(Note: When crack journalist and provocateur Jake Tarwater disappeared into the wilds of the Texas Hill Country last year, I immediately put all of my agents throughout the state on the case full-time. Nothing developed for some months until Olga, my No. 2 Houston operative, filed a cable stating that someone resembling Tarwater had been spotted driving away in a sports car from a Houston barber shop. I took personal charge of the investigation forthwith and some weeks later I came face-to-face with the scrutable Mr. T in a singles bar in one of Houston’s dreaded apartment complexes. “What’s up?” I demanded. He pretended to ignore me and nuzzled the topless dancer perched on his knee. I persisted, however, employing those same hardnose interviewing techniques that he had taught me and, many jiggers later, he broke down and told me the following saga. — C.F.)

It all started on one of those crazy weekends when nothing is happening and boredom leads one to questionable behavior. Nothing worth a damn was going on in Houston or Austin. All the bands were either on the mellow, get-back thing or were again discovering the blues and trying to compensate for not having been born poor black sharecroppers.

We were down to Cold Duck and Ritalin, the only thing in the house to read was Lafcadio Hearn and Krsna puffery, some Zen creeps had busted our teevee and somebody always h|d the Moody Blues on the phono 18 hours a lousy day. All our friends were eating brown rice and steamed vegetables and had chucked all their dope and alcohol out the door. They were generally getting holy, which is always a drag, but it’s total poison on a weekend.

So, in true reactionary fashion, Slick and Terry and I moved out of the two-story hovel in Houston’s groovy Montrose area that we shared with a dozen bilious vegetarians. That was at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. By noon we were elegantly ensconsed in a $300-a-month “luxury” apartment in Spring Valley, fired up the 200-watt “Home

Entertainment System” and had the dishwasher chugging away i for all it was worth. Real luxury. We couldn’t afford it, on course. Terry was the only one who was working but what’s\ the sense of worrying about material things, right?

By three o’clock Slick had retrieved his Corvette which he had been trying to trade for a van and lotsa cash. Terry had decided that his VW just wouldn’t get it anymore and was calling around to try to locate a fast Z-28, and I had made a deal to get my Healey 3000 back. Four hours later we had unpacked our old stompin’ get-down clothes, put some massive T-bones on the outdoor grill and were sitting around the pool, emptying a case of Lone Star (throw-away bottles) and eyeing the three secretaries that lived next door. They were shamelessly arranging their flesh on striped armoires next to us.

“Male chauvinism might be hip to get back into,” Terry tossed off as he lofted yet another empty Star over the building, drawing admiring glances from the blonde with the twin .38s trained on him/ It was all a little sudden for me so I went back inside to turn up the volume on “Fightin’ Side of Me” and to place another call to a little copywriter with whom I’d been sweet before I’d decided that she wasn’t-hip enough for me. She wasn’t in and when I returned, with a supply of anisette to take the edge off the Star, Slick and Terry had slipped back into their old habits and were arguing about life and America.

“You foolish hippies,” I chided. “When will you ever learn?”

“Fuck you,” quipped Slick. “You’re never serious. Now really. We’ve just reached, whether you realize it or not, another major turning point in our young lives. This is truly an epic moment.”

“Oh bullshit.” That from Terry. “I just want to get laid, just like it used to be back in college. I wanta getter drunk and then lay the wood to ’er. I don’t wanta plumb some chick’s soul; I want her ass. ”

“Well, now, consider,” said Slick. “We have to chart some course, draw up a master plan. We’ve gotta get a grip on things, Nothing’s been working out, that’s clear enough. Now you, Terry,” he said, pointing a shot glass accusingly at Terry’s groin. “You want sin for a season. And you,” turning toward me, “you just want to slip inside a bottle and have some chick wait on you and do your typing for you. Well, I’ve got news for you. It won’t do, it just won’t do.”

The secretaries were plainly losing interest while we engaged in these metaphysical dawdlings and I made haste to bring that to Slick’s attention but he was too lost in his anguish (however temporal it might have been) to notice.

“America is fast slipping by,” he intoned as the rose fingers of twilight delicately played upon the synthetic palm fronds behind us. “And what have we been doin’ about it? Not a goddamned thing, that’s what. I tried to tell Harper's about America and all they did was send me a lousy pile of rejection slips. Those fools back at the house think they’ll escape, they actually think they’ll be spared Armageddon because of some invisible shield of chanting and general hipness. But they won’t get by either. This is a major illness and we have to take drastic steps to cope with it.”

“Like what?” I ventured.

“Like get off our asses and . .. well, what would Cardoza be doin’ in our situation? He’s hip to it, he knows what the fuck is goin’ on. Cardoza would be out takin’ America’s pulse and writin’ a prescription for all the poison he finds.”

“That’s all very noble and beautiful,” Terry sneered, “but Cardoza ain’t here. What about us, man? Stuck in Houston with a gigantic hard-on. What the fuck’re we gonna do? Go out and pull some kinda dumb Dennis Hopper stunt and Find America?”

We were all saved the embarrassment of an answer by the ringing of the phone. I was expecting a return call from the copywriter so I sprinted to the patio extension.

“Hello, is this you?” came the faint voice. “This is Drach, in Rosenberg.” A voice from the past. Drach had gone to school with us and he had taken over as lead singer for the Triumphs when B. J. Thomas left the group to become a star. “Hey listen,” said Drach, “I heard you crazy motherfuckers were back in Houston so I called. Listen, the band’s still together and we’re playin’ tonight so why doncha come out with us. Meet me at my place in an hour.” Click.

Ten minutes later we had forgotten the secretaries and were dipping into a beer supply iced down behind the seats of Slick’s ’Vette as we sliced into the heart of Texas, west on 59 out of Houston, past the prison unit at Sugar Land where Leadbelly did time.

They really do refine sugar in Sugar Land and we had to fire up a few J’s to cover the odor (like scorched cotton candy) as we roared past the. refinery and the bank and the service station and store that make up the town. I could tell that Terry was getting cold feet about the project, so I slipped a couple of pretty, yellow Percodans into his beer. We eased over the turgid Brazos River at 110 and pulled up to Drach’s house in Rosenberg. Our tires were still smoking as Drach ran out of the door, trailed by his wife Doris. “Let’s go,” he yelled. “Gotta get on the road. We’re playin’ at Swiss Alp tonight and that’s a long drive.”

Swiss Alp? That was a new one on me but I was game for anything. We loaded beer and food and supplies and instruments and various wives and friends into the band’s station wagon. Drach took the wheel and propelled us at 95 out of Rosenberg onto a ribbon of dark concrete and we shot westward into Texas Bohemian country, which stretches from Houston to Austin, dotted with little communities where German and Czech are still spoken. The old folks still have their weekly beer-swilling polkas but their children like to rock and roll and that’s where bands like the Triumphs come in.

They play every weekend in piss-smelly halls and barns from Shiner to LaGrange.

“Dance tonight’s gonna be a motherfucker, ” Drach shouted as he swiveled around to grab a beer. Drach had been with the Triumphs for 12 years and he’s addicted to rock and roll. The Triumphs have seen better days — they were across Texas when B. J. was with them — but he’s lost none of his enthusiasm.

“Gimmie ’nother beer!” He tromped the accelerator and the poor old Ford vibrated and clanked its way up to 110 and we sailed on through the Texas farmlands, nothing but grass and cows and telephone poles and highway as far as the eye can see in the bright moonlight. Slick and Terry were starting to nod about then so I peppered their next beers with reserpine and Stelazine. Myself, I always tell the doctor I suffer from Giles de la Tourette’s Syndrome, so I popped 5 mg. of haloperidol. Still gotta dance to go to and fun to have. “Lotsa yummy chicks there,” Doris whispered to Terry and that brought him around. That and some amyl nitrite. I laid some Turns on everybody and we drove on.

All of a sudden, we were upon Swiss Alp, without warning. That’s understandable, since it’s not on any map and the only industry there seemed to be the dancehall. Our headlights, which had been picking up only empty concrete and a few possums and armadillos, abruptly shone upon literally hundreds of pick-up trucks and old Chevies and Fords parked along the blacktop in the midst of nowhere, the damnedest thing. In the middle of all the cars was a ramshackle barn sort of thing, unpainted and with gaping holes for windows.

Drach slid into the one parking place reserved for the band and we emerged into the floodlighted circle at the door to considerable comment by the loungers there.

“Remember,” Doris advised sotto voce, “these kids out here aren’t at all like the ones in Houston.”

They certainly didn’t look it. The male.hair level there was holding at about the 1962 low and there were a few guys that my trained eye would pick out as ass-kickers anywhere. Slick and I carried in the beer cooler and we were then in such a mental state that we imagined that two rangy cowboys leaning against the door tried to trip us. Drach had already gone inside to set up, so Doris cleared the way by announcing, “Friends of the band, friends of the band.” That got us by the gate and I noticed to my satisfaction that everyone else had to pay a buck and a half. The cowboys noticed that too and hurled spiteful glances our way, the kind of glances that let you know that, while immediate action is being tabled, sooner or later you’re going to get it. I vibed a message back to those insolent scum: fust try something. All the same, the situation clearly called for chemical reinforcement, so I fumbled in my new elephantskin shoulder bag for a pick-me-up: my special blend of Enduronyl cut with Quaalude-300.

Terry, meanwhile, was glorifying in the “natural” atmosphere. “Just look,” he said wide-eyed, as we struggled through the crowd to a reserved table by the bandstand. “Look, man, there’s old people sittin’ over there and cowboys and coaches and cops and kids with long hair (one or two) and kids with short hair (hundreds) and whole families and everybody just grooving. ”

I left him and went up on stage to help the guys set up their amps and strobes and black lights and had a few beers with them. By that time it must’ve been about 9:30 and they were ready for the first set so I decided to wander around in the crowd and check everybody out. I had just downed a Soma 350 and was feeling very loose but that crowd wound me up tighter than early Cream. They were packed ass-to-elbow and I first bumped into a pimply 15-year-old cowboy getting pukey drunk for the first time and next to him was a 17-year-old with his hand on a chick’s ass for the first time really sweating to get her and there was a skinny, big-eared kid trying to be a bad-ass and he was hollering “faggot” at any stranger and jostling them (me) and generally being an adolescent asshole. As I watched in horror, they all melted into giant, leering hoptoads. I got a little claustrophobic and tossed a librium and fled back to the table and that warm circle there. Already about a dozen hangers-on had congregated at our table, from a mechanic still in his work clothes to a drunken, middle-aged woman with pink hair and matching pantsuit. Slick was deep into a discussion about the economy with a 70-year-old farmer dressed in Can’t-Bust-Em overalls. Terry had his eyes on the loveliest 12-year-old girl I have ever seen and he was starting to close in on her. I know she was 12 because the disgusting creature that was her mother was sitting beside me and told me so. But she didn’t give a shit. She just whomped one of those flabby old thighs up against me and opened me a beer and wanted to get it on.

I messed around with her for a while but she got bored when I said I didn’t want to go outside so she left. Her offspring remained, sitting in Terry’s lap and giggling in his ear.

By this time the Triumphs had started playing. When they finished tuning up, one of them let a loud fart and Drach said into the mike, “Goddam, who shit?” Then they launched into the heaviest horn-laden version of “The Rapper” that I’m sure I’ll ever hear. The place was shaking.

Three little girls gravitated to the edge of the stage and spent the whole night there, watching Drach. They never danced or anything, just stood there and watched him. Sometimes, two or three cowboys, who never danced either, would come up and stand by the stage, poker-faced, and scrutinize the band and then gaze over toward our table. Then they’d saunter back outside. Gave me the willies. Despite my strict mental discipline, I found that my mind was winding itself into spirogyra (damned unpleasant feeling) and I groped for my supply of Antivert. I came to and looked around: Terry and his childlover jumped out the window and sprinted for the wagon. No one even noticed.

During a carbon-copy of “Sky Pilot” I finally had to go to the pisser and had to wade through that crowd again, getting an occasional shove from behind or a foot thrust in front of me. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I stared down two wavering shapes, who appeared to be two surly, hulking flamingoes who flanked the door to the pissoir. Inside, I found that one drained one’s lizard against a sheet of tin tacked to the wall. A giant chipmunk, dressed in sweatstained straw hat, faded denim shirt, worn levis and boots, materialized beside me.

“Hit just goes in one end and comes out t’other, now don’t it son?” he asked me. Yeah, I reckon it does, I replied and he half-turned to examine me. “Y’all from around heah?” Naw, we were from Houston and just came up to dig the dance. “Well, now, y’all be cahful, y’heah?” I heard. Time for some Esidrex, which I had, been saving for just such an emergency. I zipped up and my head cleared and I found that the two flamingoes on door duty had turned into two cowboys, crew-cut and square-jawed and displaying bulging muscles that rippled out from under their pink short-sleeved shirts.

On stage, Drach was introducing “I’ll Be Doggoned”: “This is dedicated to everybody who sucks.” No one seemed to notice and I wondered just how much attention the crowd paid to what came from the band. They never applauded anything and no one ever left the dance floor. They just kinda stood out there and shuffled around and felt each other up and once in a while went to get a beer.

When I got back to the table, Terry was still gone and Slick was in an intense discussion with somebody’s dear old drunken white-haired grandmother about farm parity and the plight of the rural populace. I had some more beer and danced with Doris. Drach dedicated “Who Stopped the Rain” to B. J.’s fans. “Oob La Dee,” which is actually a Bohemian polka, got everyone going into those nauseating schottische dances so we went back to the table for more beer. A slender hoodlum in drape pants sidled up to me and mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, “Hey dude, lookin’ for a little?”

I expected him to offer the usual baggie of alfalfa and asked to see it. “Naw, man,” he protested in outraged tones. “I got nothin’ but the best. Coke and horse. How ’bout it?”

In Swiss Alp? Doris said, yeah, that kinda stuff happens all the time at the dances now and the guy was on the level about his stuff. I offered to trade him five Tuinal 200’s and a pocketful of Etrafon 4-25’s and a thousand mikes of ascorbic acid for a spoon of coke. He turned into a tadpole and disappeared. Doris told me I was crazy, he was no tadpole, just a guy trying to make a buck. What did she know, right? Nobody fucks with my hallucinations.

The band closed out their first set with a brassy “Light My Fire” and they came back to the table to down some beers and then every groupie in the place, male and female, converged on us. It was kinda pathetic in a way, ’cause this was the closest most of them would ever come to a real rock band. They wanted to ask Drach to dedicate a song to their one-and-only or just to bask in the glow of a minor star.

“Uh, Drach, wudja play ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ for Glenda from Billy Bob?”

“Sure, man,” Drach replied expansively, “glad to.” Everyone beamed.

So I was just soaking up America in the raw (by which I mean, of course that America, rather than I, was in the raw. You understand) and taking profuse notes and Slick and Terry were getting their own impressions of what it meant to be an American in Swiss Alp, Texas. What a gas, right?

The second and third sets went well, everyone dancing to “In A Gadda Da Vida,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” “Evil Ways,” “Proud Mary,” and fifty other old songs.

Terry still hadn’t returned and Slick talked American with anyone who would listen. He started introducing himself as Studs Terkel. I danced with Doris and some of the other band wives and girls and more or less concentrated on getting drunk and experimenting with several unusual new drugs that I had recently concocted.

I guess it was early in the fourth set, during “Honky Tonk Women,” when my mind phased in again and I found Saranell talking to me. Her name was properly Sara Nell but Texans have a way of merging first and middle names so it comes out sounding like one word. Let me try to describe her. She was just 15 and a dew-fresh little country girl with golden hair falling in ringlets over her shoulders, wearing just a tight tee shirt and cut-off Levis and she would break your heart, she was that lovely. She kneeled in the chair next to me and talked about the Triumphs and then asked about me: where was I from, did I work, why was my hair so long and why did I dress so strange. Well, I never could resist someone like her and in about two minutes flat we were sashaying out the door hand-in-hand.

“We’ve just scored some black hash,” Saranell murmured teasingly. “You wanna try a little?”

“I want a lot, baby.” The minute I said that I knew I had blundered into some bad movie but I was powerless to stop. She just laughed and led me into a muddy Impala in the back of the parking lot. After a couple of hits, we rendered ourselves horizontal, as they say, and just as things got hot and heavy the door was opened and I heard a rough voice in my ear: “Try and rape my sister, willya?”

I was hauled out, groping for my pants, and slammed inta the mud. The two cowboys who had earlier supervised my entry into the pissoir were now standing over me, breathing hard in forced indignation. Saranell had disappeared. I was pissed off.

“If you ever had a sister,” I said witlessly, “you would’ve busted her cherry by the time she was six, you sheepscrewers.” That was obviously a mistake. One of them caught me on the chin as I rose and he drove me back into Swiss Alp’s noble black mud, I rolled to one side and then administered a swift kick on the rise to the balls of cowboy No. 1. He doubled over like a CTA album. The other one circled me, stalking in a half-crouch. I caught him off guard and cut him in half with a cleanly-directed jet of projectile vomit, followed by a crisp jab to the adam’s apple and a half-gainer to the groin. “What are ya, some kinda vomit freak?” he gasped as he lay writhing in a pool of limegreen slime that was steaming in the limpid moonlight.

I don’t mind telling you that I was pretty damned upset. Here I’d been forced to give up my first 30 or 35 beers of the evening on a set-up piece of ass by those swine and it was getting on toward my bedtime and I had yet to connect with any of those shimmering young scissortails inside. It was time to get a grip on myself and see about getting my ya-ya’s out. Can’t let the booshwah get you down. To get back in form, I wiped the mud off my whanger, located my pants and dropped two Butisols and four Excedrin and ankled it back inside to wash them down with a quick 12 ounces of Star.

I slipped back to the table during “Crystal Blue Persuasion” and nobody was any the wiser for my absence. Terry had returned, sporting a pleased expression and two prominent hickeys on his neck. Slick was talking to a bull-necked cop about the law-enforcement crisis.

Three dances later, Doris introduced me to Ruta, a charming six-footer. I went outside with her but I wisely packed my deadly Allis-Chalmers .357 with the engraved pearl handle. Nobody messes with my sweet Allis. When we went back in, Ruta asked me to autograph her person, which I thought was rather flattening. Maybe it was ’cause I’d told her my name was Neil Young. In return for the autograph, she offered to write a finish to my article. It was written on a beer label, since I’d lost my notebook in the fracas outside:

As the dance here ends, Drach the sexy (with his see-through pants) & beautiful singer sings a soft and slowly lovely song: ‘Hey there Lonely Girl. ’ Still the people mill and dance like cows being herded into somewhere too small. The noise of their talking at times becomes unbearable. The groupies and the ‘boys in the band’ that they’ve found are having what I’m sure are meaningful conversations of the future. As the band suddenly crashes into a loud & short version of *Light My Fire’ the people seem quieter as the group jumps from past to present. Sincerely, Ruta.

So that was the dance. After that, things got hazy. I remember getting up and singing “Louie, Louie” and then helping the band clean up the debris. I barely remember getting a case of beer and leaving with a woman. I thought it was Ruta, but she later denied it, the bitch. The next thing I remembered was about seven hours later, when I came to on Drach’s porch and I was hurting.

I had assorted cuts and bruises and my right eye was swollen shut and my wallet and shoes were gone and my nervous system was jangling. What had happened? You tell me, buddy.

Anyhow, I spent a week at Drach’s, just trying to get whole again. Then I tried Houston for a while, but it didn’t go too well. The vegetatians and spiritualists came around to lecture me and then Terry totaled out in his car one night while

stoned and Slick chucked it all and went back to college. I got a place by myself and then who should come up but lovely Ruta. She’d packed her bag and hitched in frpm Swiss Alp. She was ready for the big time and, for her, that consisted of Houston and me. After a few days, she tired of certain of my ... more exotic practices and she ran off with the ’quippie of a certain nameless power trio.

Then I decided I’d had enough of the city and it was time for some country comfort and so I (quote) disappeared (unquote) as you so hysterically put it, to a cave near Buda. But that got me down ’cause I had to walk twenty miles for a beer and I started itching for a hot shower and some big-city pleasures. So I came back here and got a job as MC in a topless joint, which I’m sure you wouldn’t understand. And that’s what I’m doing here right now.

I guess you want to know what I discovered. Well, I found America, all right, fuckin-ay I did! This is America!

(Note: At this point, Tarwater became hysterical and slapped a twenty on the bar for another round and then grabbed his swinger friend by the crotch and began gibbering unintelligibly. She screamed, slapped him, and grabbed the money and ran. Jake and I were thrown out.

“Mebbe I was wrong, ” he mumbled, shaking his head, as we sat on the sidewalk, shooting our cuffs. “I thought that was America. As your mentor, I advise you that this calls for further research and I’ll need help. ” He cackled a bit and then subsided. Frankly, the humor of the situation escaped me and I walked away.

“That’s it, ” he yelled after me. “Leave me, run away from the crazy man. But remember this: all the streets in Edge City are one-way!’’ What?)