THERE ARE PERIODS OF MY LIFE that roll through me hazily. Not like an apparition, more like that moment a cartoon villain gets hit in the head with, say, an anvil or whatever, and all he sees is stars—my life was all flashbacks that never materialized.
I woke up to a spider crawling on the floor and I was reminded of this white boy I dated a while ago with these long-ass dreadlocks. I remembered that every time he was on top of me his dreads would graze my face and it felt like a nest of spiders crawling over me. I was too young to understand how this feeling would stain me permanently.
We met at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. It was freshman year and we mutually didn’t know we were gay until we were drunk and had each other’s dicks in our mouths at the student union hall one night at 2:00 a.m.
By junior year his dreads were in full bloom and I didn’t think to tell him he should cut them (because I am nothing if not willfully nonjudgmental) or that I was certain that Jah hated him (it was the nineties and these convos weren’t nearly as prevalent).
Either way later that year I dropped out of school to follow him whilst he was following Phish and Burning Spear (respectively) on tour. We ate up his trust fund on organic orange juice, gas for the Jeep, and acid. During that period, I had fucked under a blanket of stars in the Grand Canyon some nine or ten times, swam in secret watering holes in the Appalachians, and saw longer stretches of highway between California and North Carolina than I ever knew existed. It would not last.
A year and half later I was sitting around a fire in a drum circle in Colorado. I was washed out on acid and very drunk—at the apex of my trip I felt the hand of the ancestors tap me on the shoulder and say, “Girl, take your Black ass back to college—you don’t even like these people. He just fucks good.”
I snapped to my senses and woke up the next morning and showered (for the first time in like six months), cut my hair, and took a Greyhound back to our school to reenroll. At the bus station I tried to convince the dreadlocked white dude to come back to school with me and that we should probably switch our majors to like business or computer science.
I saw the look of judgment in his eyes and I knew immediately that he was going to say some busted shit, and I was right.
“I can’t follow you back to Babylon,” he explained, like completely fucking serious. “It’s like Jerry said, man—short time to be here, and a long time to be gone.” He broke down crying and hugged me. I went back to school and we stayed in touch for a while and by 2002 he finally cut those fucking things. I think he’s a librarian now or something. He even apologized for the whole dreadlock Phish period eventually and every once in a while, I look him up and torture him with a joke.
Q: Where do hippies fuck and how is it?
A: IN TENTS MAN, INTENSE!