“The Sir Douglas Quintet is back and we’d like to thank all our beautiful friends all over the country for all the beautiful vibrations. Doug spoke over the intro in a husky drawl. The song was a timeless slice of Tex-Mex pop called “Mendocino.” It opened with an acoustic guitar strummed in a polka rhythm that seemed to have followed us up from the border. If we’d found a tiny alabaster statuette in his likeness-black cowboy hat, long hair, flowing scarf and a duster-we’d have mounted it on the dashboard.
Our fates had been placed in the hands of the great Doug Sahm, patron saint of far out trips. Still, that’s how we were doing it, with no regard for the law or cows crossing the road. The moonlight was sufficient to cast grey shadows off the scattered ocotillo and salt cedar scrub, though probably not bright enough to be driving without headlights. Now we were headed back to a trailer park ten miles away in Study Butte, where our girlfriends had wisely gone to bed hours ago. We’d fed beer to the goat mayor of Lajitas, Clay Henry paid a fifty cents for a canoe ride twenty feet across the Rio Grande to eat dirty tacos in Old Mexico and traded tequila shots with people who live in abandoned mine shafts at both bars in Terlingua. after a long day spent satisfying Texan rites of passage. I was one of three dudes in a beat up old Land Cruiser, barreling up a West Texas byway at 3:00 A.M.
The moon hung full, bright and high over the Chihuahuan Desert floor like a bare light bulb illuminating a small-town sheriff’s drunk tank, an observation I would have been smart to consider at the time.
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