I was twenty-three or twenty-four by this time, living in a garage apartment with my then-girlfriend. It wasn’t summer, but it felt like summer. I was no longer humoring my parents by attending college of any kind. I was working mornings in a coffee shop and my girlfriend was a bartender in a restaurant. She was Mexican. She grew up in Ojinaga, a little border town just across the Rio Grande.

We lived directly across the street from a man who I owed money. A former algebra teacher of mine, he had rented me a place that I moved from without telling him. Later, I had a chance run-in with him in a bar and apologized. He forgave me my debt, much like he forgave my horrible attempts at dividing fractions in Junior High.

I had a band in those days. We would rehearse in an old army barracks. At one time, the barracks had been a bakery—then, a tattoo shop. Nate, our guitarist, constructed a shower for himself in the back and set framing for bathroom walls. The barracks were located beside the train tracks, and I gradually grew accustomed to the sound of the Union Pacific coming and going all hours of the night. The barracks were down the street from the Railroad Blues, a popular bar and venue. Patrons would park in our alley, and when I stayed, I’d often be woken at night by the sound of someone outside pissing on our wall.
 
Nate was an electrician by trade and drove a blue Camino. He was living in the barracks with a girl who must’ve been seventeen or eighteen. She was the daughter of a drummer who Nate would sometimes play with in his other band; the band that had paying gigs. Nate was in high demand. People were always looking to recruit him because he was the best guitar player the town had ever seen. When I got back to Texas from a failed escape to California, I told myself that I was going to start a band, and that Nate was going to be the guitarist. At our first rehearsal, he had a black eye bestowed by his ex-girlfriend. He told me she had thrown his guitar in the street. I thought to myself, This is the guy. We played our first gig at the Goode Crowley Theater in Marfa.

I’m not sure what our bassist Mark did for a living. Something to do with computers, although I always thought Mark looked like someone who rode a unicycle all day. Our drummer’s name was Carlos. He hit hard and loved the cymbals. Every band needs at least one rich kid that can afford the equipment, and Carlos filled that role. Hell, Nate and I were so poor that we ate at the bar on Monday nights, ‘cause they had free hot dogs.
 
We rehearsed three or four times in the week. The rehearsals would always devolve into drinking binges. Physically spent, we four would walk down the street to the bar to drink pitchers of beer and talk about our sound and potential. We played a few big gigs in Lubbock; we even played Ojinaga once, which would probably make a better story than this one. Mostly, though, we played shows in Marfa and threw parties in our rehearsal space.
 
I was the chief songwriter; I was obsessed with The Gun Club and The Cramps. I wanted to be Jim Morrison and Nate wanted to be Stevie Ray Vaughn. We had too much bar band in us to be any good, but we had a lot of fun and we took ourselves very seriously.
 
I made a lot of good small-town artist friends thanks to the band. The drinking helped me get over my residual shyness. I found myself being invited to parties where I would mingle like a politician, shaking hands and accepting compliments from people I used to see as burnouts. All the while, I felt an imposter as I sat in their chairs, drank their alcohol or did their drugs. I felt a like Jane Goodall taking notes in a tree.

I read in an essay by John Berger in which he says that celebrity is nothing more than an image with a fluctuating market value. The image I cultivated for myself in those days had a short self-life, and absolutely no market. I wanted to be tougher than the teat of a mamma coyote. I compared myself to both Christ and the Devil. I was hard-drinking like my favorite blues guys. I picked a fight with a kid in a metal band, and most of the songs I wrote had a fatalistic view of the world. I took my cues from Brando; I did my version of Mick Jagger on stage.
 
‘Course, the image would crumple soon as I had to fill out a form.

*** 

John and Joanne lived in a historic rock house. They didn’t have heat. They cooked on a hot plate. The entrance to the house was a gallery. The whole place looked like a Mexican restaurant that a couple of hippies had turned into a commune. My then-girlfriend had managed to get out of work early that night, and so we went to a party at John and Joanne’s. Pulling up to the gallery, the air was crisp and clear. We had just had a row. It felt like one of those nights, where if you walked down the right alley, you’d find yourself. Yellow light from the windows made the house look like a jack-o-lantern. I felt good.
 
Because we were late to the party, everyone was drunker than us. Mark was already talking ultimate fighting, and Nate was grinning that grin he adopts past the mark of sobriety. There were girls beginning to dance. I tried my best to talk to them convivially—not as a leach. My then-girlfriend was already mixing her medicines. It would be a long night of babysitting. She was a tiny woman and didn’t metabolize alcohol well.
 
There were two stages to her drunkenness. She would smoke, talk loud and curl her leg around my own. The first stage was arousing; she had a glow to her when she was drunk. In the second stage she was cruel and accusatory, first lashing out in violence before crumpling to tears.

I hadn’t yet picked up my own personal codes of drinking. My dad once told me to drink the first one, sip the second one and turn down the third one. I follow this rule if I am drinking the hard stuff. If I was drinking beer, my rule was to stick to beer. Under no circumstances was I to mix that beer with any liquor. Same system with wine, and Quaaludes were completely out of the question. If I backslid and threw a whiskey sour down my throat, well then, I’d obviously lost all hope.
 
Did I mention there were girls at this party? Did I mention monogamy is something I have always struggled with?
 
Girls that wanted my attention and they got it, in glances that scraped their shoulders and necks as though my eyes were a rake and they were a lawn. Knowing I had a weakness for women, I walked outside into the gated alley where a fire pit was illuminating the faces of friends. John smoked Bugler cigarettes and talked about Alexander the Great. Occasionally, I peeked in on that girlfriend I had. Not dancing on any tables? A good sign.
 
There was a girl, a blonde, wearing a blue silky shirt. I made eyes at her as I walked to the refrigerator for a beer. She danced in the living room with two other girls. New people were coming in the door to look in at the gallery—a few younger kids, some women, an old couple. Then came a young man. A troublemaker, he had a soft Aztec face and long skater hair.  He arrived with a group of friends. The blonde went sullen as he walked into the living room.

I noticed intuitively that something was going on. I saw Nate walking conspiratorially: from the living room to the man, from the man outside, and then to John, who listened intently and nodded his head. When Nate walked back to the young man, the signature inebriated smile was gone. By their gestures, I knew Nate was asking the man to leave but the man was not leaving. Some time went by before Nate came to me to tell me the story. I went up to the Aztec and told him there was a girl here that says he raped her.
 
He didn’t look at me as I was talking to him. I told him to leave, and he left. Nate came up to me and said, “Man, people listen to you.”
 
That girlfriend I had, I was anxious to get her home while we were both giddy with drink. Then Nate came to me, saying the blonde had just gotten a text message from the Aztec about his friends coming back to the house. So Nate and I went to outside to the front of the house. Nate handed me a military-grade knife along with my beer. It dawned on me that I had been drawn into a knife fight.

We stood out on that sidewalk; the air was turning cold though there was no wind. I put the knife in my back pocket; I began to hate that blonde for getting me into this trouble. I didn’t know the first thing about wielding a knife. I began hating my friends. I just wanted to get home and do the bunny hop with my girlfriend. As I was running, I thought, Damn, I am too old for this. Pretty sure I’m too old for a knife fight.
 
Nate went inside to use the restroom and talk to the guys. I stood guard with my can of beer and thought about jail. I wouldn’t go to jail, though; I’d go to prison.
 
I’m a first-time offender. I’d throw myself at the mercy of the court. They’d know it was self-defense. My dad coaches football, your honor.

That’s if I win. What if I get gutted out here? God, isn’t a beautiful night, the pavement looks like elephant hide, the mountains are beaming with a crystalline moonlight. The whole block is so still. It’s funny in these extreme circumstances how beautiful the world becomes. How alert you are to everything. I remember I rolled my truck once and the truck was lying on its side in the middle of the highway like a cow that had died and I pulled myself out of the passenger side window and there was glass in my mouth. It was almost six in the morning on a Sunday and there were no cars on the highway, just my truck blocking two lanes of highway. The sun was just coming up. There was a mist around the mountains in the distance and the world never looked more beautiful. I didn’t feel a member of society.
 
Standing on that sidewalk in Alpine—and maybe this is a young man thing, but—I wanted the fight to come. My brother lives in Alaska. Talking the other day, he mentioned how sometimes, when he’s walking in the woods, he wishes a bear would attack him.
 
A middle-class kid from a small town, I chuckled to myself, I was going die in a knife fight here on Gallego Street, in front of the Catholic church.
 
Down the street, I could see headlights. It was an SUV. They slowed in front of me and I squared my shoulders. They stopped for a moment, then sped off. I saw their taillights cut a left. I imagined them inside, building up their courage. They were probably on a little something stronger than beer. I wondered if that gave them an advantage. Nate came out with another beer and we drank in silence. I looked in the window of the gallery at my then-girlfriend and I felt warmth for her. I felt warmth for everyone.

***

In the morning, she and I ate greasy food to help the hangover. I didn’t see anybody till Sunday, when we had a scheduled rehearsal. Nate had a black eye and his face was a little a cut up. Carlos looked fine, but they all said I who I should really see was John.
 
The band didn’t practice that day. We only talked about what had happened. About how, after I had left—the party on its last legs—the Aztec came back. His drunken friends had yelled that their dismissal from the party was racial prejudice. They claimed that they owned that side of the tracks and ran through the room, taking swipes at everyone there—even the girls—before disappearing. Mark and I called up John to join us at the Railroad blues and we drank pitchers of beer. John’s face looked like a dime’s worth of dog meat. We discussed our counterattack. We discussed automobile vandalism. Nate said that he didn’t care where he was: If he ever saw them again, he would get them. The band ordered another pitcher of beer and drank on picnic benches into late afternoon, imaging our eventual triumph.