intitiation

The thought of initiation scared me more than dentists. I pictured shivering naked in dark caves, eating raw meat and insects, stumbling deliriously across miles of scorching desert, hanging from my pierced chest for days on end. “Perhaps it doesn’t have to be so painful,” I mused between drags on a damp Pall Mall while thumbing for a ride in a light mist of rain outside Grosse Tete, Louisiana.