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Show RIVER I'd resolved to rewrite my novel, but that resolve didn't last very long. Being lonesome, I drank and chased women. It was a long, dissolute winter, what I remember of it. One of my lady friends (her name was Carnegie: no relation to Andrew, but she had an uncle who had invented Fritos and she could sing "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out" just like an angel) complained that, "All you want to do is get fucked up and fuck." That was precisely the nature of my disease. Soon I was broke again and crazier than ever. I was seized by compulsions to smash bottles and eat beer cans. I was desperate and depressed. At twenty-one I felt like a failure, a burnt-out case, and I hadn't even had a chance to vote yet. There's a Winslow Homer picture called "The Gulf Stream" that shows a battered old black man adrift in an open boat, surrounded by sharks and rolling waves. He appears to be deciding whether being eaten by the sharks beats dying of thirst in the boat. I was in about the same space. So there I was, living in a palatial shack on top of what was clearly a holy mountain and all I could think about was sex and money and death. The loneliness of Lonestar Peak prayed on my head and the end was not in sight. It left me bumfuzzled and suicidal. One brilliantly clear January morning I woke up at Lonestar with an old idea burning in my head. While a laborer I'd come up with a scheme to get rich quick by planting marijuana on islands in the Mississippi River (it was just one of many get rich quick schemes I'd come up with while being a laborer). I lay in bed and watched the sun edge its way up over the ridge and I thought about it for a long time. I thought of all the isolated towheads and islands I'd seen on the river, -136- |