The Drug
Part 1-A
They stood on the corner, crouching under drops of rain. Waiting for the light to change.
“Compassionate Narcissism.”
“What?”
“Compassionate Narcissism.”
Punk shuffled his feet. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I forgive you.” Ollister. Big insincere smile.
“For what?”
“For not being me.”
Punk’s forehead creased. He squinted against the wind. “But I don’t want to be you.”
“If it were true, I would forgive you for that too.”
“Shut the fuck up man, I don’t need to hear any of this shit today.” Punk. Softly, with seriousness.
Ollister stood like a patina’d statue in the downpour. It took the skies thousand of years to make solid stone droop, but Ollister could be made into a softer, sopping version of himself in about ten minutes. A wet dog, steaming with sexual purpose.
“Do you know that weird girl, Matilda?” Punk.
“Yep. You’re to stay away.”
“Aw man, really? But she’s hot. And… that’s against my philosophy.” Punk. “Anarchy.”
“Anarchy is not a philosophy.”
“It’s not just all about fucking shit up, man. It doesn’t have to be chaos or whatever. Everybody is just, like, an individual. And you can do whatever you want. Even be nice or whatever. As long as, like, you’re original, you know? An original individual.”
“Everybody draws the anarchy symbol the same way.” Ollister. Using his eyes to point to the one stitched on Punk’s bag. “We need to create a little controlled chaos of our own. I’ve got some revenge to enact. We’re going to do head-to-head with The Platypus. Mind-to-mind. You know Pete?”
Punk nodded.
“He’s in on it. He has something for you. Some drugs. I need you to go pick them up. Here’s the address.” He gingerly undid one of the many thousands of safety pins on Punk’s jacket, and pinned the piece of paper to his front.
The light changed. Ollister walked. Punk frowned.
Part 1-B
“This weather’s so nice, I just wanna… stick my dick in it.” Punk. Making small talk.
Punk was in some coke-head’s car. On Ollister’s mission. His destination was on the other side of town and he had needed a ride. This balding middle-aged man had asked him for drugs with such a reasonable desperation that he couldn’t say no.
“It’s raining.”
“I know man, already wet… already wet…” He fingered a white envelope he had found in his bag earlier that day. He had no idea how it could have gotten there, though he did spend last night in the squathouse, and fucked-up things were always happening there. It looked like a fancy wedding invitation, but was all about somebody messing up the recipient if they didn’t get some gray papers. Punk kind of liked it.
The driver tapped impatiently on the steering wheel.
“Don’t worry dude, we’re almost at Coke-dog’s house.” Punk. Trying to sound cool. The man nodded.
There was never such a person as ‘Coke-dog’. For 30 minutes Punk had given the ailing business man purposefully confusing directions. They kept doubling back. Punk said it was so he couldn’t find his way back to the drug dealer’s house, a blindfold precaution. In actuality he wasn’t quite sure where he was going. He stared at the address still pinned to his jacket. 1024 1/2 W. Strawdog.
Finally, he spotted it on the left. A duplex, overgrown and broken down. He ordered his sweating chauffeur to go a few more blocks, a right here, a left there. In front of a dismal looking residence he shouted. “Stop!” The man violently kicked at the breaks. “Wait here.”
Punk got out and began to run in the opposite direction, back towards the house. He left the envelope in the sweating man’s car. By the time he was ducking through the branches on the walkway to 1024 1/2 W. Strawdog he was out of breath. And a little dizzy. For the thousandth time it occurred to him that he was most likely anemic. He should do something about that.
The door was wide open. He knocked on the doorframe and called out tentatively. His voice echoed inside the dark house. No answer. So he went in.
His step through the doorway met with a resounding squish. The floor was covered in about an inch of mud. Punk was kind of sickened at the green bog and the wet smell his footprint had shot up to his nostrils. Now he would have to bathe. Probably.
He slowly squished his way through the house. Water leaked from the sopping ceiling, and the humid air pushed in from open windows. He felt insane.
Suddenly there was a frenzied flapping of wings and a piercing chirp. Punk’s left foot slipped out from under him and he sat down, hard, right in the muck. It was just a bird, and a small one at that. Now there was mud all over his pants, in his boots.
He stood up and sighed, his exhaled air harmonizing with the faint hum of a television set, just now audible. Maybe there was someone here after all. He made his way through the filth towards the sounds coalescing into voices.
In the main room the cavernous blackness was playing a spastic tug-of-war with the flicker of the television set. The windows were blacked out. The changing colors spotlighted a figure, sitting as though to answer the glowing box. He was on the floor, in the muck. He was completely naked, his hair long and muddy, full of leaves. He crouched, staring intensely at the television, chewing on a twig.
“Pete.”
The kid jumped back, startled. He then smiled, creepily, as though to acknowledge Punk’s presence, and turned back to his television program. Punk was unsure what to do or say. Pete had always been strange. But he hadn’t been prepared for whatever kind of situation this was.
He walked around beside him to get a look at the television. It framed a car racing along a mountain road. He sat down behind Pete on the couch, taking off his ruined shoes. The muck was warm. It felt nice when he curled his toes. He focused on the screen that had his naked friend so enraptured.
The feeding habits of the North American auto are quite regular. After it has traversed a considerable distance it will stop at one of many habitual petrol oases. There it will consume as much petrol as it desires through a “mouth”, if you will, in the rear of its body. Most domestic autos eat petrol, but the larger rural lorry prefers diesel. This mammoth country variety can consume many times the food of a normal auto. It stores fuel in its body for its routine migrations across open country.
The Welsh baritone droned on, documentary style. Pete sat still, transfixed.
“So, what’s up, man?” Silence. “How you been?”
Punk felt like he was the only solid in a room full of gasses and liquids.
“Quite a set up, dude.” No response. “I’m going to go find your john.” Punk got up and trudged into the hall. He noticed little plants, grass or weeds, growing at the edges of the walls, from the baseboard outlets.
At the end of the hallway he found the kitchen. Lush green foliage was growing out of the sink, the stove. Vines curled around the refrigerator. Water dripped down the walls. He gulped down the hot heavy air of a greenhouse.
Watch here as the clever auto uses its wiper-antennae, a natural defense against the rain. Its hard exoskeleton protects its soft innards from predators or other environmental dangers.
Walking into the bedroom he was struck by the giant mess of technology. All sorts of computer monitors had been stacked up, forming new walls inside the room, wires, and circuit boards were everywhere. When he had last seen the kid, he was studying at Art Prep, hitting the sciences hard, computer engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence. Also hitting the drugs hard. He supplied Punk, as well as a good number of his friends, with a wide variety of illegal substance.
He was a smart kid. Aced all his classes, despite constant struggle with his instructors. Punk was out of town on some hitchhiking misadventure when the meltdown happened. Apparently Pete had started holding his own “classes” after the classes of each of his instructors. He played fast and furious with fringe ideas: String Theory, Psychodynamics, Hieroglyphics, Alchemy, Post-Modern Art. He dressed like Akhenaton, the Egyptian Jesus according to one of his lectures. He recruited an impressive following amongst the usually apathetic student body. Mostly female freshman.
Somehow he pilfered Art Prep’s cache of degrees, and started passing them out on the west lawn. This gave Dean Euphrates more than enough cause to expel him and have him arrested besides.
But Pete had gotten off with probation and community service and, last Punk had heard, he was recovering in a new apartment on the east side, working on an thermodynamic perpetual motion machine or something like that. Not living like an ascetic monkey.
The auto usually returns home to sleep in the same driveway or covered shelter each night. It receives its primary rest there but is also known to take frequent naps during the day. This is often done in large encampment “lots” with many of its peers napping or hibernating nearby.
Punk discovered the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom and pushed the door open, against the mud. An indescribably foul odor rose to meet him. His nostrils recoiled. He grabbed hold of them with his thumb and forefinger to steady himself, and stepped inside.
The bathtub was blackened and filled with ash and burnt logs, clearly the remnants of fire. It certainly wasn’t safe to light fires inside a wooden duplex, but he supposed that if it had to happen, the bathtub was the most logical place.
There was furniture disassembled in the corner. He picked up the toilet seat and immediately slammed it back down. Bones. Little skulls, tiny femurs. One glimpse was enough to tell him they were the leftovers of many small mammals, and also enough to turn his stomach.
Punk never minded a little binge and purge when he was on the piss. Sometimes it was almost fun to throw up. He could drink more. But now he stifled the volcanic urge with all his strength.
He sloshed angrily out of the bathroom and back down the hall. He needed to get this over with. His heart was beating much too fast. The main room presented him with exactly the same tableaux he had left a few moments ago.
“Pete, what the fuck man? I don’t know what you think… Dude, Ollister told me…”
“Braaawwkk.” Pete barked at him. Loudly. He didn’t want his show interrupted. Punk’s anger quickly dissipated and recoalesced in to nervousness. The slow monotony of the television narrator did not do much to soothe him.
The mating patterns of the North American auto may seem strange to some, but in fact they are just unusual. When it is aroused, one auto will bump into another, preferably at high speed, as to cause as much damage as possible. Then one, or sometimes both, autos are made into scrap metal, which is then melted down to form new baby cars. The mating season varies, but holidays and late at night are the preferred procreation times. The ritual mating call or dance often consists of severe swerving and/or disobeying of lights and signs, which the urban auto has been trained to obey.
Punk stood still for the rest of the program. He thought that if he didn’t make it out of here, he might never see Matilda again. When the credits started rolling he looked again at Pete, who was now holding a plastic bag in his teeth. Punk hadn’t seen him move from his spot on the floor, all-fours. Pete was staring at him.
He approached very slowly, and gingerly plucked the bag from the naked boy’s mouth. He was afraid he was going to get bitten.
“Careful with that stuff, Punk.” Pete’s voice was completely normal. And unnerving. He winked at Punk, his gaze fixed.
“Uh… OK.” Punk turned and ran. He was still breathing hard when he hit the night air, caked in mud, plastic baggie full of some strange drug in his clenched fist.
Part 2
“Did you get the stuff from Pete?” Ollister.
“Yup.” Punk. He was manically huffing and puffing on his bony hands trying to get them to warm up.
“Stop that.”
They sat, kicking their legs against a low rock wall that enclosed a sad square of dirt in front of the organic grocery store. There were a few desperate looking weeds in the dirt patch. Some hippie had planted an herb garden in front of the store. An organic charm before shoppers got inside and discovered all the food was rotten.
“I’m gonna go get a cup of coffee.” Punk.
“Organic?”
“Shut up.” He shuffled towards the storefront.
Ollister looked across the street to the record store and the clothes shop, travel agency, coffee shop, noodle house. All the guide books let their readers in on ‘the little secret’ of this ‘hip pedestrian district’. ‘Quirky and artsy,’ it was an ‘out of the way’ bohemian mecca. Ollister wished he could get out of its way. The books didn’t say how to get out of this area.
People, in ridiculous variety, poured out of shops and on down the street. The crisp seasonal hustle and bustle juxtaposed sharply with the variety of youth costumes on display. The clouds overhead were getting lower by the hour. He watched a gaggle of ‘English'-style punks across the street as they affected various slouches and harassed the occasional elderly passer-by. They sucked down cigarettes and spat on each other, their technicolor mohawks unfolding like peacock tails. Puffs of steam rose from their mouths like cartoon bubbles.
“What?” Punk was back.
“Nothing.”
“Motherfuck. It’s cold…” Punk gripped his recycled coffee cup as though it were a burning log. He brought it to his cracked lips but didn’t drink.
“Now you’re blowing on your coffee?” Ollister.
“To cool it down.”
“Weren’t you just blowing on your hands to warm them up?”
“Uh…”
“How am I suppose to trust someone who blows hot and cold with the same breath?”
“Whatever, man.” And then, quickly directed at someone walking in front of them: “‘sup?” Ollister looked up. Some fat guy, girdled in tattoos, with a disk in his lip and ear holes large enough to stick a hand through. Even before all that he must have been ugly.
“You know him?” Ollister.
“Yeah. Sort of.” And laying a finger aside of his nose he punctuated this ambiguity with a snot rocket. The fat guy was all in black, with dreads. A Gutter punk. Filth. Closer to Punk’s kith and kin than those fashion plates across the street. The ‘newer’, more ‘hard-core’ punks hated the ones that looked like London in the 70’s. Even though that’s where it supposedly started. According to Punk they were ‘trust-fund babies’ and deserved to be beat up when the energy could be mustered. Ollister didn’t like to get involved in the punk world. It was grotesquely fascinating. Sort of.
“Why does he do that to his face?”
“I dunno.” Punk had his lobes stretched a little and a few rings in his face. Nose, lip maybe. At the moment Ollister didn’t feel like looking at his face long enough to place them exactly.
“Because he looks…” Ollister began.
“Body Modification is an art man, it…”
“I wouldn’t use that word…”
“Well, whatever, it’s rad, man. You know, like making a project out of your body. Pushing it to the limits and shit. Those motherfucks are crazy, man. Cutting, burning, you know… scarification. They’ve all got their tongues split, some of them their pricks…”
“Can you even do that?”
“Totally fucking serious. Surgically inserted horns into your forehead. Elf ears or Spock ears or whatever you want to call ‘em. Tattoos and piercings aren’t enough anymore man. You gotta get your lips sewn together…”
“That one actually sounds like it would be a good…”
“Ritual scarification, breathing fire, hanging from meat hooks. You know, by your piercings or whatever. It’s spiritual…”
“Sounds like a circus.”
“Man.”
“Do any of them ever, say, cut an arm off? That would be rebellious.”
“Shut up, man.”
“Seriously… what is the next generation of kids going to do to rebel against their nipple-pierced parents? It’s going to have to become more extreme. They’re going to elongate their legs and fingers. Or maybe erase their faces…”
“Shut the fuck up, man.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up. Ever again. Did you get the stuff?” Ollister.
“Yes. I already told you. Yes. You wouldn’t believe the shit I went through to…”
“I don’t care about that. Let’s see it...”
“What? Right now?”
“Yep.”
“In the street?”
“Yep.”
“But…”
“I don’t give a fuck. Do you?”
“I guess not…” Punk started digging through the ratty patch-covered messenger bag that accompanied him everywhere. He produced a small plastic sandwich bag filled with what looked like wet leaves. And unceremoniously presented it to Ollister.
“That’s it?”
“Mhmm.”
Ollister opened the bag and stuck his nose inside. It was surprisingly pungent and his face recoiled. Citrus. Lemons. It smelt of lemons.
“How are you suppose to smoke it when it’s all wet?”
“I don’t think you smoke it. It’s the wetness that does the magic, man.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Just squeeze some of that juice into any old orifice. At least that’s how I got it to work best for me.”
“You tried it on yourself? For fuck’s sake, Punk…”
“Dude. No. I’m not stupid. I tested it on a dog first. And then me.”
“What the fuck…?”
“My friend, he got this dog and…”
“Alright, alright… So what happened to the dog?”
“I don’t know… I never saw him again…”
“OK, then what fucking happened to you?”
“Man, it was intense...”
“Details. Not abstractions.”
“I jacked off for like 24 hours straight. Like, until I fucking bled.”
“Don’t tell me that sort of thing, Punk. That’s disgusting. That’s not the drug, that’s your own disgusting habit.”
Punk launched another snot rocket towards the sidewalk, a sneer on his face.
“Well… As long as it significantly alters your consciousness, distorts reality."
“Oh, it totally does that, man. I’m going to give some of it to that girl, Matilda, and then maybe…” Punk.
“You absolutely will not. You are staying away from her. In any case, we are going to need it for The Platypus.”
“Um… OK.”
“This is serious, Punk. Get that through the thick layer of filth that encrusts your skull. You friend Franc? The Platypus kidnapped him.”
“Who did?”
“The Platypus. The men in white suits, the men in white cars? He’s after us.”
“Heh, ok.”
“Punk, I could care less if you believe me. Just do as I say. You know that kid Silas we saw at January’s Party?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think…”
“If you want to try this thing out on someone besides your perverted self, give it to him. As encouragement.”
“Are you serious?”
“When was the last time you heard me make a joke?”
“Fuck.” The bag rifling began again. For Ollister, the temptation to peer inside was easily resisted. He didn’t want to know. “I don’t have anything to put it in.” Shuffle. “Except this maybe.” He dangled an identical plastic baggie high up in the air, this one full of pot.
“That’ll work. Dump it out.” Ollister.
“Dump it out?”
“Dump it out.”
“But…”
“Just dump it out Punk. It’s only fucking pot.”
“Dude…” Ollister’s face settled it. “Fine.” He angrily started shaking the contents on to the ground in front of him. The green flakes lightly speckled hills of snot. “You’re kinda pissing me off today, man…”
“Save it.” Ollister dropped a dripping pinch into the now empty baggie. He put his own baggie back into his coat pocket and walked off. Into the mist that was just beginning to mature into precipitation.
“Motherfuck.” Punk. Remarked to the empty space now beside him. Or perhaps the empty space in his head. He pulled on his hood and lit a damp cigarette.
A prickish-looking kid in a black turtle neck was coming out of the organic grocery store with his recycled sack full of organic food.
“Spare change?” Punk called out. Just to say something. He didn’t need it. Ollister gave him more than enough to support his various vices. But this too was an old habit.
“Change comes from within.” The turtleneck quipped haughtily.
Punk promptly kicked his ass.
Part 3
Punk was at Matilda’s. He had finally cornered her at a show last night. She seemed pilled to the gills, as usual, but it still took him a suspenseful 25 minutes to talk her into taking him home with her. By that point he was bursting.
But after he finally got her undressed, it was boring boring. All of a sudden he wasn’t interested in having anything else to do with it. But he had to stay and hide out from those guys in the white suits. He had been to the squathouse, and his friends there had confirmed the story. They were snatching gutter kids.
So he decided to have a little more of the drug. Just a little. Though he had injured himself, sort of, with his previous experiments, they were also really good, in a strange way. Also, he was really bored, and Matilda didn’t turn him on. He had to do something, he had wasted all that time talking to her.
He had taken just a pinch, and not ten minutes later found himself masturbating while staring at his face in the bathroom mirror.
It looked like the dark side of the moon. Round, cloaked, unassailable. Reflecting no light, its peaks and craters were chipped and dirty like a topographical map of a broken-in skate park.
His black hair was thick, cropped at random, according to his most recent haircut. He only allowed friends who had never cut hair before to cut his, and only if they were drunk and it was dark. This resulted in plenty of faux-hawks, dried blood/hair clumps, and joke haircuts, but at least it was different. His eyebrows were big and dark. They were so close to his hairline that from a distance it looked like they were part of his hairdo. The eyebrows were also close to his eyes, also close together. They had the requisite street-sadness, that pulled-over, yellowed look, like tarnished coins. Their impenetrability worked in reverse as well. The thoughts behind the eyes were well concealed, and if they seemed slow to track it was only a guise. It was hard to stare, but in this way an odd flash of mischief might be caught. But on the whole they kept up appearances: turned off, lights out, no one home.
His nose had been broken so many times that it looked like it had never been broken at all, or rather that it had stopped growing when he was about seven. It was small and squat, and the interior regularly exposed to view a viscous cache of hair and bloody mucous requiring constant sniffling, just to keep the stuff from trickling down his face. Even so, there was usually something unrecognizable hanging out of it, or around it. Although this nose was not without its seasons, often it was shiny pink, cracked and peeling, bloodied from coke binge or scuffle.
But his mouth, the seat of perverse human pleasure, was by far his least attractive feature. He watched it slowly open, as he manipulated himself. It looked painful to posses. It was small and tight and had to force itself into impossible contortions to make words or allow sustenance inside. He used only the left side of it. This looked cool and nonchalant when sucking on a cigarette or whiskey bottle, but otherwise it was tic-ish, palsied. The right side had been scarred into asymmetry. He had made up so many stories about “What happened to your face, man?” that he had long forgotten the truth. He did remember how he had chipped his tooth, however. His snaggle had been earned in an attempt to ride two skateboards at once – one for each foot. He flashed it proudly through the manhole of his lips now, to inspect it. The smell made him retch involuntarily. The vomit in the back of his throat only adding to the halitosis.
His cheeks were battlefields of exploded landmine zits, pocks, scars, and fresh pimples. They were forever red, forever raw. The occasional cyst, rising like the grandfather peak in an already majestic range, was not an uncommon sight. These grisly skin conditions made shaving akin to butchery, but this was never much of an issue as he only could cultivate about nine thick black hairs on his chin at a time. He let them grow and curl, plucking only if he caught one in his peripheral vision.
It was, however, clear that he was extremely attractive. Almost everyone thought he was hot, almost always. Even now, looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, he couldn’t help but to be astonished at how hot he was.
“You look really hot.” Matilda. Walking into the bathroom, forcing her eyes on the mirror, away from Punk’s furious hand.
He grunted in assent. “Uh, but you can’t tell Ollister about this, ok?”
“You can do whatever you want with your own hands.”
“No, I mean about us.”
“I don’t even talk to that guy. But I don’t want him to know about us either, ok?”
“Yeah man, I’ll probably never tell anyone about this, ever. Anyway, all he cares about is giving the drug to some guy, or keeping it from some guy or something.”
“Are you on it right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Awesome. Let’s fuck.”
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