At eighteen, Paul Mountain pissed on his academic scholarship to the University of Minnesota and fled to Boulder, Colorado without money, family or prospects. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other dudes, Paul's life was youth unbridled, impulsive, and without remorse. Perfect, in other words.
Within a year, Paul finds himself in a tiny cabin with his new girlfriend in a Rocky Mountain ghost town, convinced he can write his way out of poverty before buying his first legal drink. He was wrong. He was wrong about a great many things.
In his whirlwind comedic memoir, Paul escorts the reader on his rabid quest for anything to avoid the looming bondage of adult responsibility and shares his coming of age set against the backdrop of the final decade before the tech revolution. Pepperoni, Jalapenos & LSD is a story filled with women, drugs, old motorcycles, speed junkies, crime, sex, mountaintops, poverty, more sex, long blasts down empty ski slopes and laugh out loud happiness. More than anything, it's a story of embracing recklessness, for as Paul notes, "The day will soon come when the cigarettes finally take hold, the doctor shouts, 'Cancer!', and God's gavel falls, sentencing me to death and who the f*** knows what else. Probably hell, but I'm hoping for a clerical error, the great celestial typo."
"Reading Mountain's personal accounts about run-ins with the law, marathon sexual escapades, and other terrible decisions made under the influence of LSD or copious amounts of alcohol seems to stir up a certain nostalgia for that time long ago when life seemed wide open. A hilarious and thoughtful work for anyone who can look back and recall how the world of an eighteen-year-old felt jaw-dropping and unstoppable." - Reedsy
"Mountain's memoir offers an unflinching look at being a young American man out of control in a now by-gone era, testing limits and surprising with extremes." - BookLife Reviews
"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." - Indie Reader
"The honesty of the story creates a vivid tale of a late-20th-century journey West...a thorough, entertaining exploration of one guy's blissful days of youth." - Kirkus Reviews
"P.H. Mountain's Pepperoni, Jalapeños & LSD is my new love affair with the written word. It's Kerouac's tale for today. The same breathless prose, the same sweeping tale of the road each of us who have walked/driven/hitched/railed intimately understand." - Verified Amazon Review
"This was completely different to what I would usually read, but was enjoyable with the detail and paintings of quite descriptive and graphic views. I recommended this to a friend who picked it up on Kindle and has since read and loved it. Despite me not being the target audience of this, I did enjoy it and would recommend anyone gives it a read." - Verified NetGalley Review
"This story was so easy to read. The words flowed like magic and the characters unmistakably real." - Verified GoodReads Review
"It was funny, frustrating, and heartbreaking all at once. I sometimes felt myself rooting for the author but many times wanting to smack him and tell him to get it together." - Verified Amazon Review