P.H. Mountain’s PEPPERONI, JALAPEÑOS & LSD begins a planned series of memoirs, with a look back to the author’s late teens, beginning in 1989 when he was 18. A recent drop-out from the University of Minnesota, he and two high school friends had recently moved to Boulder, Colorado. There, he hoped to become a writer, perhaps one to eventually hold up against to his literary idols: “Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Jack Kerouac, John Irving… ”. A job as night-shift gas-station attendant would, he hoped, allow him to hone his craft in quiet and isolation, qualities missing from his home life back in Minneapolis as the child of distant parents and youngest of nine siblings. In his time off, he planned on drinking plenty of beer, taking the titular hallucinogenic, and improving his social life, given that everywhere he and his two friends “looked, everywhere we went, young, gorgeous babes strolled the streets, hundreds of them, thousands of them, college cuties from every corner of the United States.”
Mountain finds a girlfriend soon enough, Lonnie, who is beautiful, intelligent, and deeply impressed by his plans to become a writer. He also makes some new platonic friends, most unexpectedly a speed-addicted ex-con named Lawrence, who gets into the habit of visiting Mountain at his gas-station booth and sharing whatever drugs he has on him, usually a plentiful stash. As Mountain begins hanging out with Lawrence, who is both endlessly affable and genuinely intimidating, he begins accumulating the life experience required of a future Hemingway. At one point he accompanies the other man along to a drug deal, where he meets criminals even scarier than Lawrence, and shortly afterward is nearly busted by the cops. The book’s tone is sardonic for the most part, but in these moments ably captures the terror Mountain felt.
As the author reflects now, while some people “contend life begins at conception, others at birth,… I say a person doesn’t begin living until they’re forced to scratch together some dough and pay the goddam rent.” He realizes producing writing he can be proud of will take more discipline and work than was ever required of him in high school or freshman college classes. He also finds himself drifting apart from his old friends, from better-off homes and people less genuinely adventurous than he, and discovers cracks in his relationship with Lonnie, who wants the kids and traditional home life his own upbringing made him determined never to have. In chronicling the self-indulgences of youth, the writing can sometimes seem self-indulgent itself, with the author revisiting a few experiences unlikely to be of great interest to anyone to himself. His tone will also strike plenty of readers as crass, with its relentless focus on drinking beer, doing drugs, and, most off-putting for some sensibilities, chasing after beautiful women. But, though Mountain’s language could be deemed vulgar and his descriptions of women objectifying, the women who were the actual objects of his desire emerge as sensitively rendered and tenderly remembered, perhaps more fully than anyone else in the narrative. Plenty of grace notes occur throughout the writing too, confirming that Mountain wasn’t entirely wrong, all those years ago, to aspire after literary fame (even if, as he acknowledges, software development and not the Great American Novel, proved to be his ticket to financial security.)
P.H. Mountain’s PEPPERONI, JALAPEÑOS & LSD isn’t for the easily offended, but, as a chronicle of an ill-spent youth well-spent in Boulder, Colorado, it testifies to its author’s ample wit, insight, and way with words. Those who appreciate all three will be left anticipating, eagerly, the next installment in Mountain’s projected series of memoirs.
~Everett Jones for IndieReader