Who would have imagined that you could drive a rented car into the desert with a head full of acid as a father of two. Hell, as two fathers of two, when it comes down to it. That’s what we were. Our children were young. We were modern day fathers, too. Responsible for all the compassion and tenderness hitherto assigned to the womenfolk. And damn good at it, too. Or good enough, perhaps. Who could say? The world was cold and unconcerned with compassion for children. Compassion was for the marginalized. And I have to admit, we didn’t have enough to go around.
Maybe he did. My brother, Hunter, seemed to be able to face the world on simpler terms. He had faith in people. He was an optimist. He smoked a shit ton of weed.
I had the idea for the trip based completely on nothing but driving, drugs, music, and pure Gonzo journalism. I had idolized Hunter S. Thompson my whole adult life, from the time that I finally understood that the rapture and armageddon were metaphors. I remember the first time I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I didn’t understand it. I was in college. it seemed like a disjointed, piece of shit film about nothing. In those days, Gladiator was unquestionably the best movie I had ever seen, followed by Dave with Kevin Klein.
Then I smoked my first joint at Trevor’s house and I knew I would die. I couldn’t stop laughing about it. I played Come As You Are by Nirvana, the studio version, over and over. And then I watched Fear and Loathing days or weeks later. On the air mattress that I leaned up against the wall like a ghetto Murphy bed during the day. I was laying there with my girlfriend who would become my wife, with an expensive, fucked up Dell laptop on my chest. There were cockroaches on the other side of the bar of light under the door. My roommate, whom I had seen maybe three times, was an olympic figure skater. Or maybe just on the figure skating team. He ate chicken with mustard. Molly, my girl, fell asleep before the end of that version of These Are a Few of My Favorite Things was over.
I had only just learned about Johnny Depp from the movie Pirates of the Carribean and I thought his name was Orlando Bloom. Holy shit. I was greener than Tobey Maguire in Fear and Loathing. I was finishing up a college career not much more experienced than when I had started. But shit, I had found Molly. She was the key. Imagine if I had gone to strange, quiet parties and joined the rugby team with my best friend Emmanuel. It was more like a club, actually, I don’t even think they were a sanctioned team. But yeah, he’s had a life and a half. He went to Kandahar. He grew up with role models that were honest with him.
Jesus Christ.
I watched the movie many times. I was sensitive to weed, so I would basically have life altering trips based on one toke. And sometimes I would have two or more tokes. If I wasn’t doing that, I was blacking out on Goldschläger at the pool hall with Emmanuel. It was a strange time. I had spent the first few years with Molly sober as a stone as she took me to parties with her honor fraternity and played flip cup. My friend, Trevor, had this house near to the college with this immense basement. My other friend, Kathleen, was always on the verge of showing up there with psilocybin mushrooms. I would listen to Tool outside her apartment sometimes and we would go eat lunch. She never did come through with those and it would be almost two decades before I ate my first one.
So, fuck, that’s one of the inspirations I had for the trip when I planned it. Driving from LA to Vegas all fucked up.
I might as well just tell you now that I drink and I drive a lot. I understand that it’s wrong. Even I am scared to tell you. I just feel that I am a better driver than you. Or anyone. I am the smartest person alive. I can do it. I’m not sure. One of my other brothers, John, has a few DUI’s. One time a cop had to pull in front of him and slow down until John’s car crashed into him. I love that story. I am very concerned that innocent children could die in that story, even though it already happened. But God help me I love that story.
I fucking love driving, you know? And we all do, in my family. My father is a truck driver. We drove to Florida and back to Delaware a hundred times as kids. My friend, Eric, says that a road trip on an interstate is a commute, not a road trip. But I disagree. To me, there’s nothing like zoning way the fuck out, staring dead eyed at the road, driving as fast as you can get away with for as long as you can. Straight down 95 or i-4 or whatever the fuck.
So when it came time to plan my brother’s bachelor party, driving was important.
Second on the list was music. Intense, soul fucking music. God’s music. House music. Psychedelic music. Rap music. Whatever the fuck. Fucking choral music. Loud as fuck, that’s the key really. Loud enough to shake your breastplate and make you feel a little bad for people at the red light.
My brother and I were introduced to real, loud house music by my cousin-in-law, Robbie. I don’t know, I guess I had listened to a ton of Deadmau5 and some others before going to that first fateful All Day I Dream event on Governor’s Island in 2016. Robbie took me to church that day. I guess, fuck, shit I guess I had had Molly (the drug, not my wife) on the steps of my Boston apartment back in 2012 or 2013. Jesus Christ I have been alive for a long time. But that didn’t prepare me for the pill that Robbie passed me at or around 1 PM on that epic Sunday. Shit. Jesus. That show reorganized my priorities.
Of course I understood at that point that all of humanity needed to go to church, and what we called church at that time was a complete mockery.