Practical Demonkeeping

Part 1
SATURDAY NIGHT
Like one that on that lonesome road
    Doth walk in fear and dread,
    And having once turned round walks on,
    And no more turns his head;
    Because he knows a frightful fiend
    Doth close behind him tread.
    —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
    1
THE BREEZE
    The Breeze blew into San Junipero in the shotgun seat of Billy Winston’s Pinto wagon. The Pinto lurched dangerously from shoulder to centerline, the result of Billy trying to roll a joint one-handed while balancing a Coors tallboy and bopping to the Bob Marley song that crackled through the stereo.
    “We be jammin ’ now, mon !” Billy said, toasting The Breeze with a slosh of the Coors.
    The Breeze shook his head balefully. “Keep the can down, watch the road, let me roll the doobie ,” he said.
    “Sorry, Breeze,” Billy said. “I’m just stoked that we’re on the road.”
    Billy’s admiration for The Breeze was boundless. The Breeze was truly cool, a party renaissance man. He spent his days at the beach and his nights in a cloud of sinsemilla . The Breeze could smoke all night, polish off a bottle of tequila, maintain well enough to drive the forty miles back to Pine Cove without arousing the suspicion of a single cop, and be on the beach by nine the next morning acting as if the term hangover were too abstract to be considered. On Billy Winston’s private list of personal heroes The Breeze ranked second only to David Bowie.
    The Breeze twisted the joint, lit it, and handed it to Billy for the first hit.
    “What are we celebrating?” Billy croaked, trying to hold in the smoke.
    The Breeze held up a finger to mark the question, while he dug the Dionysian Book of Days: An Occasion for Every Party from the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. He flipped through the pages until he found the correct date. “ Nambian Independence Day,” he announced.
    “ Bitchin ’,” Billy said. “Party down for Nambian Independence.”
    “It says,” The Breeze continued, “that the Nambians celebrate their independence by roasting and eating a whole giraffe and drinking a mixture of fermented guava juice and the extract of certain tree frogs that are thought to have magical powers. At the height of the celebration, all the boys who have come of age are circumcised with a sharp stone.”
    “Maybe we can circumcise a few Techies tonight if it gets boring,” Billy said.
    Techies was the term The Breeze used to refer to the male students of San Junipero Technical College. For the most part, they were ultraconservative, crew-cut youths who were perfectly satisfied with their role as bulk stock to be turned into tools for industrial America by the rigid curricular lathe of San Junipero Tech.
    To The Breeze, the Techies’ way of thinking was so foreign that he couldn’t even muster a healthy loathing for them. They were simply nonentities. On the other hand, the coeds of S.J. Tech occupied a special place in The Breeze’s heart. In fact, finding a few moments of blissful escape between the legs of a nubile coed was the only reason he was subjecting himself to a forty-mile sojourn in the company of Billy Winston.
    Billy Winston was tall, painfully thin, ugly , smelled bad, and had a particular talent for saying the wrong thing in almost any situation. On top of it all, The Breeze suspected that Billy was gay. The idea had been reinforced one night when he dropped in on Billy at his job as night desk clerk at the Rooms-R-Us motel and found him leafing through a Playgirl magazine. In Breeze’s business one got used to running across the skeletons in people’s closets. If Billy’s skeleton wore women’s underwear, it didn’t really matter. Homosexuality on Billy Winston was like acne on a leper.
    The up side of Billy Winston was that he had a car that ran and would take The Breeze anywhere he wanted to go. The Breeze’s van was currently being held by some Big Sur growers as collateral against the forty pounds of sinsemilla buds he had stashed in a suitcase at his trailer.
    “The way I see it,” said Billy, “we hit the Mad Bull first. Do a pitcher of margaritas at Jose’s, dance a little at the Nuked Whale, and if we don’t find any nookie , we head back home for a nightcap at the Slug.”
    “Let’s hit the Whale first and see what’s shakin ’,” The Breeze said.
    The Nuked Whale was San Junipero’s premier college dance club. If The Breeze was going to find a coed to cuddle, it would be at the Whale. He had no