Commodore Rock

once twice three times a lady i have a story a true story a story with only a few embellishments a story about love a story about adventure it's a long story because there's a lot of love and it may take me a while to tell the whole thing the whole thing the whole thing but i'm going to at least start and who knows i may finish it someday probably not today or tomorrow but lord willing and the creek don't rise i just might and like all great love stories well really it's not so much a love story as it is a story about love but this story about love has long since started and began it begins at the end when i just have to say no beating around the bush just gotta come right out and say it

like this

i hate that fucking song

yeah that feels good

yeah i said it done gone and said it used the h word

i hate that fucking song

that commodores song

once twice three times a lady

i hate that song is the emotional equivalent of running your fingernails along the chalkboard i fucking fucking hate it and as a sad result just about just about just about anything else that the fucking commodores or lionel fucking ritchie might hum sing or somehow place in a grocery store gap walmart kmart elevator

or fucking starbucks

there were six of us but i really only remember the names of five of us hey it was a fucking long time ago you know i mean i mean i'm talking college here i mean i'm talking freshman here i can't even count that high how long ago it was there was me there was evan there was chrono there was hellinger there was kevin and there some other schmuck that i can't remember what a fucking schmuck fuck a schmuck hop on pop green eggs and ham lorax

atlanta february too cold for a cracker and florida claimed levi and rich so they were in the same boat and hell black and chrono deemed themselves quite cold capable black from pennsylvania western p a deer hunter country don't you know chrono from westpoint new york yeah like the fucking west point like run down the street throwing snowballs at the cadets at attention and they can't do a fucking thing like buckingfuckingham palace baby that westpoint we ate pizza

dominos

a cultural shock for this cracker from east swamp fuck egypt just the fact that someone would deliver za to you in the middle of the night when i we were good and stoned and really fucking needed it just blew my gator fucked mind

freshman guy chat seventies chat stoned chat politics jimmy carter president before the hostages he got screwed on that one fuck music high school stories oh man stories within stories within stories chicks chicks chicks stoned stories stories about being stoned in between bong hits the bong ruled the clubhouse

today it had rained it rained liked holy fucking hell the goddess must have drank all night long because lord knows she just peed all over us today she just opened up on us bared all and commenced to pouring

stories

stoned stories stirring memories mixing up mommas and pappas and mammies and pappies

dog stories

my dog fetched the ball from the fountain all afternoon galloping across the lawn sailing through the air over the wall of the fountain back arched tongue flailing out the side pink contrasting with the black and tan front and back legs extended fully just like on some fucking outdoor channel time trials for bird dogs just like some fucking purina dog chow alpo gainesburger commercial with marlin fucking mutual of omaha perkins

one of the stories must have been about camping most likely about camping and how many bong hits we did while camping or how much acid we dropped while camping or how many mushrooms we choked down and hurled back up whatever

drugs as macho fucking meter

so let's just fucking go now

where to

south carolina

why the fuck south carolina

there's a fucking lake there on the state line

what's it called

lake hartwell you fucking dumbass yankee

how do we get there

we don't have a car

we'll fucking hitch hike fuck face

hell yeah all six of us

no one's going to pick up six fucking dope heads at midnight

we'll split up and meet there

where

there somewhere we'll figure it out

meet back here in an hour

what about food hell we just ate we'll figure it out one hour be here

we all fucking showed up

we split up and picked spots to meet first spot north druid hills road and eighty-five north we all made it within an hour

midnight cold fucking midnight on a windy fucking highway

split up again thumbs out three and three separate separate

hey man got any hash left

yeah

sell two grams hash in times of no money is better than money in times of no hash

we get picked up by an old guy farmer kind of guy blue collar kind of guy in a covered pickup truck as we pass posse number two we say yeah those are our friends and he says why didn't you say so and the old guy pulls over and backs down the interstate for about a quarter mile at midnight and he keeps muttering to himself about you boys are fucking crazy and he's laughing and all six of us are in his pickup truck all bundled up heading north you're just not supposed to be heading north in february even in fucking georgia and we talk with the old guy and among ourselves and we tell him we go to college and he asks us where we're going and we say lake hartwell and he says where it's a big fucking lake and we say oh just drop us off when we get there we'll find a spot and we drive for a couple of hours and we smoke cigarettes and we stop at a store and buy some beer and share it with the old guy

and he let's us off on lake hartwell on the south carolina side it's a long fucking bridge that crosses the lake into south carolina and it's fucking cold the old guy said it was cold as a witches tittie and we all laughed because hell how many times had we fucking heard that one but it sounded funny coming from him

and we stumbled through the woods it was a good moon out not necessarily a full moon but a good moon and we could make our way down to the lake the lake being like a big old fucking mirror we made our way through the woods down to a little clearing near the lake and we scrounged around for firewood we barely had a flash light between us we somehow scrounged a fire and before long it was a big fucking fire and we started getting warm and we sat around

just like we had sat around the dorm room earlier that evening and we continued to do bong hits and chrono had a bottle of bourbon and we passed it around and drank it and told more stories and told more stories and told more stories and the moon whispered to us and the fire laughed with us and the water chimed in on occasion and it was all rather fucking magical it was all very loving and it was all all all

it was only the beginning

oh lawdy oh lawdy the fire died down the clouds came up the moon disappeared the wind picked up the only visible images emanating from the black being the occasional red bud of a cigarette from one or the other of us deep from beneath our sleeping bags the cold crept in

these boys were we men these boys were my best friends i was in constant awe that i could have friends like this that i had buds that would simply hop on pop at the odd chance that we could have a little fun with a simple choice of what was behind door number two as opposed to door number one there is really only one that i can pick up the phone and call there is only one who picks up the phone and says yo t what's up when i call there is really only one

there is really only one

there were two there really did used to be two there were two but i lost track of chrono a few years ago he had been heading elsewheres for a few years before that he'd been heading elsewheres for at least the last four years i think it began around the time of the clinton impeachment hearings maybe there's a connection and then george w must've just sent him over the edge not that he ever voted i don't think that chrono ever voted

turns out that he had a bit of a fucking problem

a little problem with that white stuff man the shit just took control over him go fucking figure it's one of those things where you can look back through that wiggly little path dark tunnel of our past that burps us out every fucking day that we manage to pull our sorry asses out of bed if we look back through that tunnel we can say yeah we should have known but hey but hey but hey you never know you never know you never could have known i mean what if that one time that one time that you yourself were supposed to meet up with him way back way back way back when and lend him some money and what if you had put the wrong address on the envelope and someone else had ended up with the dough and chrono would have ended up with nothing at least that day and instead of option number twenty-two-fifty that day he might have selected option number seventeen-eleven and ended up meeting some beautiful

blonde dominatrix nymphomaniac that had a thing for greek men

and the whole world might have been different

don’t you know don’t you just know and

the cold crept in and tried to claw its way into our sleeping bags no tent hard clay dirt fucking floor could be a fucking asphalt parking lot for all we could see right now little bitty pebbles poking into my back shit shit shit i hate it when it's so fucking cold and i have to get up and take a piss it's just too fucking cold and i have to piss like a fucking race horse like a fucking russian race horse ah shit i can't feel the tip of my nose it's so fucking cold i jump out of my sleeping bag and run over to the edge the edge of what i couldn't fucking tell you i run over to the edge of the clearing i guess and let it all hang out and the vigor of my stream sends an arc over the fucking moon and down in a spray of falling stars into the dry frozen weeds

urinal steam

drifting up like the fog machine at a pink floyd concert and midstream the cold starts to rise from the bare feet up through the heels through the ankles through my calves like i'm a tree stuck in the clay and the ice flows through my fucking xylem and phloem up through my knees until i'm shivering just enough to shake my frozen limp penis around like a garden hose on a hot august afternoon and piss sprays everywhere including my leg and i finally finish and

stuff my cock

back down into my pants who the fuck you calling a boy and slip back into my sleeping bag it's like sliding back into the plastic cover of a kool-aide ice pop and so instead of standing up shivering now i'm lying down shivering

and i dream about florida

and when i wake up i am the first to wake up i'm always the first to wake up i like to be the first one to wake up i like to get up and make out with the morning she's so shy when others are around she won't french kiss me unless we're alone

and when i wake up it's no dreamy arousal from a deep sleep it's a spring to baby the sun is shining and the lake is like fucking right here in front of us if i had taken a left instead of right in the middle of the night i would have been standing in water up to my knees when i peed

and the lake is huge and goes forever and i wander over and there's ice at the edge thin ice most translucent ice master i reach out with my boot and tap it with my toe and it cracks and breaks into water

and i lean over and throw a handful of water on my face when the shock is over i shake my head and throw another handful when that shock is over i shake my head like a wet dog and throw another handful until my dick is no longer hard

i married kevin's girl only at this time he hadn't even met her yet and evan slept with my girl we had both met her by then but she was going out with someone else but evan didn't really sleep with her until i had gone and split up with her but that didn't matter because i was still pissed and i thought i could kick his ass but i never did try it's a good thing because evan's bigger than me and probably would have kicked my ass

i never slept with chrono's girl or slept with rich's girl or slept the other schmuck's girl i don't think and i don't think that they ever slept with any of the girls i was sleeping with either but that doesn't mean we weren't close i mean i still loved them anyway

and then they began to wake up one by one and kevin built a fire he was that way

this is kind of the middle this is kind of the sweet spot this is the fucking navel of my tale

this is where i pontificate on where the fuck all my friends went this is where i wonder wonder wonder where they may have gone this is where i play the what if game this is where the world ends and the world begins

not a cloud in the sky always wanted to begin a story with a line about clouds and skies always thought it would be one of those snoopy moments where it begins with a dark and stormy night and somewhere in there the clouds would come up in the discussion but this is a much better approach i wish my life were on the same parallel with not a cloud in the sky

kevin was the man he was my man he lived across the hall from me freshman year we both could not stand our assigned roomies i probably could not stand my roomie more than he could not stand his roomie my roomie my roomie my roomie loved jesus yes he did does and jesus loved him or at least that's the way the song goes hell the song says he loves me too but my roomie said i was going to hell ah what the fuck

we were in heaven by the lake we were nowhere near hell we sat in our pews and kneeled in front of the goddess and took our communion from her gentle hands and prayed that she would satisfy our hardons when we returned to civilization and that maybe she might even help us get back safely to said civilization

kevin was my main he was my dude he was my brother we hung out he taught me about writing he taught me about love he was all about love he had a heart as big as the old oak tree where we'd sit beneath in the evenings and pass jays back and forth he was from western pennsylvania he was really a bit of a fuck off he ended up dropping out of school and taking a job in some restaurant and he moved to new orleans eventually and then he moved away away away and i never saw him again i googled him once but i didn't have time to search through all four hundred and seventy-five thousand three hundred and fifty-three hits that came up so

kevin and i once spent three hours in tallulah gorge talking bert down off of a boulder when he was tripping the boulder was only five feet high but bert had bigger worries and the mushrooms didn't help and now bert is dead no he didn't fall off the boulder he died of aids in the eighties

kevin and i had a house on ponce de leon with chrono and three other schmucks and we had a cat a kitten really and kevin loved that cat although it used to come upstairs and shit in chrono's clothes pile

kevin and i used to take my car to evan's fine foods no it didn't belong to evan our friend it was just the name of the place meat and two vegetables kind of place we always got smothered chicken and mashed potatoes and banana cream pie and coffee and we were happy it was an e-f-f experience

kevin and i used to listen to music together he had this infatuation with linda rondstat and jackson brown and i didn't but i stayed up all night with him in line waiting to buy tickets to jackson brown and helped him get tickets to linda rondstat and we saw dave bromberg together and we saw iggy pop together and we saw the sex pistols together and we saw jerry garcia together and we saw the new riders together and we saw willie nelson together and we saw the new barbarians together and we saw jerry jeff walker together and we saw the dixie dregs together and

he gave me my first book to write in and i still have it

kevin and i sat around the fire on lake hartwell and watched the others sleep and we smoked a joint we shared a joint we talked whispered really it was so nice out bright blue skies and pine trees and wind bouncing across the lake it was nice we didn't want to spoil it with our voices we were hungry we didn't even bring toilet paper then we shared a cigarette

kevin met a woman later the next year then that woman broke his heart and he moved to new orleans and then i started hanging out with the woman that broke his heart and i discovered why he loved her and i fell in love and she tried to break my heart but i wouldn't let her i was stubborn that way i wonder how life would have worked out if kevin had been stubborn that way if he had said no baby you are not going to break my heart then where would i be i wouldn't have three chirruns that make me grin

before i got stubborn with her though i had another woman and we broke each other's hearts and evan started hanging with this woman and i should have just said yo brother be happy yo sister be happy but i was a jerk and then we were all jerks and then evan and i had a falling out and then we i guess we just said hey dude she is out of the picture you are my buddy you are my pal i dig where you are you dig where i am let's just forget about it and that was that

i'm glad that kevin never got stubborn but i wish that he still loved me

because i'm always on that lake sharing a cigarette with him sharing a joint with him sharing the quiet with him sharing myself with him i just wish that he'd drop by the lake sometime and hang with me but it ain't never going to happen i heard a rumor that he lives in los angeles now wouldn't that be a trip

and the others got up and they got up one by one and they wandered off to pee and curse the fact that we had no toilet paper and they wandered back to smoke a little breakfast with us and it turns out that one or two of us had actually bought something besides beer at the store and a couple of candy bars were passed around and a couple of bags of potato chips were passed around and we enjoyed the breakfast of champions

and we threw rocks into the water and had contests to see who could skip the rock the furthest who could skip the rock the most times who could walk on water or come close to it who could pee the furthest while running backwards who could inhale the most part of a joint who could who could who could

love

and i was in awe when i went to college i was just a cracker from south georgia i was such a redneck hippie pseudointellectual asshole and these guys i mean these guys were something i mean evan was a fucking artist that could take junk from the trashcan and make it sing and rich was this musician who had spent a good part of his life in india his parents were missionaries go fucking figure he was the classic preacher's kid and he had wild tales upon tales upon tales and kevin was a writer and chrono was just fucking sharp as a fucking tack i mean he fucking was the sharpest tack in the box too bad he grew to like heroin

and i was in awe just trying to keep up with these guys i thought i had died and gone to heaven with these guys they were my pals they were my brothers they were my cousins they were they were they were

and now they are not

how the fuck does that happen how the fuck does that happen i mean there are fucked up things in life shit happens and all that but what the fuck how the fuck where did they go

chrono disappeared a few years ago broke my heart just up and fucking vanished it was probably advisable since the law was after him since he owed everyone money since he kind of lost it i mean he really lost it he had everything could have had everything he was the son with the talents in the bible that just blew them well except in chrono's case he snorted them it makes me so fucking mad i am so angry that he just up and vanished i helped him until the end and he lied to me up until the end and what the fuck

he knew how to wrangle some food from some people that had stopped at the roadside picnic area

and rich man he just sort of faded away i mean he was swept off his feet by a woman who would fuck him every which way but sunday and i bet that she did that too she was spooky beautiful and he simply fell pussy has that effect on us men i know

evan says that he saw him the other month he is still in atlanta

and evan is still an artist and he's had a baby and he's scared to death because he doesn't know that it's the coolest thing in the world he'll learn and then he won't be so scared oh he'll be scared all right but he'll be scared in other ways he'll be scared in that protective daddy way and that's cool and he'll be cool he'll be a good dad

and we eventually decided that we needed to move from one spot to another and we eventually decided that perhaps we should hitch hike back on down to atlanta because it was just too fucking cold to spend another night and so we started back down the road across the bridge

and you know like jim morrison he said

this is the end

we walked we walked we walked across that bridge it is a long bridge it was a long bridge it must have been a couple of miles long you could see and see and see and see and you could see your breath it was cold and the wind just whipped up and over and through us and we stopped midspan to unwrap one of those little foils of hashish neat little one gram packets packaged for quick and easy sale quick and easy sail pretty easy business hundred dollars an ounce gives me twenty-eight point two grams at ten dollars per so that gave me enough to eat on i was an early entrepreneur although i tended to smoke my profits what the fuck

we walked and we walked and we walked with our thumbs held out we split up into two groups of three i don't remember exactly who the third member of our group was but kevin came with me the third guy may have been the schmuck i couldn't remember i'm pretty sure it wasn't evan or rich it could have been chrono but i don't think so

we went up ahead it was sunday and it was the afternoon and we needed to get back and the sun was out which was cool but it was cold and our thumbs turned red we didn't have gloves i mean come on it was a spur of the moment thing we were stoned and we were standing on the bridge less than twenty-four hours after we had departed emory university that fine institution of higher learning

from whom my parents later that summer would receive a letter indicating that their son had been discovered with a bong outside of dobbs hall underneath the aforementioned oak tree with the aforementioned people and because of whom i had to explain to my dearly departed mother what a fucking bong was well geeze mom you see it's this plastic tube kind of thing and it's got this bowl and this hole yeah we call it a shotgun no i don't know why maybe it's because when you get a hit what's a hit well it's a toke what's a toke well it's it's it's shit mom i just use it to smoke a little weed sometimes you know how the pressure is at these higher institutions of learning don't worry it's not like i'm doing

heroin

and it's not like the letter is from fucking

joe friday

and we loaded a pipe and we huddled around to protect the bic lighter from the wind and we must have looked like quite the progressive little group three guys on a bridge huddled together with puffs of smoke arising up from our natural chimney we must have been quite the attraction because they pulled over on the middle of the bridge this was an interstate highway mind you this was interstate eighty-five coming down from greenville south carolina heading down to atlanta and then on to birmingham or is it montgomery hell i don't care it's fucking alabama fucking alabama is one fucked up little state let me tell you and if you happen to live there i'm sorry but it is one fucked up state probably only topped by or in a dead heat for most fucked up state with texas mississippi and arkansas ah hell i guess texas wins

they pulled over

a baby shit green nineteen sixty-five four door impala with a white vinyl top and white wall tires and spoked chrome reversals and they stopped up ahead of us and then they backed up down the fucking interstate on a fucking bridge and we ran up ahead to hook up with them and we got up to the car and this window rolled down this brother was sitting in the front seat and you could see him doing the manual roll down we all used to do the manual roll down every one is so fucking spoiled now kids these days don't even know how to roll down a fucking car window and he said

need a ride my friend

and we all hopped into the back seat all three of us into this huge backseat where this other fat albert looking guy was already sitting and so it was just a little bit crowded then we figured out that we needed to put our packs into the trunk and so we hopped back out of the car and and the driver hopped out of the car and opened the trunk and cars were blowing past us on the bridge honking their horns and the driver this tall skinny black dude with a seventies carolina fro right out of superfly with the fake silk polyester printed saturday night fever shirt and the purple bell bottoms and the platform stacks skinny mother fucker raised his hand high and flipped them off with the longest middle finger this side of wilt chamberlain and then we all hopped back into the car and the driver said

where you boys headed

and we told him we were going to atlanta and they said they were going to atlanta and that was cool we had us a ride all the way there that was cool and they said that they were from greenville and were heading down to atlanta to hook up with some friends did we know them and they said a name and we said no man we don't know the dudes but we're sure they are ok by us and they said cool

and they had an eight track tape player and in this eight track tape player they had a a bootleg tape of the commodores playing and they asked us if we liked the commodores and we were just glad to be out of the cold and we said yeah man we dig the commodores although i don't ever remember listening to the commodores except maybe at a high school dance and maybe i had copped a feel from this girl suzanne when i was dancing with her to some commodores tune she had lovely breasts and she let me feel them up

and we smoked cigarettes and we told jokes and we told stories and we tried to make our stories sound totally street and they would roll their eyes and laugh anyway they were pretty fucked up you could tell and i think having us in the car kind of weighed it down and made them go slower which was probably a good thing

and they passed us a bottle of brandy and we drank with them and then they asked the magic question

you boys cool

and we said oh yeah we're cool and they said well we all got some killer weed and they rolled a little pin joint and passed it back to us and we smoked it and ok we were upper middle class white boy dope heads who were just a little bit spoiled by the kind green bud and we rolled our eyes this was just fucking mexican shake killer weed our ass but we said hey this is tasty bro and they smiled and we said

want to try a little of our stash

and they said sure and we rolled a nice phattie none of this chintzy pin joint shit i'm talking phat and round and long and we creamed a healthy amount of hashish into this phatbone and lit it up and passed it around and the brothers went into a grin spin that slowed the car down to around thirty-five miles per hours and they got really quiet like we thought maybe we had overdone it just a little maybe we had just totally fucked them up when the tall skinny dude the driver turned full around in his seat with a grin that went from just beneath one side of his fro to the other side and said little dudes that was just about the smoothest weed that i've ever

smoked

and we all laughed because his buddy in the passenger seat had to grab the wheel because skinny wasn't looking where he was going and the car even though we were going mighty slow did the big car swerve or what

and then he settled back down and went totally quiet again and that's when we noticed the music that's when we noticed that the same tape had been in the entire time that's when we noticed that not only had that tape been in the player the entire time but that tape had been stuck on the same track the entire time that track had only one song on it and that song was

once twice three times a lady

it played once twice three times and then it played again and again

and then we had to piss really really really badly and these guys were just settling back and they didn't even notice that the song was playing over and over and over again they just sang along some in kind of mumbled hushed tones and we tried to sing along in mumbled tones as well

once twice three times a lady

over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until we were about to scream and we were about to piss our pants

once twice three times a lady

and kevin nudged me and whispered for me to suggest that they change tapes or at least change tracks and i shook my head because i didn't want to upset my ride here i told kevin he should ask if it was bothering him so badly hoping that it was bothering him worse than it was bothering me and we went on and on and on and on

once twice three times a lady

arrrrggggghhhhhhh

so we rolled another joint and lit it up in the off chance that perhaps we would just fucking pass out and go to sleep and wouldn't have to listen to it when it went click click click and we knew that once again it had failed to change tracks and this went on for two hours or more and it nearly fucking drove us out of our minds it could very well have been a nancy reagan plot to get us off drugs except that jimmy carter was president that reagan was sneaky doing that kind of shit before he even became president

we all know he fucked carter with the hostage negotiations before he became president he just might have fucked us white boy college students in the same way

once twice three times a lady

oh god just wreck the fucking car oh jesus i promise that i will listen to gospel i will listen to fucking choir music every sunday morning i will give up all my earthly possessions and walk this earth forever preaching the word just let this fucking song end sweet mother of jesus mary joseph and the fucking goat he road in on just get this song out of my existence be gone devil be gone

and then they pulled off at the north druid hills exit and we got out of the car and we got our packs out of the trunk and we all gave each other hugs and i threw them a couple of nice foil packages of hashish and they hugged us again and we ran into the bushes and pissed for a good thirty minutes or least it seemed and then we caught the

bus

back to school back to emory back to the dorm back to dobbs hall we had meal tickets we had a warm shower we had we had we had we had

each other

and we had each other for a couple more years and we had each other for eternity but somehow

we blew it

and now we have we have we have we have

something else

once twice three times and all that