Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, Sandra Bullock, John Wayne, U2, and above all George H W Bush -- nobody is truly safe when the narrator and his red-headed girlfriend get weird and wild on the streets of Austin, Texas.
Lone Star Nirvana is an edgy satire on guns, drugs, and politics, delivering relentlessly outrageous humor from cover to cover.
EXCERPT: The Ghost of Elvis
Elvis takes the hash and peels back the foil, sniffs the contents. "Shoo! That stuff smells worse than the inside of my casket."
"How about some absinthe?" She nudges me but Elvis screws up his face. "Oh, man, everything you wanna give me smells like the grave." He frowns and whips his cape in the air. "You guys wouldn't like be holding out on the King, would you?"
I nudge Carol, "Babe, I think Elvis maybe means some of that meth you scored the other night."
She frowns. "Crank?" Clearly, she doesn't consider that an appropriate recreational drug for the ghost of Elvis Presley.
"Crank?" the King almost shouts. "You mean speed? Uh, whazzit, man, crystal meth?" He starts getting so excited his aura is flickering, turning strange colors Carol may have but I know I haven't ever seen before. A liquid moustache of anticipatory perspiration oozes out over his lip, and greenish-brown drool wells up at the corners of his mouth.
Carol goes rummaging through her big travel bag but can't find the meth and starts nattering, "God fucking dammit! I can't ever find anything in this shit-assed bag!" She finally just screams and dumps it all onto the floor, jumps down and spreads the stuff out with both hands and a lot of muttering to herself about the conspiracy of the inanimate.
Elvis spots that plastic baggie full of those crystal chips and lurches down onto the carpet to grab it, but ends up grasping handfuls of air as Carol heedlessly shoves the meth out of his reach. Desperate, the King heaves himself forward onto his paunch with a loud plomp, that pompadour splaying down across his face, and closes his pale, bloated fingers around the crank. Of course, he's so fired up, he just lies there fumbling with the zip-lock, that drool now pouring down his chin and dribbling onto the floor, eyes glazed with joy, trembling like a starved vampire bat that's gotten loose somehow in a Red Cross blood center and can smell the red soup but can't quite squeeze into one of those big refrigerators stocked with the lovely liquid. The King is too wired on naked anticipation. Finally, he gives up and just sinks his teeth into the plastic, ripping it open with such fury that the little crystals go whirling through the air in every direction. It looks like a plate glass window is being sucked out by a tornado. "Man, I'm gonna die if I don't get my hands on some of that shit!" he wails.
At first I think the King is maybe exaggerating just a mite about dying given his present state of being deceased, but even as I watch him scraping madly at the carpet, I notice his body is flickering toward transparency, as if Scotty locked the transporter in on his coordinates and has started to beam him up. Not wanting to just stand there and watch the poor slob die a second time, I squat and pick up a crystal that has skittered to a spot exactly between my feet. "Here, Elvis."
His head swings around like that little girl's possessed by the devil in The Exorcist, and when his eyes come to rest on the glittering rock he snatches it from my hand and pops it into his mouth. Instantly he flops onto his back like a sweaty sand bag and lies motionless, sunglasses askew, mouth frozen in a hideous grimace.
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