're American citizens visiting Mexico. We just walked across."

"How do we know that, ma'am?"

"You stared at my ass all the way across the bridge, officer. Surely you would remember that?"

He glared at us, then went into a glass-fronted office to talk to another El Migre official. I was afraid they were going to lock us up for not having passports. After all, how could we prove we were American? As far as I knew, none of us had passports. But after a few minutes, the first bozo returned.

"All right. Get out of here. Get out of town and keep going. And don't try to cross into Mexico again, anywhere. Understand?"

"Yeah," Wendy sighed. "God, it's nice to be back in a free country again."

We beat it out of there and continued down river. We resolved to skip the tourist sights from now on. We'd go straight to Roma, load up, and get the hell out of Texas.

All the distances are long in Texas, especially for hippies. It's damned hard to be inconspicuous when you've got hair down to your waist, the girls aren't wearing bras, and you're riding in a 1947 red Cadillac ambulance. We bought food at small gas stations and avoided stopping in towns at all. Finally we came to the outskirts of Roma. Sean slowed down, and for the first time in the trip we came within twenty MPH of the legal speed limit.

Then we crested a ridge and Sean let out a whoop. A long row of tall high tension towers strode away across the hills like a column of skeletal giants. They ran west from the town over a series of ridges, exactly as the peyote man had said. Sean pulled off the road where a gated dirt track wound off toward the nearest tower. We all stared at that dusty track as if it were paved in yellow bricks.

"This is it, this is it," Mike kept saying. There could be little doubt that this was the place. We grinned at each other. I was relieved and elated to have our detection work prove out - I had been worried that this was the wrong Roma and this whole endless side trip would have been a waste of time. But I was also afraid.

Back in Colorado the idea of driving down here and picking up a load of buttons had sounded so simple. It was a challenge, a puzzle to solve, an adventure. But now here we were in the desert, alone in an alien land. The harsh, uninviting terrain, the rusty barbed wire fences and dilapidated, abandoned ranch houses were grittily real. And the hostile reception everywhere we went had put a somber, threatening tone to the trip.

We felt like resistance fighters in occupied territory. If captured we knew we could expect no mercy. This wasn't an amusing anecdote to some day add to my drug rap. These rednecks were frighteningly real. Every pickup we passed had a rifle rack in the window. The desert looked cold and indifferent. It was all too easy to imagine getting killed out there in that chaparral. A volley of shots, some screams, then silence. We'd never be found out here. I remembered seeing pictures of the shot-up car of three freedom riders murdered by rednecks somewhere out in the South.

On the other hand, about a hundred thousand dollars worth of great highs was lying on the ground within a mile of us right now. We'd come this far; I sure as hell didn't intend to leave without giving it a try. But it was nearly dark, clearly too late to wander off into the desert. We talked about it for a while and decided to spend the night as usual, parked on some old dirt road out of sight of the highway. This one was gated and locked and too close to the peyote. In the morning we'd come back here, get out there and pick until dark, then get the hell out of Texas as fast as we could.

We were all excited, anxious to get started and chafing at having to spend the night. Above all, we were elated at having found the source. Things seemed to be going right for us at last. Then we made a truly disastrous decision.

"Hey," said Sean. "Tomorrow we'll be rich and out of here. We need to celebrate. Know what we should do? Let's go into town and have a good meal in a real restaurant."

Elissa and I both thought it was too risky to go openly into Roma.

"Are you crazy, man?" I asked. "A carload of hippies just happens to stop in for dinner in the peyote capital of America? You don't think they'll put five and a hundred thousand together? Why don't we just have T-shirts made up that say 'Great Peyote Hunt of 1968'"?

"Yeah," added Elissa. "With 'Bust Me' on the back." But everyone else was for it.

"Shit, you guys act like we're knocking over Fort Knox or something," said Wendy. "These are simple ranch people. They don't know they're living in peyote heaven. They probably don't know what peyote is. If a cow can't eat it, they don't need to know about it."

"Yeah," agreed Mike. "They'll stare at us, sure, but as far as they know we're just a bunch of freaks passing through. They have no reason to suspect us of anything."

"Besides," put in Sean. "It's not like we're stealing anything from anybody. The cactus isn't doing anybody here any good. It has no value to them. We'll just come out here in the morning and be out of here before dark and no one will be the wiser."

It all made sense, and a good meal sounded great after a week of Twinkies and potato chips, so off we went to see the sights of Roma.

The town was just like a dozen others we had hurried through in south Texas - boring and uninviting. The people seemed to be mostly ranch hands, more than half of them Chicano. The downtown consisted of a general store/post office, a gas station, a used car dealership, a feed and tack store, and one Mexican restaurant. We pulled up and parked out front. We did the best we could to straighten ourselves up, then went in.

It was a clean place, with red checked tablecloths and lighted beer signs on the walls. Each table had dishes of salsa and pickled carrots and jalapenos. There were two other tables occupied, one by four older white guys and one by a Chicano family. They sat at opposite ends of the restaurant. Both conversations stopped when we came in. We took a table midway between them.

The waitress, a short middle-aged Chicana, brought us our menus and tried politely not to stare at us. We ordered chips and a pitcher of Dos Equis to start. At first we spoke in whispers, feeling very out of place. The other diners stared at us but no one said anything or looked particularly hostile, and after a while we loosened up.

By the second pitcher of beer we were feeling fine. There was good Mariachi music on the jukebox, the food was great, and the waitress even laughed with us once or twice.

"See?" said Sean. "There was nothing to worry about. These are good country people; salt of the earth. Living in cities has just made us paranoid."

"Yeah," Mike agreed. "They probably never heard of hippies. They don't know about making a sociopolitical statement with your personal style. You couldn't explain it to them in a million years. They probably just think we're from Mars or something."

Mike and Sean got into a thing with the jalapeños. We'd each tried a bite, so we knew they were hot. I was still sweating from the one I'd eaten. Sean said they must be about the hottest in the world.

"Nah, these are nothing," said Mike. "Back in Nam they have these tiny little red ones that are ten times hotter than these."

"Bullshit," said Sean. "No one could eat 'em."

"Hell, yes. I ate plenty of them. I ate 'em like peanuts."

"Come on. If they're ten times hotter than these, it'd be like eating ten of these all at once. That'd kill anybody."

"No, it wouldn't. You don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course it would. No one could eat ten jalapeños."

"I could."

"Shit. I'd like to see you try."

"Ten bucks?"

Sean looked at him. That was probably more than half of his life's savings right now. On the other hand, tomorrow he would be rich. He was also getting tired of Mike's stuff about how tough everything in Nam had been. Also he was getting drunk.

"Right." He dug a ten out of his pocket and smoothed it out on the table.

I secretly agreed it couldn't be done, but Mike didn't bat an eye. He matched the bet and pulled the jalapeños in front of him.

"Mike," said Elissa. "Don't be silly. They'll burn a hole right through you."

"Shut up," said Wendy. "I want to see this."

"Okay, ye of little faith, watch this," said Mike. He picked out a pepper and popped it in his mouth, chewing vigorously. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead, but he showed no sign of discomfort. He swallowed quickly and reached for another.

"One," he said.

He went on gamely enough through five, but his face was fiery red and sweat was running down into his eyes. He seemed to have lost his voice, but Sean took up the count.

"Six. Four more."

By this time the other patrons had noticed what was going on. Everyone stopped eating to watch as Mike ate seven, then eight. I heard the Mexican father mutter "Ay, caramba."

Mike looked terrible. His whole face was swollen. He could barely open his eyes. Tears and sweat dripped from his chin. We stared in fascination as he downed number nine.

"Nine. One to go," Sean tolled.

"Mike, for God's sake," I said, "it's not worth it." He picked out the smallest remaining pepper and peered at it half-blind, then dropped it on his tongue. He gave a gulp and swallowed it whole.

"Jesus Christ," said Sean. "The silly shit really did it."

Mike grinned triumphantly for a split second, then he sobered and looked startled. He jumped up, knocking over his chair, and bolted out the door. We rushed after him while the bunch of white guys broke up laughing behind us.

We found Mike bent over the curb, throwing up a violently green mess into the gutter. After he finally recovered, we led him back in and he drank the rest of the third pitcher of beer. Sean was heartless enough to bring up the point that he hadn't technically consumed the ten jalapeños, but the rest of us berated him and he paid up.

We quickly finished up our dinner, paid, and left. It occurred to us that perhaps we could have kept a lower profile by not throwing up on their town, but there seemed to be no harm done other than to Mike's digestive tract.

Sean drove back west, past the power line. He went quite a way, probably five miles, before he found an ungated dirt road. About a mile in, the rutted track ended at a tumble down cattle chute. He backed the car in against the rotted wood fence. It was a bitter cold night, with a clear dark sky. Sean and Wendy crawled in back with Mike, Elissa, and me. We filled the pipe extra full and added some hash and a chunk of opium. In honor of the occasion, I even sprinkled in most of the last of my DMT, dimethyl tryptamine, a short-lived but quite intense smokable psychedelic. We proceeded to get royally loaded, laughing and telling stories late into the night. Sometime in the wee hours we passed out, sprawled across one another as usual.

I woke with Elissa shaking me.

"Brian, wake up! There's a car coming!"

I sat up groggily. "What? Where? I don't see anything."

"It's behind that rise now. I couldn't sleep and then car lights came in the windows. I sat up in time to see it go down behind that hill. It's coming up this road, I know it." She sounded scared, and I couldn't blame her. Why would somebody be coming back on this old dirt road in the middle of the night? We woke up the others. Soon we were all lined up peering out the windows, our bare butts in a row. Sure enough, a moment later a car crested the hill and started bumping down toward us.

"Shit. How could anybody know we're here?"

"I don't know. Is the car locked?"

"The back door doesn't lock," said Wendy.

"What?" squeaked Elissa. "We can't keep them out?"

"Not if they want in," said Sean.

We watched terrified as the car approached. My only hope was that they were ranch hands going to work or something. Not likely. The lights came right at us, blinding us, then stopped, blocking us against the corral behind us. We couldn't get out even if we could get to the cab. We heard four car doors slam.

Ouch, four of them, at least. Not that a bunch of stoned out pacifist hippies were likely to fight off even one redneck bent on murder. Silhouettes moved across in front of the lights. There were long diagonal lines among the moving shadows.

"Oh, shit," said Wendy. "They've got guns." I suddenly felt even colder.

We heard footsteps crunching in the gravel on both sides of the car. We all held our breaths. Would they just start shooting?

Suddenly the back door was yanked open and two brilliant flashlights dazzled us. The girls screamed. The warm humid air of the car poured out and the icy night air rushed in. We pulled the bedding up to our necks. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer. I desperately tried to think what I could say or do to get out of this one.

"Out of the car, all of you!" growled a harsh voice.

What could we do? First Mike, then Sean and I scrambled out and stood naked and shivering in the lights. We couldn't see anything of our attackers, not even how many there were.

"Listen," I began, "we have women here. Let them stay in the..."

"Shut up! Everybody out!"

Finally Elissa and Wendy climbed out, trying to cover themselves. Someone whistled in the dark. Elissa was whimpering. All of us were shivering with cold and pure terror. Nothing makes you feel more helpless and vulnerable than being naked. We couldn't even run away into the desert like this. One of the lights dropped for a moment and I caught a glimpse of the end of a two-by-four waving menacingly. My heart sank even lower. What would it feel like to be beaten to death with that thing?

"What are you doing here?"

"We're just camping," said Sean. "We needed a place to sleep. We'll be leaving at dawn." We all prayed that was still true.

"Where are you from?"

"Different places. We're just travelling together."

"Where are you travelling to?"

"LA. Uh, Los Angeles."

"But you came into town from the west." How the hell did they know that?

These weren't just ranch hands who had stumbled on us. They'd known we were here and had come looking for us.

"Oh. Oh, yeah. We decided we couldn't make it to Laredo, so we turned back to camp."

"But first you stopped to eat at Ramona's."

"Yeah, we were hungry. Did we do something wrong?"

"Damn right you did something wrong. You came into Texas. We don't like your kind around here. You're not welcome here."

"We'd be happy to move along."

"Shut up! Do you own this car?"

"Yeah."

"This your wife?" The muzzle of an over-and-under thrust into the light, pointing between Elissa's breasts. She was crying.

"No. That's my lady over there. Wendy."

"She's with me," I said, and discovered my voice was breaking with fright.

One of the lights came up into my face. I squinted into the glare.

"Shit," said the voice. "With hair like that ah thought ya wuz a girl, but ah can see ya ain't." Someone else laughed in the dark. "I can't figure how faggoty scumbags like you guys have such good-looking women." I decided not to use any of several snappy retorts that came to mind. I figured we were only a few minutes or one smart-ass comment from a multiple rape and murder. Our lives depended on answering these questions satisfactorily. Who were these guys, and what did they want? I couldn't guess and didn't want to ask. The only part I was happy about was that the beating hadn't started yet.

"Listen to me, all of you," said their leader. "I don't know what you're doing here, but we don't like you and we don't want you around here. If we ever see you around here again, we'll kill you. Got that?"

I was so relieved to hear that they might see us again that I didn't even mind the death threat. It meant that they planned to let us go. But I was still afraid, especially for the women. They could still rape the girls just to teach us a lesson, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do to prevent it.

"So here's what's going to happen," the voice continued. We were all ears, believe me. "You're going to get in that car and drive west, out of Roma, out of Starr County, out of Texas. You won't stop, you won't slow down, you won't look back. We'll be watching to see that you do. You've got one minute before we stop feeling so friendly. Now git!"

We didn't have to be told twice. Sean and Wendy grabbed some blankets out of the back and jumped in the cab. The rest of us piled in the back. As our assailants went back to their car, I could see there were four of them. They all carried some kind of weapon. They started their car and started turning around, giving us room to get out.

It took Sean three tries to get the car started while the rest of us shouted at him, then it finally roared to life. He popped the clutch and we rolled against the back door as he shot down that rutted dirt track as fast as that old ambulance could go. He hit the highway and fishtailed as he headed west with the accelerator floored. The other car followed us a few hundred yards behind.

Elissa was still crying. We were all chilled to the bone and struggled into our clothes as we bounced around in the back. We found Sean and Wendy's clothes and passed them through the window with some extra blankets. We were all very aware of the lights following us.

The car followed us another ten minutes, then pulled over to the side and turned off its lights. Elissa was just shouting to Wendy that they were gone, when another car turned on its lights and pulled out behind us. They must have been waiting for us, stationed there to make sure we kept going. Somehow that scared me as much as anything else that had happened. These guys weren't just good old boys out to scare some hippies; they were organized. How many of them were there, for Christ's sake? It seemed as if the whole county was out to get us.

Sean drove on into the night. After another ten minutes or so the second car turned off its lights and stopped. We waited for another, but we seemed finally to be alone on the highway. Sean drove another fifteen minutes, then pulled over and he and Wendy joined us in back so they could get dressed. His teeth were chattering.

"Damn, man," said Mike. "That's the last time I do DMT. That shit's a bad trip."

"Can you believe those guys? What's their trip, anyway?"

"I was so scared I almost peed myself."

"Me too. I was afraid I'd have a pissicle down my leg."

"Damn, that was scary. Let's get going again."

"Oh, they've given up. We're okay here."

"You know what really bums me out?" said Mike. "We finally found the peyote fields, we know right where it is, and we just can't go pick it."

"Yeah," said Sean. "All that money just a few miles away and all we had to do was pick it up off the ground."

"All those buttons," I agreed sadly.

"Fuck the peyote," said Elissa. "Let's get out of here. I don't want to see those guys again."

"I knew we shouldn't have gone to that damn restaurant," said Wendy.

"We should have just camped out there, hiked in and picked it during the day, and beat it by dark."

"Yeah, no one could see us out in the fields. We'd be all right once we were in there."

"But we couldn't leave the car parked by the road. The boys would be waiting for us with nooses."

"Yeah, it's the car that's so conspicuous."

"Let's talk about it later," said Elissa again. "Let's go."

"You know the one place in the world those guys would not expect us to be tomorrow?" asked Mike. "Roma."

"They'd be right," said Wendy.

"But look. If we went back right now..."

"Went back?" Elissa screeched.

"Listen to me. If we went back now while it's still dark no one would ever know. Those guys have no clue what we were after, I'm sure of it. They'd never guess we'd go back, especially so soon. We could go to the road by the fields and drop three or four people off with lots of bags and containers."

"I can't believe you're even suggesting..." began Elissa.

"Then we could beat it the hell out with the car - get far, far away."

"Yeah," said Wendy, getting into it now. "The guys in the fields should be safe enough. That's just empty range land out there, and you can't see it from the road or the town."

"And the car could come back and pick them up right after dark," Mike continued. "We could be out of beloved Starr County by midnight with a carload of peyote and be flying high to LA all the way."

"And into druggie history with the boldest score ever." I was getting excited about it too now.

"That's not bold, that's stupid," complained Elissa. "You guys are crazy to even be talking about it. Those guys would kill us. They said so."

"Only if they catch us, and they won't even be looking for us. By now they're home in bed, screwing their fat old ladies and fantasizing about you girls. We won't even get within sight of the town. It'll be a quick raid, a surgical strike, a quick in and out."

"I'm worried about the quick in and out we'll get if those guys catch us."

"Let's vote on it," I said. "Who's for going back?" Everyone voted aye except Elissa.

"Okay, that's settled," said Mike. "Now, who's going to do the picking?"

"I need to drive the car," said Sean, though I couldn't see why he always insisted on doing all the driving. Nevertheless, it was his car and I was only a passenger.

"I'm having nothing to do with it," said Elissa. "I'm not getting out of the car until we're in California. I'll pee out the window from now on."

"Okay," I said. "So Wendy, Mike and I hit the desert before dawn and pick like mad all day."

"Uh, no, I don't think I want to go out there," said Wendy.

"Damn," said Mike. "We could pick lots more with three of us."

"She said she doesn't want to go, okay?" said Sean. Mike shrugged.

"Right, are we all agreed?" I asked.

"I agree you're all crazy," said Elissa, "but like I said, I'm not getting out of this car."

"Okay," said Mike. "So it's just Brian and me. Anybody got the time?"

Sean stuck his head through the window to see the dashboard clock. "It's four-thirty."

"The sun comes up about six-thirty in the winter, right? We want to get there while it's still completely dark so the car can be well away before first light. Say, five forty-five. It's about forty-five minutes back to the fields. That means we should start back at five, about half an hour from now."

That gave me pause. Now it wasn't something we were talking about doing tomorrow, it was right now. I tried to decide whether this was completely stupid or just terribly risky. Part of me wanted to do it just because it was wild and crazy. Part of me was terrified. But it was humiliating to be threatened and chased away by those assholes. We couldn't fight them, but this would salvage the purpose of our trip and prove, at least to me, that we weren't completely helpless against these Texas vigilantes. It seemed that with plenty of chutzpah and any luck at all it should work.

We were too wired to sleep, but we ate some sandwiches and crackers. Then we emptied everybody's duffel bag out, adding to the tangle of clothes and stuff that half filled the car. We found four or five sleeping bags that didn't have any large tears in them. Altogether we had ten bags, plus we could tie up our coats and make two more if necessary. It would be a load to carry, but Mike and I figured we could make several trips back to the road with the full bags. We would have about twelve hours in the fields, which should give us plenty of time.

At five o'clock Sean and Wendy got back in the cab and we headed back toward Roma. We were peering out the windows, watching for cars parked along the road, but there were none.

Mike's calculations had been slightly off. We had gone further than any of us had guessed in our high-speed flight. The sky was noticeably pink in the east before we came within sight of the high tension lines. The car slid to a stop beside the ramshackle gate. Elissa kissed me, and Mike and I tumbled out. The girls tossed all the bags out after us.

"We'll be back as soon as it gets completely dark!" shouted Sean through the window. Then the car kicked up gravel and dust as it made a fast U-turn and disappeared to the west. We threw all the bags over the gate, jumped after them, and dragged everything down under some bushes out of sight of the road to wait for light.

Nothing happened. We waited maybe fifteen minutes until there was enough light to be able to walk. We gathered up armloads of bags and trudged off into the desert.

It was rough country, thickly grown with chaparral, sagebrush, prickly pear, and mesquite, most of it about shoulder high. There was enough sandy space between the bushes to walk easily, but the bags were constantly getting caught on the thorns and we'd have to rip them free. We went maybe a mile before we got to the power lines, then threw everything down to take a break. Mike climbed part way up the tower.

"That's Roma over that next ridge," he said. "So this is the second ridge from town. If the peyote man was right, the fields should be just over that ridge to the west."

"Let's do it," I said. "I want to see the stuff. If we're wrong about this, we've risked our asses for nothing."

We picked up all the bags again and struggled on down the hill, following the power lines. We had to cross a steep arroyo at the bottom, then back up the other side. When we got to the top of the next ridge we were probably two miles from the road. The next valley looked exactly like the last.

"Is this it?" I asked. "Doesn't look any different."

"What did you expect, the leaning tower of peyote? They're small, man. Let's go. And keep your eyes open."

We started slowly down the hill, our eyes scanning the ground. The sun was just about to break the horizon, so the light was adequate.

There are a lot of small, low-growing cacti, we discovered. One in particular looks very similar to peyote, but doesn't have the little white dots of thorns. Since neither of us had ever seen live peyote on the hoof, we weren't exactly sure what it would look like. Mike saw the first one.

"Hey! Hey, Brian, here's one!"

I hurried over. There under a big prickly pear was a peyote button, looking just like the ones we'd eaten, but fresher and greener and rounder. It was three inches across and stuck up maybe an inch above the ground. I got out my pen knife and sliced it off at the ground. The cut root was yellow-green and oozed wet. We examined the button, passing it back and forth.

"That's peyote, all right. We're here, man. We are here!"

We grinned at each other. The sun came up behind us.

"Let's get picking."

We continued down the hillside, picking as we went. They got thicker and thicker, until the ground was literally covered with them. We could hardly put our feet down without stepping on one. Long before I reached the bottom of the slope I had filled the first bag. I tied it closed and left it, figuring we'd pick them up on our way back. The bag was heavy, and I realized we had a job ahead of us lugging all those bags back to the road. We'd have a hard time carrying more than one at a time.

I became more selective. The biggest ones grew way in under the prickly pears, a nasty spot because the ground there was covered with old dried prickly pear thorns. It was slow, awkward work, reaching in under the pear trees to dig out the big four- and five-inch buttons. But they filled the bags faster than the little ones.

Mike and I had each filled two more bags by the time we reached the next arroyo. At this rate we'd be loaded by noon and should have plenty of time to drag them all back to the road before dark. This damn caper was going to work.

"You know," said Mike, invisible a few bushes away. "I just remembered. The Indians say you're supposed to eat the first buttons you find right away to appease the gods of peyote."

"Oh, great," I called back. "Now you tell me. What if you don't?"

"I don't know. The gods bring you bad luck, I guess."

"Or bad trips. Maybe we should eat one now just to be sure."

"Sounds okay to me." He walked over and we sat down together on the sand. We each took out the biggest buttons we'd found recently. They were giants; as big as my hand and twice as thick.

"We thank the gods for sending us this powerful magic," said Mike, holding up the buttons like offerings. "We eat them with respect and apologize for killing your sacred cactus."

We cut off the fuzz and ate them like apples. They weren't as slimy and disgusting fresh, but the taste was if anything even stronger than we'd remembered - and we'd remembered it a lot. But in the solemn spirit of the ceremony we chewed them up thoroughly. Then we figured the gods wouldn't mind a little chaser to kill the taste and had melted Reese cups and long drinks of water. Then we went back to picking, working up the next slope.

We were nearly to the top of the ridge and were just filling our next bags when I heard an engine. Mike was further up the slope and a hundred yards to my right. I saw him straighten up and look around. The sound came again, louder. Suddenly a light green Jeep topped the first ridge. We both hit the dirt and peered through the brush. The Jeep disappeared into the intervening valley, heading our way.

"Shit," I yelled. "Who's that?"

"I don't know, but they'll be over that hill in a couple of minutes and we better be out of sight." Mike threw his half-full sleeping bag over his shoulder and bounded off through the brush to our left, circling around to get behind the hill. I did the same on a lower track. I could hear the Jeep's engine again, obviously working hard climbing the hill. We plowed wildly ahead, tearing our clothes and skin on the sharp thorns on every bush, our feet sliding on the steep gravelly slope, the heavy bags bouncing on our backs. The engine sound came louder, and I knew it was coming over the hill behind us.

Then we were around the hill, out of sight. We continued running, angling downward now, trying to get to the arroyo at the bottom, which offered at least a hope of finding shelter in this open country. The sound of the Jeep got louder again. Any second it was going to come out on top of our hill and we'd be dead men. I dropped the bag and ran as hard as I could, my breath rasping in my lungs. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mike doing the same thing, though he was still a hundred yards or so above me and to my right. Then beyond him I saw a glint of light at the top of the hill. We both threw ourselves down into the dirt.

I scrambled in under a big mesquite, ignoring the thorns. The engine idled, then stopped. I was still close enough to hear the ping of metal as the engine cooled.

Looking up through the brush, I could see a man get out of the Jeep. He had on a green uniform and a wide flat-brimmed hat like a ranger. I was relieved - at least it wasn't the vigilantes we'd encountered during the night.

The man looked down the hillside in our direction, then reached into the Jeep and brought out a pair of binoculars. For several long minutes he scanned the hill, looking right towards us. I was pretty sure he hadn't seen us when he crested the hill, and there was still a good chance he wouldn't find us. There were thousands of bushes on that hill, and only two of them sheltered terrified hippies.

Then he put down the glasses and started walking right toward us. I couldn't believe it. I only caught a few glimpses of him after that, but each time he was closer and still walking right at me. I slithered deeper under the mesquite. Then I heard a voice, close enough for me to clearly hear what was said.

"What you doing down there, boy?"

My heart sank. He'd found Mike! But I still harbored a faint hope that he didn't know there were two of us. I hoped I could count on Mike to be cool.

"I...I...," I heard Mike stammer. "Um, picking fruit?"

I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing or crying, I wasn't sure which.

"Picking them pye-oaties, looks to me."

Damn. This country cop was smarter than I had counted on. I had been making up excuses for trespassing.

"Where's your buddy?"

"Nobody here but me, officer, sir," said Mike. Thanks, brother.

"Waal, let's just mosey down here a little farther, what say? Come on." I lay trembling as I heard them coming through the brush, their footsteps getting louder and louder. Finally I saw black boots come around a big prickly pear and walk right up to the mesquite where I lay. The guy must have built-in radar for hippies.

"Waal, looky here. Another one. Come on out of there, you rascal." I squirmed out from under the bush and stood up. The dude was tall and lean and weathered, with none of the pot belly and tobacco chewing I associated with Southern cops. Then I saw his arm patch - Immigration and Naturalization! This wasn't some country cop. This was El Migre!

He led us back to the Jeep, stopping to pick up the bags we'd dropped. I noticed one of our other bags in the back of the Jeep. They no longer contained a fortune in great dope, I realized - they held evidence. Hell, I'd had friends get fifteen years in the state pen for one marijuana seed. What did you get for hundreds of peyote buttons? I could already hear the judge: Did you obtain any evidence of their guilt? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. No doubt about it. We were goners.

He sat us down on the ground, one beside each front wheel, then hand-cuffed us, running the cuffs through the holes in the wheels. He got himself a drink of water from a cooler in the back, then got on his radio.

"Unit nine to base."

I heard the radio crackle, but couldn't make out the other side of the conversation.

"I got two hippies out here. Been picking them peyotes. Yuh. Yuh. Okay. Well, I'll just stand by out here till you get back to me. Okay. Ten-four."

He came around then and gave each of us a swallow of water. It was after noon now, and hot in the sun. We sat dejectedly, too depressed to talk.

"Hey, officer," I heard Mike call from the other side of the Jeep.

"Yeah?"

"How did you know we were out there?"

"Plane spotted you an hour ago. Damn river's just over that hill there. We always patrol this stretch with the plane. He said he saw two people, I come out to pick up the wetbacks and find you two. Just lucky, I guess."

Some luck, I thought. Maybe this was because we hadn't eaten the first buttons we found. Shit, that's right. We should be coming on to a powerful trip any minute. My stomach was already feeling queasy. Oh, great. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse. The radio crackled again. He thumbed the mike.

"Unit nine. Hi, chief. Two of them. Yuh. Yuh. The same ones we talked to last night. Yuh, the hairy one and the bald one. No sign of the others or the car."

My despair reached new depths. I'd been relieved to see that it was a cop, not a vigilante. Worse yet, it was both. Well, they'd already told us what would happen if they caught us again. I had a sudden image of him just taking off in the Jeep, flailing us to death until there was nothing left but bloody handcuffs.

"Yuh, so what do we do with 'em? Wanna give Ramon a call? Okay, I'll bring 'em in for now. Out."

"Okay, into the car," he told us, freeing us from the wheels. We clambered into the back of the Jeep, sitting on top of our bags of buttons. He handcuffed us to the grab rail behind the seat and took off. It was all we could do to keep from being thrown out of the car. It seemed to take forever to get back to the road, but finally the jouncing stopped and he pulled out onto the road, heading east, through Roma, and beyond.

"Where are we going?" I shouted above the wind.

"Border Patrol at Rio Grande City," he called over his shoulder. I decided that was good news. If they were going to kill us, it would probably have been back there in the desert. Now all we had to worry about was spending the rest of our lives in jail.

We rolled along the south Texas highway, the sun bright above us, the wind whipping my hair. It was rather pleasant, probably enhanced by the fact that the peyote was really coming on strong now. It felt almost like an outing, a ride in a convertible. But I was on my way to jail. This could be my last ride in the open air for many years, perhaps for ever.

The drug underground had legends about many of the famous prisons that had swallowed up so many of our comrades. I knew some bad stories about Joliet in Illinois, but everybody seemed to agree that the worst pen in the country was Huntsville, Texas, where sadistic guards with shotguns and cattle prods drive the prisoners as they pick cotton in the noonday sun until they drop. Mose Allison wrote a song about the eleven-foot cotton sacks you drag with you. Now I was going to find out what that was like.

We arrived in Rio Grande City. The officer parked there and went in, leaving us alone in the Jeep. A crowd of Chicano kids gathered around us.

"Hey, heepies. What you do?"

"Nothing," said Mike. "The capitalist overlords are trying to crush the resistance movement, just as they oppress minority peoples everywhere. But they can never win. If they kill us, a hundred more will rise up in our place. We are everywhere, living in their cities, infiltrating their armed forces, sleeping with their daughters. Death to the pigs! You are our brothers in arms, noble sons of Moctezuma. Set us free and we will lead you to freedom."

All of us stared at Mike in amazement. I looked at the kids and they looked at me.

"Sheet. These guys is loco," said one, and they wandered off.

Jim came out of the office and climbed back into the Jeep. He turned and looked at us.

"There's no Federal law against picking peyote, so we're turning you over to the Starr County sheriff." We drove off again.

I didn't know if that was good or bad. As alienated as I was from the American government, its laws, foreign policy, and wars, I was still young and American enough to think that it abided by its own laws. I thought I'd at least get a trial. But I had bad images of southern sheriffs, usually guffawing along with the other good old boys as somebody was lynched.

We turned off on a side street and parked behind an old courthouse. We were led up the back stairs to a barred door.

A Chicano man in a sheriff's uniform came to the door. He was short and round and had a pleasant, friendly face.

"Hi, Jim. These the two Bob called me about?"

"Yuh. Got three bags of cactus out in the car, too."

"Damn. What am I going to do with that? It's Saturday. It'll start to smell before I can get 'em to court."

"Dunno, Luis. But it's evidence. You gotta keep it."

"You can put it in our cell," said Mike. "We don't mind."

I thought that crack might result in a gun butt to the head, but to my surprise they both laughed.

"Don't suppose you'd smell any the worse for it," said Jim. The sheriff led us in and put us in a holding tank while he and Jim did the transfer paperwork. Jim took off our handcuffs, which was a real relief. We looked around at our new home.

It was clean and well-lighted and there was a regular toilet, not one of those stand-up commodes you get in some jails. It was a long rectangular cage built against two brick walls. Through the bars we could look through an open door into what appeared to be the sheriff's living room. His kids were watching TV. I thought it strange that he lived in the courthouse next to the jail, but I supposed it must be convenient. After a while Jim left and Luis went back into his house. He left the door open, maybe so we could watch TV, we weren't sure.

Mike and I talked about our situation and admitted we were dead meat. There wasn't a hint of a defense in sight. On the other hand, we weren't being mistreated and we were in the most comfortable digs we'd been in for a long while. It felt nice to relax in bed and chat with Mike. Except for an occasional paranoid fantasy, he'd been pretty quiet on the trip down and I didn't have a feel for him at all, but with nothing else to do we talked a lot.

He'd been just an ordinary kid, growing up in LA, messing around with pot and rock'n'roll, listening to Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, gradually getting his head straightened around from the bending they put on it in school. Then something terrible happened: he graduated from high school. Within two weeks he was on his way to Indochina, as they called it then.

He'd gotten off the plane in Da Nang and was sitting around on a pile of luggage with a bunch of the other recruits, looking around at the strange new country and talking about how hot it was. Then a mortar shell landed and blew the guy he was talking to into hamburger and messed up a bunch more. Those guys were just put back on the same plane and shipped home, one in a very nearly empty body bag. After that, he said, it got worse. He didn't tell me too many more details, but the way he said it made me glad he didn't want to talk about it any more.

He'd survived a year, then gone off the deep end and been shipped home on a Section Eight. Again, he didn't give me the details, but he did say other guys were shooting off their toes so they could go home, so I guess it isn't easy to get a Section Eight. He got off the plane in Seattle and couldn't imagine just going home and hanging with the guys, so he hit the road. Now, at nineteen, he was flat broke and was heading for home. Or he had been before this little contretemps with the law.

Later a wonderful smell wafted from the sheriff's house - home-cooked Mexican food. Our mouths watered. We hadn't eaten since the meal at Ramona's the night before. We expected somebody to pour a bucket of swill into the cell or something, but soon a nice-looking Chicana lady came out with two huge steaming plates of enchiladas and beans. I'm sure it was the same thing her family was eating.

"Gracias, Senora, gracias," called Mike as she was leaving. "Delicioso!" She turned and smiled.

"Dos cervezas, por favor," I tried, and she laughed with us before returning to her family.

"Damn, man," I mumbled with my mouth full of beans, "is this a great jail or what?"

"Best time I ever did," agreed Mike. We ate well and slept soundly in soft clean beds for a change.

The sheriff brought us our breakfast (machaca and fried eggs) in the morning.

"Well, boys," he said. "Today's Sunday and there's no court today. The judge will see you first thing Monday morning. In the meantime I'll let you out one at a time to take showers and get cleaned up. My wife will wash your clothes if you want."

That was the first time I realized that it was at least a week since my last bath and I'd been living, sleeping, and running around in the desert all that time in the same clothes. I bet all of us in that ambulance must have been pretty rank. Fortunately, we all smelled just as bad, so nobody minded.

As neither of us had other clothes, the sheriff loaned us a couple of his son's jeans and shirts. By the afternoon we were bathed and had clean clothes and I had put my hair in a conservative waist-length braid. We had two more great meals and spent a while chatting with the sheriff's young boy who came into the jail to stare at us. We were feeling almost happy about being busted.

The next morning the sheriff took us down the hall to the courtroom. Now we were nervous again. Huntsville was still a possibility. There were five or six other people in the courtroom, but I didn't know if they were awaiting trial or had just come to watch a hanging. The judge came in, a rather fierce-looking older dude with a white moustache. The sheriff led us up before him.

"State of Texas versus Crawford and Simpson, your honor," said the sheriff. "Possession of a controlled substance."

The judge looked us up and down curiously. I felt quite sure he'd never seen a hippie outside of Time magazine.

"What substance?" he asked.

"Peyote, your honor," said the sheriff.

"What the hell's that?"

"It's a cactus, your honor."

"A cactus? What do they use it for?"

"It's a narcotic, your honor."

"A narcotic cactus? Never heard of it." He stared at us. "Where you boys from?"

"I'm from Ohio, your honor," I said. "I'm a college student, majoring in geology. I'm on vacation, between terms." He cocked an eyebrow at that. I guess I didn't look like a college boy to him. I was certainly no Aggie.

"I'm from Los Angeles, sir," said Mike. "I'm a GI, a combat veteran just returned from serving my country in Vietnam." I thought that was a nice touch. Mike was handling himself well. I'd been afraid he'd start off about capitalist oppression.

"And if I may be allowed to make one statement?" he continued. My heart sank. Huntsville, here we come.

"Peyote, or Lophophora williamsii, is not a narcotic. It is an hallucinogen, sacred to the Native American peoples, and is..."

"Hold it right there, boy. Sheriff, have you looked up the statutes on this stuff?"

"All I know is it's a controlled substance under article 7449."

"Okay. That's all I need to know. Where's your evidence?"

"The INS picked them up down by the river. They had bags of the stuff. It's out back. I can bring it in, but it's gone off. You wouldn't like it in here."

"No, that's okay. Looks like we got you boys dead to rights. Do you deny you were picking this... what is it?"

"Lophophora williamsii" began Mike.

"Whatever. Do you deny it?"

"No, your honor," we both said. What was the point of denying it?

"Okay, that's it. I find you guilty of possession of this here controlled substance. I fine you both twenty-five dollars. Pay the clerk and get out of town."

I couldn't believe it. Twenty-five bucks? I thought it would be twenty-five years. The judge turned over a paper on his desk and started reading the next case.

"Uh, your honor, sir?" Mike said.

The judge scowled over his glasses at him.

"I don't have twenty-five dollars."

I shook my head. "Me either."

"Well, the jail rate is five dollars a day. If you can't pay the fine, you'll have to do five days in jail. Do you still claim you don't have the money?"

"Yes, sir," we both nodded. "We'll take the time, your honor," I said.

"Dammit, judge," said the sheriff. "Do I have to feed these locos for five more days?"

"That's the law, Luis. They're not above the law, and neither are we." He turned back to us. "I sentence you each to five days in Starr County Jail. That's until five PM on Friday. Take 'em away, Luis."

The sheriff glumly led us back to our cell. When he was gone, I turned and grinned at Mike.

"Boy, he really threw the book at us, didn't he?"

"Damn," yelled Mike. "This is great! Five days of this great Mexican food."

We flopped on our beds and relaxed, free of fear for the first time since coming into Texas. Our main concern now was what had happened to the others. Also, of course, all our stuff was in the car. We decided we'd seen the last of it all.

But late that afternoon the sheriff stuck his head in to tell us we had a visitor. Puzzled, we went to the bars. Elissa came out of the sheriff's apartment, looking scared but beautiful.

"Baby!" I yelled, "What are you doing here?"

"The police told us you were here," she said.

"But how did you ask them? Where have you been?"

"After we dropped you guys off we drove west a few miles, then Sean decided we'd go down to theriver and go fishing. There's a big lake there, Falcon Reservoir. At least it would give us an excuse for being there if anybody saw us. In late afternoon a Border Patrol truck showed up. They came over and said our friends were in Rio Grande City jail and we could visit you the next day if we wanted to. They were really nice."

"How did they know you were there? We didn't even know."

"I don't know. We couldn't figure it out either. They didn't hassle or us search us or even question us. They did suggest we not stay in south Texas any longer. It was spooky, like they knew everything we had done since we came."

"I know," I agreed. "They've got an organization here. It's weird."

"It's the CIA," said Mike. "They run this big cocaine smuggling operation from South America and use the money to prop up puppet dictatorships in Central America. They need this border in their control. Nothing happens within a hundred miles of the border that they don't know about. They've got El Migre and the Border Patrol in their pay, too."

We looked at him blankly. Where did Mike get all that stuff? I thought it unlikely then, figuring it was another of his crackpot conspiracy theories, though later events have shown that he was probably right.

"So what are you going to do?" I asked Elissa.

"Sean and Wendy want to leave right away. They've heard there's a hippie scene in Fort Worth and they want to go check it out. I want to stay with you."

"You can't stay here alone for five days until we get out. You should stay with them."

"But how will we get together again? And what about your stuff?"

"You keep it. When we get out we'll go to Fort Worth, too. I'll try to find you. If there is a scene there it can't be too big. Put the word out about where you're staying and I'll find you. If we can't hook up, sell my stuff for what you can get and buy a bus ticket to California. The guitar should be worth that in a pawn shop."

"But how will you get to Fort Worth? We've only got twenty dollars left."

"Let's split it. Mike and I can hitch there when we get out."

Elissa wasn't happy about going off by herself. She'd never really liked Sean and Wendy and thought she couldn't trust them. But she sure couldn't stay in Rio Grande City, so she agreed to the plan.

"I'll go get the money," she said. "Anything else you want out of your stuff?"

"Yeah," I said. "My heavy coat." Then a wild thought struck me. "Oh, yeah. And my sample case."

"What? In here? Are you crazy?"

"No, I think it'll be okay. The sheriff is really nice and doesn't hassle us at all. He only comes in once a day to make sure we're still here. Besides, I don't want you holding while you're travelling with Sean and Wendy. They might try to rip you off."

"You really think it's safe?" she asked, not at all convinced.

"Sure," said Mike. "It'll be cool. They'd never suspect it. They already searched us when we came in. They're not going to search us on the way out."

"Well, okay, if you're sure." She went back out to the car where Sean and Wendy were waiting impatiently. They were spooked about being at the jail and just wanted to get out of town. In a few minutes Elissa was back with my pea coat over her arm.

"Your money's in the pocket," she said as she pushed it through the bars.

"Thanks, babe," I said. "You're a doll."

She looked at me sadly. Her lip was trembling.

"I can't stand to leave you here like this," she said, her voice breaking.

"It's the only way, babe. You'll be all right. I'll see you in a week in Fort Worth. Find a nice safe crash house, put out the word, and wait for me." I gave her a long kiss and a squeeze through the bars and she hugged me back hard. Then she went out, turning at the door to say goodbye to Mike and throw me a kiss. The sheriff never reappeared. God, I love lax security.

I checked the pockets of my coat. There was my ten dollar bill, tucked in with the little cookie tin I carried my stash in. It was filled with four or five plastic boxes of various drugs. We were set.

The first thing both of us did was to write home for cash. I had a joint checking account with my mother that still had a couple hundred in it, so I asked her to close it out and wire me the money. I'm sure she was really pleased to see a jail as my return address. Mike wrote to his mom in LA, asking her to send what she could.

When the sheriff stopped in at dinner time we asked him for some smoke. He came back a few minutes later with a bag of Bull Durham, some papers, and a box of matches. He was a fine man. After another wonderful meal we smoked a few joints, carefully exhaling out the window.

After dinner the sheriff came back to say we had another visitor. We looked at each other in surprise. Who in the world could it be?

A kid about sixteen came in and sat on the bench just outside the bars. He was tall and skinny and had bad acne, but he had an intelligent look in his eye. He smiled shyly at us.

"Hi. I'm Billy."

"Pleased to meet you, Billy," Mike said. "I'm Mike and this is Brian."

Billy reached through the bars to shake hands. Mike gave him the hippie handshake, which only confused him. I gave him five.

"I guess you're wondering why I'm here," Billy said, and we nodded.

"I'm a freshman out at the local JC," he began. "My girlfriend Alicia was in court for speeding yesterday and she saw you there. She'd never seen anybody like you guys around here."

"Nobody like us has ever been here before," said Mike.

"Well, she told me about you. She knew I was interested in hippies and stuff. Are you guys really hippies?" He asked it with such hope in his face. Far be it from me to disillusion a kid.

"That's right, Billy, we're the real thing," I said with a straight face.

"Why?" asked Mike. "Are you doing a term paper on hippies or something?"

"No, nothing like that," replied Billy earnestly. "I like hippie stuff." He said it in a low voice, as if he might be overhead and immediately committed. It was like saying out loud that he liked to molest sheep or something.

"Far out!" I said, and he glowed to hear somebody actually speak hippie talk in his presence.

"What do you know about hippies?" asked Mike. "I mean, how did you hear about us?"

"I read all the magazines. There's been articles about hippies in Life and Time and even Reader's Digest. I've cut out every article I've found. And sometimes on TV they show hippies demonstrating or dancing or something. And I listen to the Beatles and even Bob Dylan, though I don't always understand all the words."

"No one does," Mike said. "That's the point."

"Why do you like hippies?" I asked.

"Oh, there's so cool! I hate this town. It's so dumb and backwards. I mean, you can't believe this place. It's as square as you can get. I think it would be so cool to grow my hair long and go to San Francisco and join a rock and roll band. But my mom won't even let me grow my hair so it touches my ears."

"Yeah, old people just don't understand, do they?" I said. "They want everybody to look the same."

Billy was beaming with joy to have someone agree with him, to understand his desire to be different. He needed so little to make him happy.

"Where are you guys from?" he asked.

"I'm from Haight-Ashbury," said Mike. "Brian's from the East Village."

"Oh, wow! No shit?" gasped Billy. I frowned at Mike.

"Hey, man," I said. "Billy's all right, dig it? We don't have to jive him, man, he's one of us. I'm from Ohio. Mike's from LA."

"Wow! You mean Los Angeles? Wow." Billy was easily impressed, but I could see he was thrilled to hear me say he was one of us.

"Are there other kids around here who think like you do?"

"Not many. Most of 'em are redneck crackers. They just want to ranch or sell used cars like their dads. But there's a few of us out at the JC. We get together and listen to cool records and wear headbands and stuff. Just in the room, you know? We'd get kicked out if anybody knew."

"Bold stuff," said Mike. "You ever get any good shit?"

"What?"

"You know. Shit. Dope. Weed. Smoke. Grass."

Billy's voice sank to a whisper. "You mean, like... pot?"

"Yeah. Or acid, hash, speed, anything?"

"Nah. Where would we get anything like that around here? Everybody just drinks Pearl or Lone Star. There's none of that stuff in Texas."

"Not around here?" Mike raved. "Why, my ignorant young friend, you are fortunate enough to be sitting in the middle of one of the best sources of Lophophora williamsii in the world."

"Huh?"

"Peyote, my boy, peyote. The food of the gods."

"Peyote? You mean that little cactus?"

"Exactly."

"You mean you can smoke peyote?"

"You don't smoke it, you eat it."

"With caution," I added. I had visions of an entire cell of novice hippies offing themselves on strychnine. "You shouldn't do it alone the first time."

"Really? Peyote? Shit, it grows everywhere around here!" Mike and I looked at each other.

"Really?" I asked. "Everywhere?"

"Oh, hell, yes. I got some out in my back yard."

"Then what," Mike asked me, "were we doing risking our necks out there by the river in CIA-controlled country?" I could only shrug.

"Wow, this is neat," said Billy. "Is that why you came here?"

"All the way from Boulder, Colorado," Mike answered. "Just so we could visit your pleasant little pokey here, as it turns out."

"Aw, Sheriff Delgado, he's okay. He'll treat you all right."

"He sure has so far. Compared to the way we've been living, this is a palace."

"Oh, yeah, that's the other thing I wanted to ask you. Is there anything I can get for you guys?"

"I'm afraid our resources are exhausted," said Mike with affected dignity.

"Oh, that's okay. I can get you some stuff."

"Well, I'd like something to read," I said. "A magazine or a paperback or something."

"I'd sure like some candy," added Mike. "Maybe some Hershey bars or a Twinkie?"

"Sure, I can do that. Anything else?"

"Yeah," said Mike. "Can you bring us some of that peyote out of your yard?"

"Yeah, sure," he said, obviously pleased to be helping our hippie endeavors. I think it never occurred to him that he could get into trouble smuggling drugs into jail. He left after some more conversation.

The boy was as good as his word. He returned in the morning with a full grocery bag. As usual, he simply walked into the jail. The bag was overflowing with reading materials and candy of all sorts. In the bottom were a half-dozen peyote cactus. He must have dug them up roots and all with a shovel. They looked like green lumpy carrots.

"My boy, you're a prince," said Mike.

Billy watched wide-eyed as we cleaned the peyote with our spoons and ate it. He looked as if he were watching us take the sacrament. Which we were, sort of. We chatted for hours with Billy as we munched the candy. He had to go to school before the buttons came on, but he promised to come back later. We assured him it would be all right if he brought some friends.

We spent that day in cosmic realms, totally unaffected by our surroundings. We felt safe and secure there. It really was a nice little jail. Certainly the best one I ever tripped in.

Billy came by to visit us during his lunch break from school. He brought his girl friend Alicia and another guy, Ron. I felt a little like a pet hippie in a zoo as he introduced us to his friends. He was clearly glorying in being so tight with two of our alien species.

I kept eyeing Alicia. She was really a good-looking girl and two days in the slammer was already working on my libido - what must it be like for lifers? I noticed that Ron was looking at her a lot, too. I thought she was aware of both of us and was enjoying the attention. Mike as usual seemed to have no interest in anything on the physical plane.

We chatted with them for an hour, then they had to get back. Billy promised to visit again after school - with more candy, as we had finished the first load.

"Your friends are welcome again, if they want," I said, meaning Alicia of course. It didn't seem likely to lead anywhere, but we had managed to get just about everything else we wanted in that jail.

They all did visit us that evening. They told us about their lives. They all seemed fairly comfortable and well-off. I suspected that most local kids didn't get a chance even at junior college. So these were Rio Grande City's best and brightest. And as usual, it is the people with leisure and no responsibilities who were interested in social change, not the ones who need it the most.

All three of them were bright and articulate, but their education was sorely lacking. I wrote out a truly eclectic reading list that included Hermann Hesse, Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Eldridge Cleaver, Aldous Huxley, Baba Ram Dass (nee Richard Alpert), Bertrand Russell, Richard Farina, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Bernard Shaw. Mike gave them a discography of Jefferson Airplane, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Grateful Dead, and Donovan. We sent them back to their circle of Texas-avant-garde friends, bearing these seeds of subversion to carry throughout south Texas. We urged them to have the lists photocopied and posted on bulletin boards. We felt like a cross between union organizers and evangelists.

Billy drove to Laredo that same evening to a bookstore that carried some of those books and still somehow survived. It was exciting to be exposing these eager kids to the tenets of our lives and the kids were as thrilled as middle-aged virgins to be finally finding out what it was all about. They knew about headbands and bellbottoms, but they hadn't a clue about the philosophical basis of what the hippies were doing. By Wednesday they were cutting classes to attend our school for subversion.

We talked about the war, and Mike curdled their blood with a story or two of what the U.S. was doing in Southeast Asia. He shocked them to their roots when he told them that America was fighting on the wrong side, supporting a tyrannical regime against the democratic will of its people. He laid on them some of his conspiracy theories, from the FBI killing JFK to the CIA-run cocaine trade in Latin America.

We explained about the military-industrial complex which Eisenhower had warned the country about, but which had since taken over every aspect of government, from foreign aggression to spying on and oppressing its own citizens; of reviving prohibition to jail anyone who wanted to be different, to be free.

We talked about the sexual revolution; how the pill had finally freed women from being in men's power; how hippies believed all races, nations, and genders were equal. We told them how the government was secretly thwarting civil rights legislation and enforcement, fanning the flames of racial hatred to keep its various oppressed peoples at each other's throats, unable to form an organized resistance.

We explained how the U.S was using a thousand times its fair share of the world's resources, knowingly poisoning the planet with toxics, nuclear waste, and atmospheric nuclear testing, all for immediate profits. We pointed out how the U.S supports its arms merchants by stirring up regional wars, then selling arms to both sides. We showed them the suicidal lunacy of the arms race.

Those three Texas kids absorbed all this in open-mouthed astonishment. They had never heard any one of these ideas, let alone all at once. It was like force-feeding them. We felt an urgency - after all, we only had three more days to convert them, to make them unwilling to serve their masters, to go out and proselytize in their turn. Who knows? Perhaps they could save the benighted state of Texas. Is this how Lenin felt in the Moscow train station?

Wednesday evening Sheriff Delgado brought us our dinner.

"You boys get ready tomorrow. I'm releasing you first thing in the morning."

"What?" I said. "We're in till Friday evening."

"I don't care. I'm tired of feeding you. And I don't know what all you're telling those kids all day, but I think their parents will be happy to have you out of town, too."

"But our money hasn't come in yet," I said. "We can't leave town till it comes."

"That's not my problem, is it? You're on your own tomorrow morning."

"No way!" said Mike. "The judge gave us five days and we're doing five days. We know our rights."

"I'm telling you you're out!"

"Oh, yeah? What's the penalty for petty shoplifting in this town?"

"What? Why, it's a twenty-five dollar fine."

"Or five days in jail, huh? Our money should be here by then."

"Hey, wait a minute. Are you threatening..."

"I'm just saying it's going to be hard for us to stay in this town without any money."

The sheriff glared at us for a few minutes, considering.

"Thursday night," he growled. "No later."

"It's cold out there at night. Friday morning."

"Okay, okay! Friday morning."

"After breakfast."

"After breakfast!" He stormed out and slammed the door, rather maliciously, I thought, as it meant we couldn't watch M*A*S*H with his family that evening.

The next day we did what we could to complete the kids' course at the underground university. They were coming along well. I discussed Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me with Billy and Alicia, while Mike and Ron compared and contrasted Gnossos Papadopoulos and the protagonist of Jimi Hendrix' Hey Joe.

When we told them we were being released in the morning they seemed crestfallen.

"What will you do? Where are you going?"

"Well, nowhere until our money arrives. Do you have any idea where we could stay for a few days, very inconspicuously? It doesn't have to be fancy. Just a roof over our heads."

"Hey, that gives me an idea," said Alicia. "Billy, what about the skating rink?"

"That is just a roof," said Ron.

"There's the office," said Billy. "At least it has walls."

"Skating rink?" I asked. "Sounds like a hard place to hide in."

"Naw, it's closed," said Billy. "A few years ago my old man tried to start a roller skating rink on some land he owned about a mile west of town. It's just a wood floor and a roof. It never really made it with the kids and it folded a year or two later."

"Does anybody ever go there?" Mike asked.

"Well, sometimes," Alicia said with a giggle and a look at Billy.

"Sometimes kids go there at night," said Billy with a shy grin. "There's this old mattress somebody hauled out there."

"I get the picture," I said. "And the office?"

"It's always locked. But I know where Dad keeps the key."

"That sounds great," I said. "How do we get there?"

"We can take you."

"Perfect. Can you pick us up in the morning?"

"Well, I suppose we better go to school. They might be getting suspicious that we've all been out sick all week. I can pick you up at lunch time."

So we were set. In the morning we took advantage of the showers and Mrs. Delgado's wonderful cooking one more time, then the sheriff released us. We thanked him and told him we would recommend his jail to all our friends.

At nine o'clock we were standing on the front steps of the Starr County courthouse, our sole belongings a fistful of one dollar bills in my pocket. We walked to the Western Union office, in the back of the Chevy dealership, but our money still wasn't there. We laid low in a nearby highway culvert until noon, then returned to the courthouse. A few minutes later Billy and Alicia wheeled up in a big American car. We clambered in back and lay down on the seat as Billy took off. A few minutes later he pulled off the highway into a gravel parking lot.

The skating rink was a big sagging wood floor with a roof of steel trusses and corrugated iron. Across the front gable we could just make out the faded words "Rio Grande Rollarama". An eight-by-eight office in the front left corner had a plank or two missing from the walls. A door stood chained and padlocked under a sign that said "Tickets" in olde west lettering.

Billy pulled a rusted key out of his jeans and unlocked the door. The inside was dark and musty and the floor was littered with trash and rat droppings.

"I love what you've done with the place," Mike said. Billy looked embarrassed.

"It's fine," I reassured him.

"You sure? It's kinda messy."

"Sure, we've been in worse places than this. It's only another day or two."

"We've got to get back to school," said Alicia. "We'll come visit you tonight, okay?"

"That'd be great. Thanks a lot."

Mike found an old broom and we swept the floor. I checked out the mattress to see if we wanted to bring it in, but it was filthy and vermin-infested. Those kids must be desperate to screw on that thing. We found a roll of canvas awning material and made a rough bed out of that. Then we got loaded and hung out. At dusk I walked to a little market and bought two cans of refried beans and a pile of tortillas. Four dinners for under a dollar. It made me nervous walking on the highway. I kept having images from Easy Rider of a shotgun coming out the window of a passing truck. But no one hassled me except for one beer can thrown at my head and another truck that swerved off the road at me. They didn't seem to be serious murder attempts, so I figured it was just normal South Texas boys fooling around.

Mike and I had dinner cold, then did two more of Billy's buttons. We got nervous about somebody coming by to screw and finding us there. We didn't like the idea of being trapped in that office with only one door, so we climbed up into the rafters above the rink. It was actually quite comfortable up there. We were still there an hour or two later when Billy, Alicia, and Ron showed up. They climbed up to join us. There in the darkness we initiated them in the joys of good hashish. They loved it, and we spent the entire evening giggling like children.

It was great fun, but it was also an important part of their education. First, of course, it was an integral ritual of the culture: the ceremonial filling and lighting of the bowl; the fraternal passing of the warm, glowing pipe; and above all the drug rap, detailing the lore, history, and probable source of the drug and anecdotes about memorable characters and experiences on hash.

Secondly, it was good for them to get stoned, to see that being stoned is just plain good fun, relaxed and comfortable, and instantly giving the lie to all the propaganda they'd been taught over the years. Once is enough to convince you that the authorities have been bullshitting you all along. And if they lied about that, what else are they lying about?

And third and perhaps most important, it gave them a chance to see us stoned. When you get stoned with someone, it is impossible to remain cool in the negative sense. You do all the silly, embarrassing things everyone else does - transpose words, forget what you were saying, and laugh helplessly at absurdities. Those kids saw us as we really were - not super-hip dudes from some unattainable, alien world, but just two kids a year or two older than they who had had some different experiences that had changed them.

It was an evening of laughter and friendship and I think we all felt as close as family when they at last climbed down to go home. I gave Billy a few simple tests to assure myself that he could drive safely, then we gave them the traditional hippie bear hug and sent them back to their parents. Mike and I felt so good as they drove off that we did another couple of buttons to celebrate. We had a beautiful trip and saw a gorgeous desert sunrise before we crashed.

The next day was Saturday, and we had pinned our hopes on our money arriving that day. Mike, as the least conspicuous, walked into town in late afternoon and checked at the Chevy dealership. Still no money. He thought perhaps it had somehow been delivered to the jail by mistake and went over to the courthouse. Sheriff Delgado was not pleased to see him again and threatened to run him out of town, but he did say the money hadn't come there. Mike walked back dejected. We knew it was only a matter of time before somebody hostile spotted us and kicked the shit out of us. It's just what you did if you were a redneck and something came by you didn't understand.

We didn't see the kids all day Saturday and assumed they were absorbing their experience of the night before. We had dinner and climbed up into the rafters when it got dark. It turned out to be a good idea.

Saturday night in Rio Grande City is party night. The old folks go to the country western bar to drink, dance, and fight. The kids pay drunks to buy them six-packs of Pearl and Lone Star at the package store, then hang out at the Range Burger Drive-Inn at the east end of town, sitting on hoods and talking loud. Then they jump into their cars or pickups and peel out, their tires screeching and smoking as they tear through town, hell-bent for action. The only problem is that there's no place to drive to. So they roar out of town to the skating rink, turn around, and roar back to the drive-in, just as if they'd really been somewhere. It's pathetic, but what can you do if you live in a place like Rio Grande City?

All this made for a lot of commotion out at the rink. Every half hour or so a carload of drunk and rowdy rednecks would blast in, toss a few empties into the skating rink, then peel out, spraying gravel across the rink as they fishtailed back onto the highway. Each time disturbed our stoned repose and filled us with paranoid delusions about being lynched or raped or both.

Around midnight a car skidded in and stopped and a figure leaped out and raced into the rink below us. We froze, holding our breaths.

"Guys? Are you up there?" It was Ron.

"Over here, man. What's up?"

"You gotta help me. I'm in deep trouble." His voice was trembling. He was scared.

"Hey, calm down, brother. Come on up."

He swung up beside us. Even in the dark we could see his eyes wide and white.

"What's going down?"

"It's Billy. He's out to kill me."

"Billy? No way, man. You guys are best friends."

"Not any more. He had a date with Alicia tonight, but she called him to say she was sick and couldn't go out. He couldn't reach me, so he went out with some buddies to go drinking."

"So?"

"So after a few hours he heads up to the burger place to get something to eat and he runs into a friend of ours, Jimmie. Jimmie isn't all that bright. He says, 'Hey Billy, where were Alicia and Ron going earlier tonight? I saw them heading out of town in Ron's car.'"

"Oh, Ron," said Mike. "Are you diddling Billy's girl?"

"No! Well, uh, sort of. But she's not his girl, not really. I mean, they've been dating, but she's not wearing his ring or anything."

"But people think they're together, right? Or Jimmy wouldn't have asked Billy about it."

"Well, yeah, I guess so."

"And Billy thinks she's his girl, right?"

"Oh, yeah. He thinks he's in love."

"Oh, Ron," said Mike again. "We are disappointed in you. He's your best friend."

"I know. I feel terrible about it, but I just couldn't help it. You know how Alicia is. She's so friendly and nice, and so darn good looking."

"She's a sexy woman," I agreed. "I'd jump on in a minute."

"Yeah, exactly. Well, it was her idea. I mean, she suggested telling him she was sick and all. I didn't like it, but I wanted her so bad and I figured he'd never find out."

"Tell me," I said. "Was it worth it?"

His eyes lit up. "Oh, yeah," he said dreamily. "It was great. She's great. Her tits are like..."

"Please," I begged. "A gentleman never discusses a lady he's bedded. It shows disrespect. Besides, I'm horny enough as it is."

"But what about Billy? Jimmy told me he went to get his gun."

"No shit? Do you think he'd use it?"

"I don't know. If he's mad enough, I think he might. He's got quite a temper."

"What does Alicia say about it? Does she love you?"

"She says she likes both of us. She likes Billy but doesn't want to go steady with anybody right now. She says she's not ready for that yet."

"A wise decision," said Mike. "You're all too young to be making commitments that could tie you up the rest of your lives. You've got to live some life before you know what you want out of it."

"I may not have a life after tonight. What am I gonna do?"

"Where's Alicia?" I asked.

"At her house. She had to be home by midnight."

"Does she know Billy knows?"

"No. I met Jimmy at the drive-in after I took her home."

"She should know about it," Mike said.

"She's got her own phone in her room."

"Good. Call her and tell her about it. Tell her to stay there."

"Okay. What about Billy?"

"My guess," I said, "is that he'll come here when he can't find you anyplace else."

"Oh, shit. You're probably right. What can I do?"

"If I were you I'd stay out of Billy's sight until he calms down. Go out a long way away and drive around or something. Don't go home yet. Can you get away with that?"

"Yeah, my parents never know when I come home."

"Good. Come back here at say, five o'clock and we'll talk again."

"Okay. And thanks."

He took off, spraying yet more gravel across the floor of the skating rink. We watched his tail lights disappear in the distance.

"You think Billy'd shoot him?" I asked Mike.

"I think he'd want to shoot him. I don't think he'd really do it. But you never know when testosterone is involved."

"I know. I hope he shows up here so we can talk to him. Damn!" I shifted uncomfortably.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. I've just got these two regrets. One is that I wish I'd known she was ready to drop Billy. I would have made a move on her myself."

"And the other?"

"I wish I had let Ron describe her tits."

"You're the slave of your gonads, just like Billy. To be truly spiritual you have to rise above the physical."

"If I thought I had to give up sex to reach nirvana, I'd give up religion instead."

"But sex ties us to our animal bodies."

"I like being tied to my animal body. I believe we are animal bodies, with animal brains. We use our brains to try to make sense of the world and that leads to religion, the desire to understand the world. I have no idea yet what it's all about. Maybe nothing. But for me personally, I don't think it involves separating our minds from our bodies. That's dualism, and it's exactly what's wrong with the world."

"Materialism is what's wrong with the world - people thinking that acquiring material things is the goal and the justification for anything they do."

"But that doesn't mean that material things are meaningless or evil. If a man steals, it's not the gold that's at fault. If he rapes, it's not his testicles that are wrong. In both cases it's his lack of respect for his fellow beings. It's his dualism that allows him to put himself on one side, and to put other people and their possessions and interests on the other. He thinks that other people aren't like him, that their feelings aren't as important as his. If he realized that we're all related, he wouldn't do it."

"That's simplistic. If you..."

Just then a car skidded into the lot and Billy ran into the rink. He was carrying a gun.

"Brian! Mike! Are you here?"

"Yeah, we're here, Billy. Come on up."

"I'm looking for Ron. Have you seen him?"

"He was here earlier."

"He was? Where did he go?"

"Out of town. A long way out of town."

"Shit." He stood there a moment, trying to decide what to do. "Well, he has to come back sometime. I'm going to wait at his house." He started back to his car.

"Billy, wait." I shouted after him. "We told him to come back here later."

"You did?"

"Yeah. So there's no point in your going looking for him. You can stay here with us and wait for him."

He looked undecided. Clearly he wanted to go do something now, not sit and wait.

"Come on, man," said Mike. "Have a smoke with us."

Finally Billy shoved the gun into his belt and swung up into the rafters. He was shaking and his shirt was soaked with sweat. I eyed the gun uneasily as he settled down.

"So, Billy," I said. "You're looking for Ron?"

"I sure as hell am! Do you know what that fucker did?"

"Yeah. He told us."

"Shit! Is he bragging about it already?"

"No, but he knows you're looking for him, and he's scared."

"He's as scared as you are right now," added Mike.

"Scared? I'm not scared. I'm mad. Mad enough to kill the bastard."

"Don't tell me you're not scared," said Mike. "I was in Nam. I can smell it in your sweat. You're afraid of what's going to happen when you meet Ron. You're afraid you might not have the nerve to do it, or maybe that you will."

"If you're like me," I said, "the scariest thing is feeling trapped. Like there's no way out. You can't see how tomorrow can arrive unless you've either killed Ron or you've chickened out. And either one is too terrible to imagine. Either you're a murderer facing ten to twenty years of getting screwed in the butt in Huntsville; or you've shown yourself and everyone else that you're not a man; that you've lost your girl, your guts, and your pride all in one night. Pretty grim."

Billy's eyes got even wider, then he turned away.

"That's it, isn't it?" I persisted. "Sure, you're mad as hell. You've been hurt, and hurt bad. You've been betrayed by both your girl and your best friend, and it seems like you've lost them both. But even more than all that anger and hurt, you're feeling trapped and alone and scared."

"You're not alone, Billy," said Mike. "We're your friends. We love you."

Billy shuddered, fighting his emotions. I thought he was trying not to cry, but then he turned and snarled at us.

"Fuck you! What do you know about it? What do you care? You're not from around here. Easy for you to spout off with your free advice. Tomorrow or the next day you'll be gone, and I'll still be here. I have to live in this town. Am I just supposed to go to school on Monday and say, 'Hi Ron. Hi Alicia. Did you guys have a nice time fucking Saturday night?' She lied to me! She's my girl!"

"She's not anybody's girl," said Mike. "She's her own woman. She makes up her own mind who she wants to be with."

"She wants to be with me!" he screamed.

"Well, she obviously likes you, Billy," I said calmly. "She's been going out with you a lot. But from what I hear, no promises have been made."

"I was going to ask her to go steady. Soon. I was going to ask her to marry me."

"I don't think she's ready for that, Billy. I don't think it's you. I think she's just not ready to settle down yet."

"What do you know about it?"

"A woman waiting for a man to ask her to marry him doesn't go out with his best friend. Ron didn't drag her off by the hair, you know. She went willingly. She's got a right to do that."

"But with Ron? That's what really pisses me off. If it'd been somebody else I'd just be at home feeling heartbroken. But he's my buddy. We do everything together."

"I'll say," said Mike. I shot him a dirty look, but I don't think Billy caught the comment.

"But he and Alicia are friends, too," I said. "They know and like each other and they're both attractive and healthy. It's a natural thing to happen."

"That doesn't make it right."

"No, it doesn't," said Mike, turning to me. "Billy's right. It wasn't just boy meets girl, boy mounts girl. They both knew it would hurt Billy. And they did it anyway."

"But if they wanted each other, which they clearly did, anything they did would hurt Billy. Billy wants Alicia all to himself, and obviously that's not what she wants. So there's hurting in the wind for Billy no matter what. It would have been cooler for her to break it off with Billy before starting anything with Ron."

"Yeah," said Billy. "If she had talked to me first, told me she wasn't interested in me anymore."

"What would you have felt?"

"Well, I would have been upset, sure. I love her."

"And if you'd found out later she was seeing Ron?"

"I'd have punched his lights out!"

"Right. So this way is no different. You just took the one-two punch all at once."

"A three punch, so to speak," said Mike.

"But she lied to me!"

"Yeah, that's hard to take, too. And that's wrong of her. But look at it from her side. She likes you, but she wanted Ron too. She couldn't just say 'Look, I want to go out with Ron.' You wouldn't have let it happen. So she probably felt she had no other choice. If you hadn't been so possessive, maybe she wouldn't have felt that way. Maybe that's just what drove her to see someone else. It wouldn't be the first time that someone has chosen that way to send a good clear message to someone who doesn't want to get the message. You might do the same thing if you were seeing a girl and she was getting way too serious for you. Wouldn't you?"

Billy thought about this for a while, and I could see he was calming down a little. But then he flared up again.

"But what about Ron? He knows how I feel about Alicia, and he did it anyway."

"Men are simpler creatures," said Mike. "They tend to think with their cocks."

"Inelegantly but accurately put," I agreed. "Again, put yourself in his place. You know how attractive Alicia is, how she makes you want her. I sure do. Mike would too, if his balls hadn't been eaten off by creeping Oriental religions. Say she'd been Ron's girl all along. He's your buddy, you hang out together, so you're around her a lot. The desire builds up so it's there all the time, so it's hard to be around her."

"Now who's being inelegant?" put in Mike.

"Difficult to be around her. What's more, you get the sense from her that the feeling's mutual, that she's attracted to you. That's one of the best feelings around; when you realize that somebody that turns you on is just as hot for you. If she were alone you'd be on her in a flash. But you think, 'I can't make a move on her. She's Ron's girl.' But then she comes on to you. She suggests it. She tells you she wants to make it with you. Now you tell me the truth. What would you do?"

"The truth now, not the bible school answer," said Mike.

Billy thought for while, then looked up with a crooked smile. "I'd probably take her up on it and hope he never found out."

"Wonderful things, testicles," said Mike. "So charmingly predictable."

"So now you want to kill either Alicia or Ron for doing just what you probably would have done in their place."

"Doesn't seem right, does it, Billy?" said Mike. "If Ron had met Alicia first, it'd be you driving around out there scared shitless that your best friend was going to kill you."

"Killing him would fuck up all three of your lives forever," I said. "It sure as hell wouldn't get Alicia back and you'd have lost your best friend. Ron would be dead, you'd be in the pen, and Alicia would have to live with that guilt forever. That's not revenge, Billy, that's a waste of three good people."

"Yeah," said Mike. "The world is short of good people. We can't afford to go around killing each other off. Violence isn't the way. Violence causes violence. Look at Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They were successful. They got things done. Not by blowing away people that pissed them off. But by trying to understand them, putting themselves in their place."

"What am I supposed to do?" Billy wailed. "Just forget it? Pretend it didn't happen? I can't do that. As far as I'm concerned, they can both just kiss my ass."

"Well, that's one way of turning the other cheek," I said, "but I don't think that's what Jesus meant." Billy snorted at that.

"But you're right," I went on. "This is a big hurt, the kind grown-ups get. You'll probably never forget this much pain. You want to strike back against the pain. But it's the hurt feelings and the resentment and the anger and jealousy that you need to battle, not Alicia and Ron."

"Hurting them back really won't make you feel better," added Mike. "Believe me. You'd regret it the instant you did it."

"The only thing you can do is to forgive them. They hurt you, sure, but they were only being human, doing what humans do. Having feelings means they get hurt sometimes. Maybe you can't be friends with them anymore, and that would be a real shame. But it's better than blowing your lives to pieces."

"And maybe you can be friends again sometime," said Mike. "It's up to the three of you."

Billy sat for a long while. We let him think. After a long time he turned and looked at us.

"I'm going home," he said. "Tell Ron not to worry. I'm not going to come after him." He swung down to the floor and walked slowly back to his car, looking like the saddest, most hurting person in the world. He drove off into the first tints of dawn.

Mike and I looked at each other in the half light. "I think we did it," I said.

"I think so," Mike agreed. "I was trying so hard to say the one thing that might get through. I guess one of us must have found it."

"I think we just showed him that there's another way. The Code of the West says you have to have a gunfight on Main Street. But Billy's smart enough to see the other sides. I think he's going to be all right."

Ron drove up a few minutes later. "I got here a little while ago and saw Billy's car," he said. "So I stayed out of sight. I was scared to come in."

"It's okay, Ron. He's not gunning for you," said Mike. "But he hurts like a son of a bitch. He feels like you kicked him in the balls and he's never done anything to deserve it."

Ron hung his head. "I know. It's true. All night long I've been driving around out there, thinking about how he must feel. I feel pretty shitty myself. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just hoped he wouldn't ever find out. I was just thinking about Alicia."

"We know. And Billy understands that too. But it still hurts. You've probably lost him as a friend, and that's a real shame. But maybe not. You're going to have to give him some time. I'd leave him alone unless he approaches you."

"And I'd keep the thing with Alicia invisible. Or better yet, forget it for a while. No need to rub his nose in it."

"Yeah, I talked to Alicia, and she feels rotten too. We agreed we made a mistake. She wanted to call him right away to apologize."

"I'd tell her to give him today to himself, then do that tonight. I think he'd be glad to hear from her, especially with an apology."

"Go on home now, Ron. And get back on that reading list."

"Okay." He shuffled his feet uncomfortably. "Look, I don't know what you guys said to Billy tonight, but thanks. I didn't think anything could stop him from coming after me. I thought I was dead, and deserved it."

"No one deserves to be dead, Ron," said Mike. "It's the hippie creed." We both gave him long hugs, then he drove off.

"I wonder if Alicia will need our counseling too," I said.

"You stay away from her," said Mike. "Billy's still got that gun."

"Don't worry. Man, I'm tired. I think I'm finally coming down from the peyote."

"Yeah, I guess so. Quite a trip, huh?"

We dragged ourselves into the shack to crash and slept till the afternoon.

When we woke up I walked into town to the Western Union office. My money order was there, but not Mike's. I cashed it at the gas station and walked back.

I told Mike I was anxious to get up to Fort Worth and find out what had happened to Elissa and my stuff. Mike said he had no interest in going to Fort Worth. He'd had enough of Texas. He planned to go straight to LA when his money arrived.

There didn't seem to be any reason for me to hang around. I gave Mike a few bucks to keep him going, then we gave each other the hippie hug. I had nothing to pack, so we just went out to the highway and I started walking. A car flashed past a few minutes later and I turned to thumb. Mike was already out of sight. I walked almost eight miles before an old couple in a Nash Rambler picked me up. I was on the road again.