FLYING COYOTES

The back story behind this is probably book length itself, so I’ll do my best to keep it brief. I was living in a house with thirteen roommates in Portland, Oregon. The year must have been ’97, possibly ’98. These years are sometimes fuzzy. Although that seems like a lot of roommates, we weren’t the most extreme house like this. Our pals at a house called the “Dust Bin” had some ridiculous number of like 25-30 people living there, including several people living in the backyard in tents.

Sometimes I miss these days, sometimes I don’t.

Anyways, we found out our landlord, a crooked Reverend, didn’t own the house we were living in. The bank owned it and this crooked Reverend just had keys to the place and was charging us rent on a building he didn’t own.

This led to a legendary keg party in which the house was severely damaged in several ways. A crew of graffiti artists went nuts on the walls, people dismantled the chimney and threw it in the yard, we burnt the furniture, and my pal Duane cut a Lay-Z-Boy recliner in half with a chainsaw.

It was one hell of a party.

After it was over, we decided to flee Portland, taking two vehicles- Duane’s cargo van and a VW microbus.
After a stop in San Francisco, we decided the best thing we could do with our lives was to become nomads living in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, so we headed down there. When we got to the desert, we made a pit stop at a gas station. These would usually take quite awhile as people poured out of the vans, took sink baths, smoked cigs, bought twinkies, whatever.
Jammed in a van with nine people- like I said, sometimes I don’t miss these days.

So what I would do while waiting is see how well I could balance walking back and forth on the concrete blocks at the end of a parking spot. As I was doing this one time I saw a big baggie sitting in the curb dirt.
“That’s funny because that looks like a giant bag of weed.” I thought, then thought “naaah that’s ridiculous, it’s junk.” Then I thought, “Maybe I should look at that and confirm that it’s junk.”

It wasn’t junk- it was a giant bag of weed.

That night we got totally lost in the desert and decided to just pull off the road and make a bonfire and try to figure out what state we were in in the morning. After we made the fire using dried out cactus and wood from a pallet we had stolen from the gas station, we smoked the shit out of that reefer- yes sir.
Then we started hearing coyotes howl. First one, then another, then a dozen. And the howls were getting closer. People were getting a little paranoid about the coyots. They were sure the coyotes were in league against us.
Here’s a point of contention in this story- I swear that we also heard drumming in the background- like Indian drums far away along with the coyote howling, but everyone says that didn’t happen and I just hallucinated it.
The coyote howling freaked a lot of people out and they got in the vans to sleep. I’m a pretty tough codger, though, so I slept right by the dwindling bonfire, along with three or four other people.

That night I had a dream I could see me and the other guys sleeping by the fire, like an out of body experience. Then I saw a huge horde of coyotes running right at us- hundreds of them. Just as they were approaching our sleeping bodies, though, they took off flying over us and up into the starry desert night sky.