Head West with Broken Neck
About
"…a raucous ride into a life spent living in the moment." — The US Review of Books
Head West with Broken Neck, Vol. 3 of THE WORLD IS MY ASHTRAY, reconnects readers to P.H. Mountain's hilarious, fast-paced world of questionable decisions gone horribly right. Then predictably wrong. And then, somehow, surprisingly right again.
Paul and Lonnie remain holed up in the mountain ghost town of Eldora, Colorado, where Paul completes his first novel with the indispensable assistance of acid, speed, and rivers of Budweiser. Now a dangerously legal twenty-one-year-old man, he tests the patience of every barstool and bartender within twenty-five miles—finding all the pleasure and pain the bottle promises.
“Unless the Hindus were right, I’d never died before, and the Hindus couldn’t possibly be right, could they? Those dudes f**king starved as perfectly edible cows strolled past, flaunting their exalted bovine existence with each steaming cow patty they dumped on Gandhi Plaza. Still, pain this overwhelming implied death, didn’t it?”
With a few extra bucks in their pockets, Paul, Lonnie, and the dogs take off on a wanderlust road trip in the battered Vanship Econoline, crisscrossing the bohemian American West in search of those final reckless days of youth. But the slow, relentless drip of time presents challenges that weed and whiskey can no longer solve. As adulthood looms, Paul and Lonnie are forced to confront hard truths—about themselves, each other, and the inevitable future.
Spontaneous travel, excruciating pain, and bursts of hilarity punctuate this next chapter in P.H. Mountain’s darkly funny coming-of-age memoir. Set in the 90s just before the tech revolution, Head West with Broken Neck is a full embrace of reckless living, an unapologetic testament to the wild beauty of attacking life with the throttle open and arms spread wide.
“I collapsed backward, pulling Lonnie on top of my chest. We rolled around the bed, clutched each other spastically, howled like old beat poets in old bars in old ‘Frisco town. I reached around and extracted the last vestiges of orgasm from her soul, hoping we could just die, just f**king croak right then and there, because nothing would ever get much better or mean much more.”