Thoughts on the Arms Race and Sails Cats

*Author's Note: "This slice of life comes straight
from the heart, and straight from the past. This
is the real 70's, not a sitcom TV show.


I was telling her about her wonderful head because my brain cells weren't functioning properly. Of course she wasn't listening. So I decided to ask her if she knew what I meant. She started telling me about the Arms Race and some dead cat in the street. A little while later, and after quite a bit of fumbling and repositioning, another question popped into my head,

"Is it a Sails Cat?"

She looked up at me and wouldn't you know it, but those big old crocodile tears welled right on up and came tumbling on down. Man, it just filled my brain cells with sorrow. I was crying too. She had her whole house filled with roiling clouds of incense and ragweed smoke.

I started thinking about that cat again. That poor bastard was probably just padding by the place minding his own business, caught a good whiff of this shit, and then just dropped dead in
the road. I thought I should take a look at him. See if his eyes were rolled up into the back of his head and his whiskers all curled up. Those are the sure symptoms of a feline drug-overdose.

I immediately thought better of that course of action when I tried to stand up. First of all, the girl was in my way, and with the contact buzz I had, I wouldn't be able to cross the room let alone make it to the cat.

Hoping to get off the subject, I asked her about the weather. She went into this long string of mumbled choking gags of gibberish. I figured this flower-child must be really stoned. She couldn't even talk! As a matter of fact, she looked pretty comatose. I told her to let me straighten my head out. That might help. It didn't.

I strongly advised her to try and clear her throat. I couldn't understand what she was saying. She made this deep hacking noise in the back of her throat, turned her head, and spit out this gob of primordial soup and went on with the conversation.

She said the weather was fine, but one had to be careful about the dark clouds and acid rain. "Acid", there was one word I didn't need to hear coming out of her mouth! And then it happened. The open door showed up, and my eyes became the open door. And the open door said,

"If you want to come, you can. Just step into me and feel my love surround you. It's all so beautiful on the inside."

The chick blinked her eyes in amazement for a few moments.

"I didn't know open doors could talk!"

I told her that most open doors did. It was only the closed ones who did not have the power of
speech. Then she asked me if this open door was a loner. I told her she had something dribbling down her chin. She wiped it off with the back of her hand and repeated her question. I told her it probably was. She asked me if the open door was aware of the "true" Ground Zero. I didn't say anything, I just wiggled my head. I was back to thinking about that damn cat in the road. The open door had now left me and gone into the girl's eyes. How had that cat died? And the open door said,

"Do you want to come along and feel the glory of our secrets? Come along,bbbooooy. Come along and dig all of these beautiful flowers."

Digging flowers, I thought to myself, had always turned me on. I gently reached down to the girl at my feet, and raised her ever so carefully by her elbows to have her stand directly in front of me. I leaned toward her and whispered if I could dig her flower. She uttered a soft sensual groan before replying.

"Is this a one-night-stand, or something a little more permanent?"

I mulled it over with a hand on my head for awhile, looked her dead in the eye, and decided not to tell her the truth. The question was repeated. It was followed by another lie. She and the open door just stared at me for what seemed a very long time.

"And what would you do with our flower once you had dug it up?"

I told her that I'd spread its seeds over the entire face of the earth to grow and multiply in power and glory.

"Oh, you're good, boy, real good."

Next thing I knew, her palms were on my bare chest firmly pushing me back onto the couch. She straddled those long coltish legs on either side of me and lowered those lush, full lips to my ear. She had stopped hacking and had an awful lot to say all of a sudden.


At that point I wasn't sure if the open door was still there, or not. Back then, I still figured 'three's a crowd'. Afterwards, though, I was to learn just how interesting those odd numbers could be. But right then she went back to talking about that cat, so I asked again,

"Is it a Sails Cat?"

The next thing I knew were the oceans rising from their beds and clashing head-on in one thunderous explosion. I felt myself plummeting headfirst into a narrow gorge filled with smoke and vapor. The walls were lined with a putrid mucous that slithered along as if it had a life of its own. There were great flashes and strobes of multi-colored lights as my head finally burst against the walls of that canyon. I was falling. Falling and tumbling like a 747 with jammed landing gear down an international runway. Luminescent white rivers flowed like molten lava. Somebody pulled all the plugs. My brain spilled out of my cranium and the Grateful Dead playing in the background were replaced by a humming static noise. The black lights and strobes turned to darkness, and I suddenly found myself in the street eyeing that cat. I heard a horn blowing and brakes and tires squealing. A Chevy pickup truck was hurtling down upon me apparently signing my death certificate...

A week later, everything was gone as fast as it had come. Permanence proved to be of the fleeting variety. She was gone, the cat had turned into an Organic Frisbee, and the open door was closed forever. Her flower had turned into one gigantic, nebulous mushroom. Ground Zero was here, true enough, right where I was standing, right where that poor cat had died, right where that Chevy had hit me. I buried the cat in the same spot in a ditch alongside the road. The guy in the truck who had hit me gave me a lift out of town a month later.



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