This was a letter to 8-Track Quarterly. I think they changed the name to 8-Track Heaven though. A truly fine zine covering all your 8-track needs.
Saturday night started with at Trader Sam's.
First, a Scorpion, chock full o' rum. Next, a P-38 (after the WW II dive bomber). More rum. Booze served in big bowls for four--with straws, umbrellas and plastic boats the way God intended. Liquored up, Bill, Brad, Tim and I decided to check on our boat we had souvenired from a golf course with lakeside boat rental. A 12-pack of Luckys came along for the ride.
We stumbled about in the dark until we found the trail we'd been forced to blaze through the brush after fighting 50 feet of reeds to beach our boat the previous weekend. We'd killed a lot of brush on that trip, so it wasn't too hard to find. But our boat was gone. Some bastards stole our boat! Probably the rental place we had gotten it from in the first place. The bastards.
No boat meant no late night sailing, so we opted for a quick golf cart cruise. Brad and Tim were too drunk and tired to continue, so they slept it off in the car. One hot-wired golf cart later, and Bill and I were speeding around ramming things. Speeding as in "fast-as-a-golf-cart-can-go." Bill Baja 500'ed over a sand trap. The cart nose dived, tossing me out into its path.
Just before the cart hit, I thought, "Wow, this is pretty funny. I'm gonna be run over by a golf cart." But golf carts weigh more than I figured and it pretty much sucked. Without enough clearance for my body, the cart bottomed out, rolling me through the sand, before the rear tires gained enough traction on me to spit me out the other end.
Beaten by a golf cart, I limped back to the car with the Pogues song "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" going through my head, "Along came a golf cart blowing me head over tit, and I looked at the place where me legs used to be, I never knew there were worse things than dyin." We got some tacos, went home, and I fell asleep thinking about Stiv Bators dying in his sleep after getting hit by a car.
I didn't Bators in my sleep. Instead, the next day Steve Mar and I got some booze and drove 90 miles to Sacramento to see "So Wrong They're Right." It's the documentary on 8-Tracks and it was being screened in Scott's backyard. It's four months later. All my bruises are gone, and I still have fond memories of the movie. Oh, and this has everything to do with nothing, but when you shoot a .22 into a line of 8-tracks in your living room, the bullet stops after about six of 'em (depending on the powder load). And Marla, if she's around, will curl into a ball and cry 'cause guns scare her.