“Embrace Your Madness”

School was a whole other story, all about limits and rules. In class, Tristan slept. Then he’d write about it in his journal. Every day he sleeps through school, he wrote, comes home to read Brautigan for twenty quiet minutes. Brautigan was thrillingly weird — his lucid commitment to poverty, his thick ’stache and old-timey clothes. Tristan gushed about Brautigan to his girlfriend. Her name was Kathy Morris. He shared all his discoveries with her. “When he loved you,” says Kathy, “he loved you so completely.” She had short brown hair and a skull about half the size of his — in the pictures she took of them, her head looked like a doll’s. After school, Tristan and his girl would escape to the woods, to privacy, carrying a Black Flag tape, a boom box, and an illicit bottle of wine. One year, as teenagers, they took a vacation together to Spain. They saw the bullfights in Madrid. On another trip to Europe, he sat in a vast public square and fed the pigeons. I can hear a hundred thousand pigeons in a wave that could drown America, he wrote. Or a herd of wild elephants on acid, stomping over the Kremlin. I smile as my family, my birds, my pigeons round the corner and tear me limb from limb as their Jesus, their martyr. …

Then it was back to Lancaster, the epitome of middlebrow America. Tristan and his buddies worked hard to show their contempt for everything it stood for. One of the guys in their crew lived in a housing development next to a golf course. The course was a vandal’s dream. It was right beside a cornfield. They built a hut there out of bamboo. They hauled out a mattress, some Sex Pistols tapes, and “carved a little corncob bowl,” says Tristan’s friend Scott Fidler. The hut was the ultimate delinquents’ clubhouse. Depending on how they were feeling, they might kick back in the hut for an hour, smoking the bowl, and then, after spying some hapless foursome, sneak up and steal their golf cart, joyriding it as the poor goobers waved their putters in impotent anger. Or maybe they’d load up on acid and whack golf balls into the development, getting off on the rainbow light trails streaming off the psychedelically enhanced Titleists winging through the sky.

In moments like that, he was every bit El Oso’s son.


“THE WAY HE made it sound was, his father was killed, like, running guns or drugs or something in Central America,” says Justin Quinn, Tristan’s friend. “He really made his dad out to be a hero.”

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