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me - like something that had been pressed down so far in a body it had to explode. What all college kids feel. Though only some of us are carrying daughter rage secrets in our skin and bones. When the plane landed in Lubbock my swim coach picked me up at the airport. The woman who had paid for me.
    It took about two weeks for the Lubbockness to set in.
    Until May of 2009, Lubbock, my friends, was dry. Not arid. Though it’s that too - arid enough to choke on. But it was Alcoholess. Except in bars and restaurants during certain times. To purchase “packaged” booze, you had to drive 25 minutes or more to a drive-through liquor barn type alcohol hut. Load up. Drive back. Stealthily sneak your load up at night through the
side doors to the girl’s dorm - carrying giant suitcases of beer up several flights of stairs, or bottles shoved down your pants.
    The environmental extremes in Lubbock are stockyard cow shit smell so pungent it makes your eyes water as well as causing a special gagging reflex, and hot wind orange dust storms so thick you can’t even see the hand in front of your face that also feel like you are being attacked by little Lubbock evil devil pins if you venture out.
    Avenue Q, Buddy Holly Plaza. Big bronze Buddy Holly statue. Google it. Buddy, he’s circled by a walk of fame including greats like Waylon Jennings and the venerable Mac Davis. Budfest takes place during the first week of September, Buddy Holly’s birthday. During Budfest, drunk West Texans dress up like Buddy and his woman and … holler.
    Prairie Dog town. Picture a very large dirt area contained by a cement fence in the middle of nowhere. A cement fence about knee-high. And inside the cement fence? A great many holes in the ground. And in the holes? Prairie dogs. So if you were drunk and high and sitting on the cement wall in the middle of the night, the thing to do would be shine a flashlight and then throw rocks at all the heads. Like a grown up whack-a-mole. What’s not to like?
    Yeah. And when I say flat? I mean if you jump you can see Dallas.
    Lubbock. Great place. Honestly you should save up.
    By day I went to swim practice at 5:30 a.m. and breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and classes 10:00 a.m. through 3:00 p.m. and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and dinner at 7:00 p.m. every day but Sunday with a pack of hot swimmer women and then the nights were ours.
    All night. Every night. As much night as you could get in you before 5:30 a.m.
    I was in love or something like it with my roommate within a month of meeting her. Maybe it was her drinking ability, or her swearing ability, or her rock and roll or her Bose speakers
and kick ass stereo or her being from Chicago and thinking West Texans were cretins or her butterfly stud shoulders or her big tits or her bandana or her torn up jeans or her one-hit pipe. Maybe it was just her name. Amy. Amy, what you wanna do. I think, I could fall for you, for awhile maybe longer if I do.
    I don’t know how much you know about swimmer partying but, well, it’s formidable. College swimmers are nearly all on some kind of scholarship. That’s money. There were the two British twins with spikey bleached hair. There were endless Barbie Texans with hairspray and drawls. There was a fantastic senior dyke and an amazingly beautiful boy-bodied Asian woman and mystical. Romanian. Of those with peckers, there was a tall lanky tow head with hair as white as mine whose last name was Creamer that I fell for like a blond brick house, there was a surfer So Cal king of Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello and beer dude, there was a two-stepping horn dog from Dallas, there was a guy from Amy’s hometown who orchestrated the mandorm parties, and a whole pack of swimmer guys with rockets in their pockets and shaved skin in places regular guys didn’t know about.
    When I say we partied, I mean an epic poem.
    About halfway through the year my days became swim practice at 5:30 a.m. big melon headed