Sitting on the floor, talking on the phone. Hmm, this looks interesting: The Full-Custom Gospel
Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat. Lean over, plop it into the the CD player. Whoa! Holy shit, this is cool. Really badass.
Wait. What’s today? What time is it? He’s at Liberty Lunch right now.
Steve, gotta go, I’ll call you back.
In the car, and out the door in 10 flat. On the freeway, and in the lot in
another 10. Standing in the Lunch, the whirlwind having stopped, the heat
begins to slow it all down. It’s hot. The guy next to me feels like a gas
heater. Try to pull away, but there’s no where to go: There’s 500 more just
like him. Trapped. From the stage, a mad-bull red light chases me while I stand
stock-still. If only I were steam rising from this boiling brood through the
half-finished roof into the night sky. Over my head though, the tin- can
portion of the ceiling keeps the heat up close and in my face, all over me like
a wool mummy wrap. Another Texas shed. It’s too damn hot. I pull the wet Spurs
T-Shirt from my belly.
Meanwhile, the Reverend keeps stoking the flames, shoveling more chunks of
psychobitch blues into the stageside furnace with his pitchfork guitar.
Outside, the Lunch pulses hot, white heat. Behind my eyes, the same. Never
heard anything like it. Droplets of sweat roll down the crease of my back, and
the heat leads my mind to wander.
Back to a time and place where the mingling of music and sweat was much
different. When music was only a soundtrack to sex, played on a boombox to hide
the sounds of lust and love colliding head on. We shared secrets every night
that summer – in that small bed, in that small room, in a large house where parents slept
upstairs. Couldn’t they sense what was going on in that hot, back-porch room?
Certainly, the two of us didn’t care. We were too caught up in emptying a
Pandora’s box of hormones. And all the while the same mix of heavy metal songs
played over and over, splicing themselves into the fiber of a maiden
relationship.
Afterwards, I used to reel home in the stupor of love. Walking up the hill to
my house, the temperature dropping as my climb continued. Reaching the flat
stretch in front, I’d probe the darkness for the echoes of a kick-the-can game – wondering whether such games still existed, and whether Folger’s coffee still
came in paint-can sizes. There were new games now, and I crept up the stairs to
my room pleasantly exhausted. Sleep would find me before the clothes hit the
hamper.
When I was younger, mere nighttime would’ve kept me awake, and often did.
Especially if my friend Steve were in the bed across, sleeping over. We’d stay
awake all night, listening to the radio, talking and giggling until passing out
a few scant hours before the cartoons began. It was hot in that corner room,
save for the cool breeze that swept under the heavy door. In the darkness my
fingers poked out from beaneath it, my oasis in the desert.
Tonight, however, there’s no oasis. No cool draft – only the ones in the hands of smokers torching up to transform the Lunch into
the nuclear reactor of hell. It’s still too fucking hot, but it doesn’t much
matter. My soul already belongs to the the Reverend on stage – my sweat is the interest from the sale. It’s another summer night in Austin,
Texas, and I can hear those first love noises all over again, ringing with
reverb from galloping guitars.
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).
