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Batons And Flashlights
During part of that period I wasn't scripting I ran with a Rasta from Trinidad. He was showing me some ropes of lifestyle that for all the diversity of the university's curriculum, were not offered in any of its classrooms. This was in Austin, TX during those late seventies into early eighties when disco was getting pummeled by punk, and middle class kids from wholesome families were creating a thing coined later as slackerdom.
I'm going to skip that period again except to refer to an old times sake job we did together. I was his chauffeur, and I can't really say what he did as I wasn't paying attention, except to my own business which was to drive us around in his two door Maverick, not to be confused with my four door Maverick which sits under a shed not really out of the weather, in Bushy Fork, North Carolina.
This piece is about revolution, inspired by the dismantling of Napster, which is an evil anti-capitalistic device which must be smothered, or reconfigured so that it can make millions and millions for millions. Disagreeing makes you a pinko fag, so think carefully before you think out loud. Once branded, only long sleeve shirts can hide your secret.
My Rasta friend and mentor was being uncharacteristically generous this day we met by chance after a year's separation, on that busy lane across from the UT campus known as the Drag which was an artery for deviates and academics. He was offering me tickets and a sum of money to drive him to a cow pasture north of Austin where the Police and UB-40 were performing. "No other obligations, bigtimer, " he assured me. Except for the very real threat of a hard prison term, which had in effect ended our partnership, we'd had some good times together, so my playing hard to get was really more just to extend the marvelous thing which was Rastaman almost begging me to do this thing for him. I don't enjoy being begged, but I am a little queer for the uncharacteristic behavior, and I guess it was just nice to see that Rasta was missing me.
Here's the thing. At this concert I drank beers and therefore subsequently had to pee, and badly you know. We are in a friggin cow pasture with acres and acres of border between the barbed wire fence and the mass of people oogling Sting, but they actually had security enforcing the no free pee rule (you had to walk a quarter mile and stand in a line behind fifty other weak bladders). The security forces were like the Ninth District Court, not to be trifled with, serious business and no joke.
I can't abide. I'm standing on this little mohill looking around without appearing to look around, trying to do the 180 as if I'd read all the Casteneda's, and it happens in a way, that I do "see" what it is there is to see. And that is that to my left and to my right there are a good many of us men with bulging bladders looking for a break, and so it is I, somewhat uncharacteristically, who looks to the man on my left some twenty feet away, and said, or in truth yelled, "let's charge the fence," and we did, me and this guy still twenty feet apart on the fence line, to hell with the Court, we peed freely, and luxuriously.
The thing is, if it had just been me and this other dude the security forces would have come over with their batons and flashlights, and after making fun of our penises, would have punished us for this crime against fence posts. But here's the beauty of it: by the time I was jiggling the last drops away, there were no less than one hundred men, shoulder to shoulder, watering the fence line, and what had moments before been something that couldn't be done was now a done deal.
I'm pressed for time, camping at Rocheblave tonite, forget the analogy, long live Napster.