Transubstantiation at El Patio Cantina

And then there was creosote in the urinals. Maybe they had used urinal cakes before but now the pissers in El Patio Cantina were full of fresh cut scrub, pokey stems and so many tiny leaves and sometimes little yellow flowers as targets for your stream. Not just one or two clippings but the whole crown of the bush lopped off and filling the bowl at the base of the flushtrickle waterwall where coalesced not only urine but also blood and shit and vomit and whatever other bowel stuff ends up coating any good dive, an extensive catalogue of how El Patio had the tendency to turn us inside-out. But the smell was wafting toward the bar more and more and there were complaints from patrons who were not totally flipped like us regulars. This was the problem: the awful smell of our good times. But God invented the creosote bush. God looked out over the desert some time ago and wondered if she’d laid the dreadfulness on too thick. She sprinkled the sand with creosote as a compromise between nothing and something. She said, You will grow equidistant from one another. You will keep your space. You will multiply only yourself. You will clone yourself from the center outward so that you grow into a ring, a fortress of yourself, filled with nothing. You will measure your age in millennia and you will keep your distance from one another and you will be greedy with water. Nothing will eat of you. You will clone yourself until you are as numerous as the stars in the sky. You will fill the desert with your constellations of lonesomeness. You will, above all, be fragrant when I let you drink. Go for a walk through the Chihuahuan Desert on a drizzly night and the coarse earth will let down its guard as it gulps and you will get to smell its soul, the smell of creosote after rain, a declaration sigh of existence after so much solitude. If you gasp deep it hurts because the smell is pungent, medicinal even, but if you take it easy every breath is sweet with notes of pine and citrus and rosemary all mixed into an ichorous perfume that wafts straight brainward, makes the neurons heel finally with unbounded gratefulness: there is rain. We will drink. So: noon and our bartender walks from El Patio toward the Rio Grande carrying a pocketknife, finds the biggest, emptiest ring of scrub and slashes at its branches that have for millennia cloned themselves into an empty fortress only to be deconstructed noon after noon into a bundle of sprigs and crowns in the hands of our bartender who returns to the cantina, fishes dripping oldies out of the urinals and drops in fresh cuts of creosote so we might spend another night emptying ourselves into the declaration sigh, pretending there is no difference between piss and rain.