The Peyote Coyote
Face Down Ass Up on the Cantina Floor
By Mike Marino (Writer/Journalist)
Juarez, Mexico – 1965
Tequila & Marijuana Cocktails
Double-dazed and purple-hazed, I had journeyed from the cheap wine and endless row of topless bars that formed a phallic phalanx along the fog drenched streets of San Francisco’s wet dream North Beach…caressed the Golden States left coast as though fondling an asphalt breast…whoopin’ and hollerin’ and camping’ and camping’ it up and down on the Pacific shores at Big Sur with love. Then, Death Valley with its shimmer, dunes and mountain hues, purple and copper in color, and then crossed the border into Old Mexico looking for a new life among old Mexicans and even older Indians who held the secrets of peyote .
I was already high when I walked into the dusty hot sun baked village, himself as dusty and tired as the old siesta men already asleep against adobe buildings. Holographic mandalas appeared as the mescaline hit he had taken just an hour before began to take effect, causing them to swirl in the air to the strains of a marching band, bold as brass. I marveled too at the hallucinatory batons that were silver, tossed high, higher than I had ever seen, high into the bosom of the sky by young Zen cheerleaders in revealing skirts of catholic plaid. Haiku visions followed him down the streets and into the cantina, visions of poets and hemp happy hipsters spinning out of orbit with a post-beat cadence, swimming and sailing as great Ahab whaling ships in search of a great white whale in a kaleidoscopic sea of murals filled with mermaids. Beastly large frescoes, obscenely obese as magneto generators deep inside the industrial vagina of old Henry the Ford’s not enough eyeliner, yet, too much Rouge Plant, downriver, back home, years back, eons ago, in Detroit. Now he was well beyond home, and far past the exhaust of a creative blaze orange blue collar sunset
The mescaline massaged me with gentle fingers of hallucination as the dust swirled at my feet and entered the cantina and ordered a drink. Soon I could see only the dilated vacant alley eye socket stares of the institutional disabled and could now eavesdrop on those silent screaming voices in the victims head. Victims imprisoned in wheelchairs, straightjackets and hoped up on narco midnight pills while interjecting injections of sweet dreamy morphine. Drug induced circumnavigating their own private Polar Ice Caps, past giant icebergs, round and round the Cape we go, circular explorations they were, easy to negotiate, except for those 90 degree corners of fleeting reality that appeared only as more hallucinations obscuring what they really were. Those recesses, the corners, the 90 degree forks in the road, were illuminated in deep shadow by electric currents, pulsating and twitching in orgasmic release as the tequila he was now drinking in the cantina, had wormed it’s way home to the grand nerve central station, exposing the masks of drunkards with tankards, comedians and dexadrinians.
The broken mirror in the men’s room fired back olfactory warning shots over the head and as he ducked he could see the pile of neon lipstick tubes lying in the bottom of an empty William Holden swimming pool, empty except for Holden floating on top with a bullet in his back, on the fading estate of old Sunset Boulevard. The drugs finally shielded him from the visions of bright lights emanating from a very secretive Left Bank French underground, thick with homosexual transsexual mascara that penetrated deep into the bowels of the cabaret underworld of a bereft Berlin. A socialista workers paradise appeared in it’s glitzy place, forewarning of a possible fornication as he sat down on the floor of the bar to watch Tom Joad and the False Maria getting it on, electing eventually to erect monstrous and preposterous monuments to Karl Marx, Frederich Engels and Papa Ooo Mao Mao!

The subliminal droning of the Industrial assembly lines hummed a tune that was a delightful color, and as colorfully imposing as Diego Rivera’s blue-collar steel-grey Soviet Stalin hues. I looked around, my head spinning around and then…I stumbled, I tumbled and swore as I fell, face down, ass up onto the cantina’s jukebox floor – passed out and pissed off in Ciudad de Juarez in 1966. Dreaming drunk, vivid and vibrant, I walked the dog of Chihuahua through the desert of the same name. The desert, now deserted except for techno-color fragrance of nighttime, dreamtime nightshade and bella donna blooms. I could have been snorin’ in Sonora with a senora or senorita or two, dos, passos, pesos, but instead traveled in suspended cartoonic and catatonic animation through fully phallic fields of the cactian cosmos astride a fully loaded, fuel injected heavy metal steely dan saguaro..locked and loaded.
I found buttons in the surrounding hillsides, and ate one only to feed a hunger and to quench and squash a thirst. Soon I was assailed by the sounds of laughter and unfamiliar dialects, not chinee but mex me thinks, with the dust swirling like little dustbowl tornados created by little brown feet belonging to the little brown kids of the little brown mestizo village who danced delirious in the dormant dirt of the dusty catholic plaza..Saint San Shit or something or other.
A lone tree, stood, still, silent, leafless, but flashed on and off with liquid-light, bright with Robert Johnson hues of blues and the hot reds of deep south negroid rhythms, bumps and grinds, bullfrogs, gators, bayou crickets, and big invisible swampy snakes with blank faces.
The mescaline band, mucho mariachis in hand, performed a flaming tight pants’d flamenco with a flamingo of dubious gender on the table, tanked up on too much tequila. Then the trumpets, blaring out festive fiesta fandangos with a serape serenade for sweet Scheherazade’s, with wave after wave of music, like lyrical tsunamis crashing to shore, deep inland and further yet to reach the lagoons and Indonesian caves. In my dream, or someone’s dream, can’t remember now, I stood alone, with all the others, fixed in place fixated on all the empty eye sockets of the other prisoners of Zen, in the Jesuit jail, white stucco’d, Caucasian calked and adobe’d, surrounded again like Saturn confined to rings of debris, by anxious urchins, begging, imploring to fill the piñata with more peyote and tequila dreams.
I lowered the mache of paper to the dusty ground below, filled it, packed it like a pirates cannon full of shrapnel words, not in any particular or peculiar order of sentence or structure of any kind. Then it was raised by the numerous Pablitos by its frayed rope high above the blindfolded assemblage who couldn’t wait to swing a stick at it like Mussolini hanging upside down in the square like a slab of fascist meat.
Sticks swang and swung and swinged, wildly, no hits, no runs, no errors until ol’ Number Seven connected with a direct hit. As the ball flew out of the stadium, words, so many of them, fell from the punctured piñata complete with punctuation, like so many pieces of pretty candy flying out without wings in every direction. It was an explosive array of metaphors, verbs, nouns, some were renowned nouns while others merely unknown nouns. The cascade of the English language fell not to the ground but found sanctuary on the linen pages of a book waiting for them in illiterate alleys, for their very arrival, survival and grammatical revival. The children, the smart ones, not the adults, gathered up the little candy like words together, and together they spent the morning forming sentences and paragraphs until the no-sense finally made sense, mainly socialista mumbo jumbo about a lady named Frida, Che Guevara and the flats of tortilla.
Soon the words became sentences, the sentences paragraphs, and soon it was a book, a tome, that I read a little of.
Soon in my dream my eyes became heavy with drink and mescaline and I had to rest. I laid the invisible book on the invisible table next me and was glad to sleep. The alcohol and peyote were wearing off as the plaza and the piñata began to fade from view and my reach. Voices disappeared too, decibel by decibel until there was only a loud silences. I had some tea in a cup and it smiled back at me, a weird Cheshire cat got your tongue grin, and then I doubled over and threw up….
Next Day
The sun rose in the east as I suppose it feels it has to, that is what we hired it for after all. It warmed my face as I sat up, refreshed in spirit with a hollow stomach. Sitting in the corner, quiet as a saint was the mysterious Doc Yucatan, a haiku hobo of recent acquaintance from Denver. “Damn Doc, I had the weirdest dream last night, or I think it was my dream and not someone else’s. It was one long string of dream beads or shells strung together.”
Doc motioned for me to get up as it was time to head out, so we both got up to leave old Mexico after I had splashed rancid brown water on my face and grabbed by backpack by the bedstead. Doc and I walked through the sleepy village and down the sleepy road where even the dogs were to goddamn lazy to bark at us, we lit a joint and walked out into the desert…the Haiku Hobo and the Dharmabum in search of the Peyote Coyote
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Author of The Sandoz Collection FREE E-Series – Sex, drugs and rock and roll! To order your FREE E-copy email Mike at theroadhead@yahoo.com (Also includes Mikes two other e-books (The Atomic Hula) & (The Peyote Coyote) The Collection is Free to all Emerald Readers..it’s free so order today)
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