"Rebecca Ore - Acid and Stoned Reindeer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ore Rebecca)

Acid and Stoned Reindeer
by Rebecca Ore
November 2007 Issue




The reindeer were stoned. Flat Nan, Ken, Ro, some other girls and boy who'd just discovered
sex and I were chasing mammoths off the summer range so the horses could eat in peace and
so we'd have some hazel nuts left for the winter. We didn't hunt mammoths until snow fell
which made tracking them like following a herd of Buicks. Mammoths always looked surprised
when we found them so I don't think they were that smart.

Centuries later, I was at a loft party in New York City, having gone back to see how some
people I'd met in 2001 had gotten that way. It was easy to wrangle invitations to parties in
the early 1970s if you were a presentable boy, and I've always been a presentable boy. The
loft was full of painters with real gallery shows, of famous painters' future, present, and ex
wives and boyfriends, of the kinds of people who showed up to be at a party with famous
painters, poets, and the various entertainments people who threw loft parties had to offer.
Dancers danced. Painters chatted up art critics. Poetry professors chatted up graduate
students past, present, and future. And I felt both in place and out of place, remembering
parties in places that must have been Rome that felt like this, or which could have been
provincial capitals pretending to be as vicious as Rome. Clothes change; bodies and poses
don't. I was maneuvering for the drinks table when someone said, "If you want to try acid, the
punch is spiked."

If I was going to get drunk, I was going to be pinned down in time for the duration anyway,
just like being sleep, so I might as well try something new. To lock me to the party time, I
drank two big glasses of white wine, which was the screw-neck bottled cheap Chablis
available at all bohemian party those years. Then I took a drink of the punch. I'd heard about
acid, like rye fungus without the fingers dropping off, and I was feeling reckless, which
happens when you spend a couple of centuries being really cautious after seeing a lover
hanged, and your caution starts to recoil. Stonewall marked the change; New York was full of
possibilities those days. The revolution hadn't quite faded.

Even before the acid hit, I'd spotted a couple of guys who liked what they saw. And saw one
man who'd lost his old lover and who would lose his young lover to AIDS, but this isn't that
kind of story, so we've got to move on.

I knew not to spend too much time with the people who'd wonder why I didn't recognize them
in 2001, so I found a couple of people who I knew would have moved away by then, two
women, one also tripping and sitting in a chair while people worried about her which amused
her, another one curled up on a sofa talking to someone who wasn't ever going to be famous.
Just when I was wondering if the punch had really been spiked, I remembered…

The reindeer were stoned. I had a vivid dream while awake, of reindeer eating mushrooms, the
ones we'd been told were poisonous to average people, and wandering around, bumping into
trees, goosing each other with their antlers, eating the mushrooms, and jumping into the air.

I was carrying a small pack with flint, fire stone, tinder mushrooms, and some dried meat, and