Yet what self-respecting pot dealer in the 1970s makes absolutely no mention of the Armadillo World Headquarters, a haven for pot smokers and Austin's premier counterculture institution of that entire decade? Sure, there's mention of Hemphill Park, the Congress Avenue Bridge, and stashing cocaine in a South Austin La Quinta. That said, it's rather disappointing that so little is offered up to the reader to give a real feeling of what it was like to live here back in the day. While some of the episodes take place in Houston and briefly in Florida, this is, as the title suggests, an Austin-centric book. In fact, paging through the chapters, I constantly flashed on Gilbert Shelton's Austin-created Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers underground comics and how Nomad's episodic vignettes are wistfully reminiscent of the spirit evoked by Franklin, Phineas, and Fat Freddy. There certainly seems to be a penchant for exaggeration here but, indeed, that tends to make the dubious details all the more entertaining. That's not to say this is outright fantasy, but rather that the passage of time may have skewed the intricacies of reality, while Nomad's flotation within a constant smoky haze just might have affected his original perceptions of how things went down. Straight from the get-go, it seemed apparent that much of what is presented here should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Using the alias Casper Nomad, the author serves up a cavalcade of era-appropriate escapades: an out-of-state acid-laced rock festival wild drug-'n'-booze-fueled lake parties encounters with the Mexican mafia and other shady dealers close encounters with the law and, perhaps inevitably, a bust. As someone who savors his precious reading time and usually spends that time venturing into weightier fare, it would be dishonest of me to say I didn't genuinely enjoy this slim volume of stoner crime fluff.

Wild at heart book mysogynistic