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unlatch.
    The dark, hot room stank of smoke, sweat, and rotten fruit that had been lost in the chaos of clothing piles, stacks of old papers, scattered cassette tapes, and plastic tape cases clouded with dust. On the fireplace mantle stood a wooden crucifix draped by crisscrossed bandoleers packed with shotgun shells.
    Mel staggered across the room and sank back into the cushions of his tattered sofa, where he slept beneath wrinkled Hustler centerfolds pinned to the wall. He leaned the .22 against the arm of the sofa and turned the radio back up to a moderate blare.
    I sat on the straight-back chair, took a lighter from his table, and levered open a beer. Mel accepted it without comment, upending it like a marathon runner at the end of the race, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down on his fat, grizzled neck while the first twelve ounces hit home.
    He croaked, “Cold—good.”
    I pried open another, handed it over, and opened one for myself.
    Mel slid down to the other end of the sofa to throw another log in the stove. No fridge, phone, or electricity out here—just the battery-powered radio, which he kept on the Mexican station. It’s not because he spoke Spanish—he didn’t—or particularly enjoyed the music; it was white noise for him, twenty-four hours of it in this room of dark-paneled walls and blackout curtains, and it was guaranteed that whenever there was a deejay interlude, newsbreak, or other announcement, he wouldn’t understand enough to get an impression of something, anything, going on in the outside world.
    “Had this whore here last night.” By whore he meant woman. “Kicked that bitch out about an hour ago. Ugly as hell, but she sucked cock all right. Thought you might have been her come back for more.”
    Mel guzzled his second beer. Once in a while I asked myself, Why do I come all the way out to Abiquiu to visit Mel Woburn? I hated some things about the way Mel came on—the misogyny, the cranky paranoia—making each pilgrimage for more homegrown like a ritual rehashing of what had gone wrong with the ’60s. Each time I came here I had been patronizing Mel, leading him to believe I was interested in his crazy hippie days, when privately I pitied him for being such a burnout recluse, but there was nobody in Los Alamos I could speak freely with about my fondness for marijuana.
    I opened us each another beer—he kept it so hot in the trailer it was easy to put away a few fast—and asked, “How was your Fourth?”
    Mel made a voilà gesture across the trailer, his fingertips charred to nubs from stoking all the fires he stoked, smoking all the pot he smoked. “Same old, same old.” He started to roll a joint.
    Going to Mel was a little like church for me. There was ritual, there were parables, and of course we shared the sacrament. And there was something else Mel and I shared, a disease that infected men like us, making us waste ourselves, our talents, our days, on tired schemes and cheap tricks, burning ourselves up inside, meanwhile tarring up our lungs and pickling our livers, putting the brain slowly to sleep. Maybe I did it with a little more style: imported whiskey and bottled beer with the gold foil on the neck instead of Milwaukee’s Best; the expensive house and the moping trophy-wife instead of hippie whores and a bent-up trailer with centerfolds above the sofa. Otherwise, the only thing that made us different was that, in the midst of all the dissipation, I kept paying taxes.
    “How ’bout you,” Mel said, “what’d you do?”
    “Went camping in Ledoux.”
    Mel licked the fresh spliff. “Morphy Lake?”
    “Yeah. You been there?”
    “First place I came back in ’69.”
    “No shit?”
    “Would I shit you? All kinds of hippies lived out there. Used to crash at a big adobe above the lake.”
    “An L-shaped place?”
    “Yep. Part of it was actually a log cabin.” Mel shook his head and lit the joint. He puffed and passed.
    “What brought you out there?” I hit the