Here's something I've typed up so if one day you're staring at the center of my face and feel compelled to ask I can just give you this so I won't have to repeat the same story for the hundredth time and thereby risk losing all sorts of valuable soul points

Not far from the area Orson Welles broadcasted "The War of the Worlds" and sent hundreds of gullibles to their windows scared-shitlessly checking out the skies, and only a few miles east of the swarming Route One corridor and all its malls and malls and malls and malls (I saw a robot come out an elevator in 1977 when the Quakerbridge Mall opened) and not far from where I am now in a nicely tinted, glass-plated, and sleekly polygonal corporate center (in which hundreds of computers and related supportive microchips and gadgets click and respond and all are cooled by local or general humming air-coolants)–I, the egotourist, he who must temp to gain enough cash to drift through South America and develop the tenets of egotourism, while getting paid to write this by the Xerox Corporation while listening to "Thick As A Brick" I right this minute hear translated into Muzak–not far from all this sprawling density, I, the egotourist, attended a weekend party.

This was the first weekend after I moved back home from Boston. The directions Crowley left on my answering machine highlight a pig farm and a gravel road after a clump of hedgerow that I immediately associate with a bustle. Anyway, the directions are perfect and I show up and bum money to pay the guy collecting for the beer, the barbecue, and the band from a skinny white blues guitarist acquaintance who gives me a business card as a way of giving me his phone number he says. The card advertises his blues duo called Mojo Baby or something else but definitely with Mo' in it. So I'm smoking cigarettes and going back to my electric blue Subaru from time to time to get another bottle of porter warming on my passenger side floormat and I see this little dog and a young woman in cut-off jeans with fleshy slabs of raw flounder steak extending down to her Birkenstocks. The dog's real little and I'm friendly to it although I'm usually inclined to hooking these little 20oz. bottle-sized dogbellies across the laces of my shoe and flicking these nerfball curs off into all eternity–but for some reason I'm nice to this one and snap my fingers at thigh level and watch the pup leap and flip in air toward my hand. Then I'm bored, the dog's grown tedious, and then, yes, I do consider soccer-styling it into orbit, but restrain myself and simply give it a little growl. So I'm walking back to the picnic table and the area where all these New Jersey thirty-year-old gearhead rednecks with soccer cuts (mullets) tickling the worn collars of Don Garlits' Funnycar shirts with the sleeves cut off so from the side so you can see all the way into their pepperoni nipples, some in wrestling shoes, others donning extra-padded crosstrainers, all lounging around the barbecue setup, downing plastic cups of kegbeer. My friends are late. I only know the Mo'-something bluesman, and so I'm walking back towards him and the fucking little mutt is yapping and nipping at my heels. I'm walking heel toe heel toe and whenever I try to drive my heel into its ravenous snout I miss and my stroll is not at all fluid or elegant. Eventually the dog retreats.

A stage is set-up extending out of an old wooden country garage that would have been a barn if we were in Amish country an hour to the West. A drum kit on which three youngsters are banging, and one of them, a long blond tangle-haired pre-nymphet, is sitting on the stool and actually busts grooves for a few seconds before she synchronizes with her companions' chaotic syncopations. Afternoon light, tall trees, cymbals reflecting out over the grass in front of the stage to form little oasis chunks of light that I cross as I move toward the one guy I know. Some joeys are eating dogs and burgers and some are tossing quoits and it's a nice outdoor late-June picnic-party. A little boy in a diving mask and snorkel mercilessly soaks everyone in range with a water bazooka that's powered by its own remote generator that's strapped to a small Deer Park watercooler plastic cask that's strapped to the back of the boy's panting malamute. On and on and it turns out the girl with the flounder thighs is a friend's girlfriend and they've been here all the while setting up tents so they won't have to raise them later when all they'll want to do's fall over and die. All my friends are all quite alive now but not quite kicking and we're all loitering around the barbecue grill, pulling thawed dogs out of a generic thirty pack and placing them perpendicularly across the grill. I like my dogs charred. I cook mine till the skin is all black-blistered and a fissure cracks down the sides and I imagine that my dad would love his skin to come close to this extreme of well-doneness as he sits for hours and hours soaking in carcinogenic solarities. My dad has an extraordinarily developed ability to cease all motion for days and days while still maintaining requisite oxygen intake and carbon dioxide outflow. Regardless, dogs are being eaten with ketchup and mustard which I note now because I never use ketchup on dogs and in fact I'm dog-earring this for you now so you can remember it later. I'm talking to a young advertising executive named Sean Cibulskis who majored in biology but read too much Carlos Casteneda and other assorted newage-sewage and so decided medicine was somewhat immoral but restricts any ethical objections to the world of advertising–You ever see the milk ads with the athletes or Spike Lee with a milk mustache? That's his firm. So I'm laughing about this contradiction and simultaneously checking out my good friend Crowley flirting with a total honey babe while competing in a game of doubles quoits. The flounder thighed girl's boyfriend, Corky Artese, comes over and we're all checking out the flirtation like the Miracles watching Smoky take the lead. We're all noting body contact, and filling in potential dialogue since they're way out of earshot. We've all recently seen Swingers and so we're saying "is it on? is it on? I think it's on. . ." and when any of us try to walk over and eavesdrop or get introduced to the honey babe we get the cold shoulder from both of them and so we're sure it's on. Eventually as the sweet lady cooks a burger and we pry Crow away for a second, we're all full of questions and we find out she'd got a kid and she's thirty-five. Seconds later she's gone for good as if all the fluid sheen over her skin was like a balloon holding air, and since she was near the grill, the heat evaporated the sheen and so her body escaped into the pulchritudinous realms of mist from which she descended.

Although I may seem insensitive to my friend's sensitivities, I'd like to preface all of my demeaning portrayals with an affirmation of affection and brotherhood towards the good friends I may occasionally pan–I do this not just out of my natural, torrential condescension, but out of a love for my friends and a belief that representing them as I see them will inspire them to rise above the skewed truth I depict. And so let me present my skewers–Crow's stomach's rounding out toward the convex and his chin seems like a little gelatinous knob rising out of his thickening neck. He really could use a naked romp through the poison ivy with a fly pork sock. He's an internet jockey for his father's financial research company and needs to click on some booty with his stiff flesh mouse to reintroduce him to the world of actual human interface-sucking. But he's got a cool name and when he was young he was handsome.

So Crowley's looking under Camaros and pick ups for the sweet lass of fluid sheen and we're smoking a joint leaning on Corky's Volvo sedan, the only foreign car parked out on the yard–but at least it's innocuously Swedish. Corky's telling a story about how our dwarfish, hairy-toed, and recently thinned down drinking diet shakes friend, who we call by an abbreviation of his Hungarian surname, Kartarbak, climbed into bed with Corky and the flounder-thighed one 4am at the shore and laid his abristled smacker right on Corky's sleeping lips. Needless to say relations were tense and Corky's ever-present sarcasm took a turn toward ridiculing our friend's potential latencies.

Yeah boyee we're stoned and getting drunk on Molson or Coors Light from a keg and the band arrives and it's the nation's #1 Black Sabbath tribute band–Sabbra Cadabra. There's more quoit tossing and I take a break from a vicious match teamed with Kar and go interview faux-Ozzy and point at other obvious members and test out my equivalency discernments like that's Bill Ward right? That guy there with the relief pitcher stash? And that's got to be Tony Iommi. Sabbra Cadabra tours as far south as Tennessee and as far north as Boston. I ask if they study films of vintage Sabbath and compare-contrast with videos of their own performances? I ask faux-Ozzy if he uses the warding-off-Satan / hook-'em horns hand-signal first employed by Ozzy's replacement Mr. Ronnie James Dio? He says he throws two hands up in the air and raises his middle finger and pointer in the old peace flash that Ozzy preferred. They play all the hits and whenever I ask them to play "N.I.B." or anything he assures me that we'll play it. Faux-Ozzy's got long straight dirty-blond middle-parted hair and looks tired and paunchy like a big rotweiler sitting up on a hot stoop. But later when he comes out on the stage he's wearing six-inch soled boots and a fringed cape and a heavy crucifix the size of a monkey wrench dangling across his pelvis. He throws his hands up and flashes the peace sign and in an affected English accent yells into the mic: ALCOHOL!

The sun's setting over the impressively tall pines and sycamores and all these boxes are unbroken down and piled in a massive pit awaiting eventual conflagration. I'm off towards this pit entirely wasted with Crowley pulling all the loose crumpled bills from our pockets to buy nitrous oxide balloons at 3 dollars an inflate. Off onstage Sabbra Cadabra's busting "War Pigs" and I'm flailing around with everything numb except for all the little hairs on my body which are all extraordinarily sensationally accentuated, the sun coming through the trees, and shit–I forgot to mention these huge black spray-painted devil's masks they've nailed up in some dead branchless trunks stripped of all their bark near the stage and I'm hoping beyond hope that they'll light those things on fire and at least an acre or two of land will incinerate in the process and immolate every being and thing and all our souls and all the mileage from all the cars would ascend along with the band's exploding-into-shrapnel effects boxes and dry ice machine, all of it melding into an orgiastic burst suggesting the creation of a second sun on earth seen all the way down in Austin, Texas. But they don't light the death masks and there's no fireball visible trans time zones.

I'm next to Kar rocking out to the band's third set, now dangerously shlockered, toasting ALCOHOL! along with faux-Ozzy and later on realizing that el verdadero-Ozzy used to toast SATAN! and the two are associated. I'm raising my cup of rank intoxicant so quickly that the fluid jumps from my cup high into the air and never comes down at least not on me. They close with a reprise of "War Pigs," "Paranoid," "Fairies Wear Boots," and finally, "Killing Yourself To Live." By the way, the band's flawless. Everything's right on, the voice, the solos, all of it, and the few stragglers left standing are struggling to stumble away from the wreckage of crushed plastic beercups and dusted straw while the tribute band breaks down their equipment and retires to their corresponding band of groupies well-lubricatedly waiting in one corner of the dressing-room garage that would have been an Amish barn.

We retire to the Volvo's rear fender, sitting between the car and the tents, hidden from the scene's debris, drinking some concoction that tastes like sour cola and is actually homemade ginger soda and dark rum. Eating salt and vinegar chips. Talking eventually about the Constitution. Kar and Sean the advertising man are arguing over whether this nation's legal system's the best in the universe, as good as Jordan or better, and Sean's saying no and Kar's going to law school in the Fall and gets impassioned and patriotic in a very admirable 3am cerebrally well-argued way. I'm on my back listening and interjecting, sort of moderating, commanding the animated debaters to like let him finish Captain America and back off for a second Red Menace and adding non-sensical sarcastic blurbs that I now forget but cracked me up at the time so much that Kar got mad at me for not taking the debate seriously. For some reason I stood–and standing precipitated my downfall. That dog. That mangy cur I didn't immediately want to kick to the shores of forever. It started barking at me. It's not really so little. Picture a cross between a fox and a ferocious hellhound. A red dog. No lights. I can't see a thing. I'm stupid drunk, and by this I mean quiet, loopy, and somewhat messianic. And supposedly the following ensued. I didn't black it all out. Only the idiotic phrase that's scarred me for life.