Bum Wines and the Peyote Coyote by Mike Marino (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📖

safe keeping in your penny pants pockets, but then there is the clerk that will let you put a penny in, those are the ones to watch. They are pure evil and eventually it will catch up to them and they will be a penny short, then what? Fuck 'em.
The preacher Johnson lived in a small town in southern Oklahoma, the territory that neither Texas nor Oklahoma wanted, except for its water and not the drunk and addicted Ira (passed out dead on the road) Hayes locals of legend who find pleasure in sniffing a can of silver Sherwin Williams paint or taking meth or riding in pickup trucks with their dogs in the front seat ready to hump the next hitch hiker, but in the end, the backend, their wives and girlfriends rid in the back of the truck, in the open like Springer Spaniels with their mouths agape in huge toothless gaps on their way to 24/7 7-11 for more cheap wine and beer and cigs and a stack of lottery tickets they can ill afford but by anyway and then can't afford the babies formula.
His congregation was as randy and grandly gregarious as he was, and Sundays were a celebration of life with a boisterous gospel that he read with flames of conflagration shooting straight out of his tailpipe with the haunting passion of Jack Bruce performing "Tales of Brave Ulysses" live at Croydon and a Shecky Greene attitude towards platitude. It was more of a Green Bay tailgate Packers party than piety, ok, ok, it was a Tailgate Piety Paroday Party. He used to joke about his ministry, mostly white trash, "but they are my white-trash" he would say referring to the flock as the Church of Bud Lights and Bug Lights by the light of the double-wide moon, and the only thing they understood was the Gospel according to Lynard Skynard and full vinyl volume, amps as altars, and virgins to sacrifice a'plenty, second cousins mostly laid out in hide-a-beds, while Tripod the three-legged dog stood guard on the porch, as far away from the screen door as his chain would allow to snap rabidly at anyone who walked past the fence on the property line as it did to the Howard girl just last month leaving a scar on her lip that would be with her as a reminder for life. She hated dogs after that, and reminds one, or two, or just me for that matter of factly matter, of what Mark Twain said in Connecticut when he had a neighbor next door with a barking dog, Twain said, "I wish I owned half that dog, I'd kill my half."
When I lived there, I never went to church, even his, but we became friends (met at demolition derby I was MC'ing for a radio station), and after that Friday nights were for poker and wine. The cheaper the better, along with a couple of bottles of Mexican beer brewed in some small back alley backwater miracle cancer cure pharmacia/cantina on the border that had a harsh taste. "Damn, you know, if I were only part Injun, you know that Quannah Parker? Hell, he started that whole Native American church thing, with peyote and secret war dances. Well, sir, I would have rode that circuit for sure," preacher Johnson would tell me on more than one occasion. He loved Parker. A man who overcame everything to attain everything, and on his terms and could get legally loaded, natural and native, at the same time well within his rights and all wrapped up in that waxy kind of meat market paper you don't see anymore, because the butchers are all dead, and ol' Parker's peyote rights were protected 100% usda fat free and fed free by the u.s.gummint including Indian Agents and J. Edgar Hoover's "Gee!! Men." Honest, that's what Hoover said, I swear on a stack of pantyhose.
One year near Christmas, I commented to the preacher, that his massive belt buckle he wore everyday 'cause he won it in an Indian rodeo in Broken Arrow, was larger than the planet Jupiter, or at least as big as Grandma's turkey platter and just as shiny and silver, and the buckle could probably be decorated for the holidays, decking the halls. Not one to be insulted easily, he just laughed, and then invited me to come to church the week before Christmas, knowing he wouldn't get me in there any other time and maybe not even this sunday go to meetin' time, but I did. I arrived, sat in a pew, him not thinking I would show up. The coughing and squirming in the congealing congregated stopped and preacher Johnson came from behind the "stage curtain" and walked confidently towards his podium. Saw me and smiled, then the gates of hell and accusation opened it's jaws wide, as he proceeded to tell the assembled what I had said about his buckle. Embarrassed as a whore of the bible waiting to be killed by stoning, I didn't know what was next until he walked from behind the podium above the crowd and lit his buckle up. He had attached a battery operated string of Christmas lights to the buckle and the belt so he looked like a pious wreath and when the switch was thrown his mid-section came ablaze and that damned buckle was as big and as bright as an exploding nova. It was the actual moment of creation. God said, "Let there be light," and goddamn if there wasn't.
I shook my head to bury a smile accompanied by a laugh, and received a standing ovation. Let's face it, this guy was Ole Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the scintillating Sinatra for sinners and saints, and he took command of the stage and those around him, not to bully, but to infuse with life and the joy it brings at the same time. Still, I never did go back to church, but every weekend we ended up riding horses on his small spread near the Texas border and finishing off the day with some not so awful wine and Mex beer and laughed into the night. Eventually, as is the life of a radio hobo, it was time to shut down the station and move on down the road and up the dial, which I did, and saying goodbye to an audience you get to know is never easy, let alone certain of them one on one, who has left a lasting impression on you stronger than super glue. The preacher was one of those. He showed up in the studio that day, resplendent under the cover of a cowboy hat brimming with machismo, and that damn buckle that had lit up his church on a Christmas morning not too long ago like Dresden during a fire bombing.
After the final show on the radio station, I shut the mic off and started to say my final "adios" to the station staff and some of the listeners who had turned out for their "adios", and the preacher grabbed me by the shoulders as I started to walk out of the building. "Not done with you yet, son. Here, for you," he said and handed me a small box maybe 4 inches by 4 inches and I opened it. It was an Oklahoma State Rodeo Association Belt Buckle and my name engraved on the back that bore the words..."To Mike, No Bull!" I still have that damned buckle and never rode in a rodeo, but because the preacher gave it to me out of friendship, he taught me what being a champion is all about. It's not about winning all the time, but just making a good friend.


MAGAZINE INTERVIEW WITH MIKE MARINO
Conducted by Jeri Maier of Boomer Magazine

Thanks to the internet, we now can travel to far away land, far away places as well as travelling back to the past and reminiscense about our life's experiences way back. We can also travel back to the places where we used to live and how they were back then. There are many web sites for baby boomers that take us back to the journeys of the past. Journeys that we might have done ourselves or journeys and trips that we wished we had or we just dreamt about. Here we are honored to be able to share a conversation with Mike Marino, an author of ROAD TRIPPIN' USA book. Mike's web site and his book will take us back to mystical journeys from the 50's, the 60's and the 70's.

Question: (Jeri Maier) For an opening question-first can you tell us a little about yourself?

ANSWER: (Mike Marino)
In addition to being a freelance writer and starving, yet published author, I've also had a career in rock n' roll radio in the rustbelt known as the Motor City, where I was born. Actually in Detroit, babies aren't born, we roll off the assemblylines. Cars and cruisin' were always a part of the chrome-magnon car culture there and Woodward Avenue and rock n' roll were the fuels that propelled that generation, at that time, and especially in that town.

The neighborhood was decidedly Italian and Sicilian, with names like Marino, Vitti, Scalisi, Russo, and Mafioso, you know, vowels at the end of names, not like the Irish, with vowels at the beginning. After a few years on the road living in Hawaii and San Francisco, with a brief stint living on Sunset Strip in LA, I ended up in radio somehow, completely by accident by the way, and it eventually took me to my adopted hometown of San Francisco, where years prior, previous lifetime, I had lived a somewhat streetwise existence. Now as a broadcaster, I enjoyed ten years flying around the airwaves and had a rock n' roll oldies show on Saturday Night called "The Blue Suede Cruise". Greased and gassed, we rocked for 5 hours every Saturday with all requests and had a feature we called the Dovetail Doubleshots...two psychedelic tunes in a row..of course some of those songs are 14 minutes long and leaves plenty of time to eat pizza among other things.

I started writing a few years back in response to a magazine who saw my website and had me write an article on whatever I wanted, although it had to be travel oriented. So, North Beach: The Beat Goes On! followed by Haight Ashbury: The Spare Change Tour! came about. Once these appeared online, I was approached by other editors who wanted to use them, as well as a supply of fresh stuff from the literary weedpatch, so it just grew from there. Then I was coaxed into writing a book, rambles on Pop Culture, and wrote it as a labor of love and badda bing, badda boom, well, now it's buydabook!

Question: (Jeri Maier)
Reading your book, one can imagine travelling back through time and spaces. Time in the 60s and 70s... spaces, places where all the dramas of those time happened when