James Bond...On A Bicycle!

It looks so innocent, so tiny, in my gritty hand, which still reeks of pickle juice, mayonnaise and bacon grease from a long day on the line.  My heart is pounding from my bike ride home, and sweat courses down my brow.  I hold the cupcake in one hand and a cold Leinie's Original in the other.  This is to be the point where the wave of my drug consumption that summer, and possibly my life, crests.  And it's all in this little chocolate cupcake.

"So this it?" I ask Peter. 

"He said that would do it," Peter replies back. 

My other roommate, Elian, looks at me with suspicion.  "I already had one, dude.  It ain't doin' shit."

"Me too," Peter adds.

"How long ago?" I ask.

They both shrug.  "'Bout an hour ago.  I had mine right after work," Elian explains. 

"What the hell," I mumble and devour the cupcake in a three bites.  It sure doesn't taste like much, maybe a little burned.  I instantly think that Elian is right; he and Peter look totally sober.  I wash the remains down with a two swift chugs of ice cold beer and head for the bathroom.  As I shower, beer in hand, I don't think anymore of the cupcake. 

A good friend of mine cooked up the cupcakes, using half the recommended dose of hash.  Hash.  I know that's like weed, and weed doesn't scare me.  After getting interested in it (and a host of other substances) this summer, I have found that all the scary facts they told us in D.A.R.E. class have been nothing but a pound of bullshit.  Pot might make me lazy, and it sure gives me the munchies like a motherfucer, but it hasn't affected me in the horrific way that alcohol does.

Ah, demon alcohol...always there with me, like an abusive relationship with a psychotic woman.  I savour my shbrew, the cold beer contrasting with the hot water that cleanses me of a day's worth of accumulated filth.  Woodrose seeds, mushrooms, and pot have caused me no harm.  I can't say the same about Xanax or Purple Drank, which may have taken a toll on my liver, although they were used so infrequently and in small doses. 

I'm not expecting much out of hash brownies, in other words. 

"Hey, I'm going up to X's house.  Elian, you wanna come with?" I offer.  I can visualize X's voluptuous body and her epic hair. 

"I think I'm just going to catch a movie and plop down for the night," he fires back. 

"Peter, are you hanging out with that new girlfriend of yours?" I ask, more out of courtesy than anything else.  He's got himself some Barbie doll girl, and I'm sure that he doesn't want to hang out with X and some other weird girls, who are far from his supermodel tastes.

"I'm turning in too.  I gotta work a double tomorrow," he says.  "I'm just going to chill out, maybe watch a movie.  See what this cupcake can do."

"All right," I say, and head outside to my Iron Horse. 

The night is an absolutely perfect summer night: the lingering residual heat eminates from the asphalt under my wheels, and a great moon glows in a pregnant glory beneath the cedars on the horizon.  I've taken about 6 beers with me, which should get me pretty damn buzzed before I head home.  X is planning to go to some party as well, and I have little patience for those things.  Besides, I have to work early tomorrow at 8AM.  It's now 10:45.

There is a slight haze in the air as I head north to the next village.  I always take backroads to X's house, even though she's located on the main drag.  Though I'm probably not arrestable in my present state, I have a particular distrust of law enforcement.  Plus, I want the road, and the night all to myself, my only company the incessant growl of White Zombie's Astro Creep 2000 on my MP3 player, as I forge my way through the hazy night. 

Everything is fine when I arrive at X's house, but some strange girl wearing a Ukrainian soccer jersey opens the door.  She's also wearing a shit ton of make-up and her hair is all dolled up.  She looks like one of the dejected housewives my buddies Max and Dima tried to pick up at this shitty, shitty bar called the Polar Bear (which was nicknamed Hitler, because the main bartender looked like the failed Austrian artist turned dictator).  I am instantly caught by a wave of nostalgia and sadness as this thought plays through my mind...how long ago was that?  Four, five years?  How did this chick teleport here from the goddamn past?

This thought comes through plainly enough, and seems rational, but Kate, X's roommate calls me inside.  "Hey, are you coming to the party tonight?" she yells.

"Nah, I gotta work tomorrow," I explain. 

Kate pouts and pleads.  The heavily made-up woman in the jersey pleads as well.  "There will be lots of girls there," she offers.  I want to say something like I'm interested in seeing X tonight, but wow, that's some pussy ass shit right there.  So I use the same excuse that Elian gave when I left. 

"Well, if you change your mind, you should come," the made-up one says.

Kate and X's other roommates pile out, this skinny little dude, and his even skinnier punk rock looking girlfriend.  "Hey, you want some tequila shots?" they offer me.  My heart sinks when they proudly display a bottle of Jose Cuervo as if it were the Holy Grail, but free booze is free booze.  And I'm waiting for X to show up. 

My opinion of tequila is quite high, owing to a trip to Mexico with Elian, where I sampled the real shit, and in spite of an unfortuante incident last summer.  I remember how that started, with Elian and I drinking a whole fucking bottle straight up, chased by beers on some dock down by the lake.  We went swimming, and Elian lost two of his rings.  One of my roommates was shagging some girl on that same dock, also blitzed out of his mind.  I also remember how that ended: my dresser tipped over, a light bulb shattered and crushed into my chest.  I made it to bed nonetheless, bleeding out into my sheets until they dried, leaving me glued to the sheets.  It was extreme, but did nothing to dull my lust for Mexican booze.  I even went snorkeling down at the dock and pulled Elian's rings out of the seaweed that morning, bleeding from an enormous gash in my chest.  Probably not the wisest idea, but whatever. 

The made-up girl sits across from me and keeps engaging me in friendly banter behind a so typically Carpathian smile.  "So how is your sister?" she asks me. 

"All right," I shrug, opening a beer of my own.  I offer her one, but she refuses. 

"You know I don't like beer unless I'm drunk," she says. 

Who the hell is this chick?  Why can't I put a name to her face? 

Kate sits down next to me.  She's tells me some story about how she made out with one of my classmates.  The girl across from me tells me about how she made out with some random guy at the bar when she was drunk.  I think it's kind of fucked up, but do my best to hide my disgust.  Yet I feel the revulsion deep in my guts, a tightening of my intestines, like the harbinger of bad indegestion.

"But I liked it," make-up girl gushes. 

I feel like giving her Max or Dima's phone number, but can't remember either.  Besides, the punk rock girl is offering me a shot of tequila with a wedge of lime covered in salt.  Actually, it's not a wedge of lime, it's a slice so thin I could read a newspaper through it, had it not been covered with a Himalaya sized lump of salt.  I lick that shit, sip that shit, and squeeze what juice I can out of the lime before I gulp down the rest of my beer.  I open another straight away just to attempt to quench the thirst that moutain of salt has caused.

Kate takes a beer from me, as well, and talks about her plans when the summer ends.  "X and I are going down to Chicago for a few days, then we'll head back to college."

"Oh really?" I ask, wanting to mention they could stay with a deranged friend of mine from down there as a cruel joke.  I still haven't come to accept the fact that X will be gone from my life, proabably forever, come the day after Labour Day. 

"Maybe you want to come to the party tonight?" the make-up girl asks again.

"No, really, I want to go home," I say. 

Make-up girl sighs.  "Enrique is coming here soon to pick us up."

I shake my head.  
"Hey, dude, are you feeling all right?" Kate asks. 

I blink.  "What?  What on earth makes you say that?"

"Your eyes are all red," make-up girl says. 

I get up and go to the bathroom, and sure as hell, my eyes are narrow slits, nearly bleeding from the blood surging through the vessels.  It's now 11:25, and I know it's time to get going home.  I hadn't felt anything before, but now I can notice an itchy sensation in my eyes and a lethargy in my limbs.  The medicine is kicking in.

"Shit, it's my allergies," I offer.  "I've got to go get my medicine." 

Make-up girl stands up, her enormous chest bouncing as she reaches her full height.  "We can drive you home."

"No, I must go." I say, pushing my way to the front door.  All I've got to do is get across the main road, and I'll be safe.  The backroads, where no one shall find me. 

"Let us drive you," make-up girl insists. 

I really can't take it anymore, so I break free and dark out towards the Iron Horse, forgetting two of my beers at their dining room table.  "No, I must go!  I'm working at 8 tomorrow!"

Broken free from their grasp, I jump on my bike, and jet across the main street, into a parking lot.  It is only when I'm on the other side of a line of trees that I stop and turn on my bike lights; I don't want the cops stoping me for any reason.  The urge to flee is strong, and I have never felt such a longing to get back to my residence and safely behind the door of my bedroom.  A massive yellow moon has risen and illuminates the gloom, save for the moments when dark clouds obscure its face and plunge the fields and forests of our island's interior in waves of pitch. 

Before I can even finish the first stretch of road, a car pulls up behind me and slows down.  Fuck!  It's the cops! My mind screams.  My body resists by putting on the brakes, no matter how badly I want to pedal like hell and get out of here.  Calm, calm, calm, I think, remembering a similar incident from last year when the cops pulled up beside me to tell me to turn on my rear light.  Calm, calm, calm...I've got to get out of this.

The car roars ahead, an old Buick by the sound of it, and passes me.  I see a hand out the window, and recognize it as the hand of the make-up girl.  What is going on?  I think, before my mind jumps to the paranoiac conclusion: they're following me!

A normal person would shrug this off, maybe be complimented that some chick and her friends were following him, but at this point I am not quite in my mind anymore.  After they have passed, I take an even smaller backroad, hoping to evade any further traffic, but when I get to a patch of the main road, they pass me again! 

The panic is slightly less this time, but it still gets my heart racing.  There is no rational questioning, like "why are they following you?" or "just what the hell do they want from you, and what would they do if they 'caught' you?"  No, just the panicked thought: they're after me!

Goddamn, that's funny when I think of it as I write this, a full six years later.  It's going to be fucking hilarious when I get home.  But not now.  I shut off my music, hoping to stay more attuned to the sounds around me and avoid any further surprises.  In this fog of THC, my mind cooks up the highly illogical conclusion that I'm in some fucked up spy movie, trying to evade Russian assassins driven by some Latino Marxist rebel, which in some ways, is not totally incorrect.  But these are not assassins, and the driver is not a Marxist rebel.  And I am most certainly not any hero, or anyone worthy of persecution.  This is some sort of fantasy, much like an absinthe induced adventure I had earlier this year, trying to take short cuts through forgotten farm fields, where a forest had grown around old barbed wire fences.  On that occassion, in the dawn light of a spring day, I crawled under fences and through muck, imagining that I was escaping from a labour camp.  In fact, that happened in the same area where I am right now...

I take the second to last turn, a deserted, but hilly road that will lead me onto my homestretch, and my heart sinks.  Up ahead, there is a car parked in an abandonned driveway with its headlights on, much like the cops do when they've set up a speed trap.  Should I shoot the gap?  Should I hide in the woods and wait it out, maybe walk the Iron Horse back home through the forests?  He's probably seen my bike light, and is lying in wait for me.  Hell, if it is a cop, he's probably got better things to do; maybe bust that party those girls were going to.  After all, that's somewhere on this road as well...I wonder if X is there, and feel sad that I didn't see her tonight.  But then I look up and see the parked car ahead...

Must pass through the eye of the needle, I repeat over and over in my head.  Who said that?  Castaneda?  Hunter S. Thompson?  Or some occultist like Aleister Crowley or Peter Carroll?  I'm approaching the car...there is no turning back, I must go, and go fast, though I am pedaling uphill.  The Iron Horse weighs a ton, its solid steel pulled back by gravity, but my legs pump.  I stand up, trying to put more leverage on the pedals, hoping they don't break, as they did two years ago, and stab my calf.  I draw closer to the car...just let me go, you don't want me, I'm just small fry!

The engine roars to life, a monster out of a Stephen King book that bears the name of my first real girfriend.  FUCK!  I pedal faster, lungs burning and sweat pouring down my brow.  The things in my bag slam back and forth, cold rocks against my back.  The car comes closer to me, and I wait for the moment that an inhuman voice shouts over the bullhorn PULL OVER YOUR IRON HORSE, YOU GODLESS SAVAGE! and the light of the moon is replaced by the cyan and crimson of an a real life alien abduction.  There will be humiliating depravation, there will be torture, and there will be probing...

The car passes by, and once again I see the hand of that made-up girl.  "You slattern!" I growl, menacing futily with my fist.  Whatever rational thought that remains disappears, because now I truely believe that she/they are out to get me, those Russian assassins from the foot of the Carpathians!

Their car pulls in a driveway I recognize as the address of their party, and I scream on past, my Iron Horse reaching maximum velocity in tenth gear.  And all at once it is silent except for the noise in my ears. 

I figure out that I have long since turned off my MP3 player when the volume control does nothing to stem the flow of radio static through my head.  Though the moon caresses me in a cool, golden glow, I'm having auditory hallucinations, as if a radio is being played at very low volume in a distant room and someone is changing the channels gradually.  Snippets of familiar songs are melted into others before I can tell what they are; they all gel together in a motley swirl of dissolving colours, like crayons melting in a frying pan.  My internal iPod has been set to shuffle/self-destruct.

It takes a great amount of willpower just to make that final half mile stretch to my flat.  I race into the driveway and ditch the Iron Horse behind my boss' toolshed, laying it down in a patch of lush green plants.  Will they find me? I wonder.  I listen carefully, the strange noises in my head not abating a bit.  But I can discern no motor vehicles, so I scamper up the stairs and into my flat. 

The lights are out up there and it is peaceful.  I can't even hear a stray snore from Peter, and the light under Elian's door is absent.  The fucker's usually up well past midnight watching movies, laughing sporadically, or porking some girl.  But tonight is silent. 

I have to force myself to brush and floss my teeth, staring at the twisted reflection in the mirror.  The eyes of this monster are so red, the smile so warped, that I can barely discern a resemblence to myself.  I shut the lights off and brush my teeth in the dark, being horrified by the creature I have become, but feel a dread I know all too well seep in from the corners of the room.

What about the Russian assassins? 

Maybe they will follow me home.  Maybe they have followed me home.  I lock the front door, turning the lock as quietly as possible so as not to give away my position.  They could, after all, be standing right behind this door.  Then I'd have to beat the dumbshit out of them with a barrage of apples rotting on top of the fridge.  Send their asses reeling down the stairs.  That's what you get for surprising a crazy man at his home.  The cops would have to call their families back home and explain why their daughters were pelted with rotting fruit as they tried to break into some dude's flat.

But who would believe it?  Can I believe it?  Yeah, I can, but I can also believe the weird geometric shapes drifting before my eyes.  And these aren't the friendly wah-wahs of a mushroom trip; no, these are somewhat menacing tetrahedrons and sigils of the 50 Names of Marduk in the shunned Necronomicon.  I lay down on the floor in the living room and attempt to trace them with my fingers, as I had done on my first mushroom trip, but they prove far too intricate for my baffled mind that screams OVERLOAD.

Oh well, all is set, now it's time to go to bed.  I get up and make for my Hobbit Hole.  But as I cross the living room, I see a flash of headlights as my neighbour pulls into his driveway.  Yes!  I can trust him!  He can help!  For he too has ingested the Cakes of Light!

I wait until he gets out and whisper from my blackened flat.  "Zambezi!  Dude!  Up here!  Are you there?"

He turns his face up, and even at this distance I can tell that the medicine is running strong.  His eyes are red lines and his face warped into some stupified grin.  "What?" he says, but I'm scrambling down the steps. 

Alas, he has had two cupcakes, but is dealing far better than I.  Zambezi can't get a word out, and try as I might, I can barely make any sense of anything that night.  I try to tell the story.

"Peter and Elian...Cakes of Light....we ate them shits, dawg!  All of them!  Then...the Iron Horse...all the way to the other part of the island...fucking weird chick with caked on make-up...and she followed me, that Russian assassin...fucking Carpathians!  I tell you man, I was James Bond on a fucking bicycle!"*

Zambezi bursts out in laughter, as do I, the maddest gales of my life.  I will feel the ache in my stomach muscles from this riotous fit in the coming days, but right now it feels awesome.  Two idiots laughing their asses off in a drive way, in an island in the middle of Lake Michigan, understanding little, if any of what they are recounting to each other. 

I go back to bed, but my mind is bursting with music and weird geometric patterns.  In the darkness they are more pronounced against the ceiling.  I put on Michael Hoenig's Escape from the Northern Wasteland, and try to get into the music.  But sadly, the geometric patterns and dubstep-like audial hallucinations are too intense.  And it's still 2 years until I'll hear Skrillex.

I think of my family, recalling their faces.  I think of X, briefly.  I think of work, where I must go come the morning...but my mind is so warped, so fucked up at this point that a horrifying thought comes to mind: what if the kite string snaps, and I never get back to reality?

"If I know I'm going crazy, then I must not be insane."  So sang Dave Mustaine.

I get up the next day, and glide the Iron Horse in to work.  Everything is okay until I get off.  I can barely clock in, I'm so tired, hung over and twisted.  My co-worker is listening to oldies on the radio, and I have the feeling that I'm experiencing those audial hallucinations again...maybe I am.  Making small talk is impossible.  Words tumble out in odd clusters. 

Elian shows up and tries to put a garbage bag in a garbage can....20 minutes later, he's still standing over the garbage can, the bag in hands, laughing uncontrollably.  "Dude, I'm fucked up," he laughs, each word separated by laughter.  Not surprisingly, he goes home shortly thereafter.  I decide to not just work my shift to 4 PM, but also cover Elian's night shift.  14 hours of work in that state.  Goddamn, I don't know how I manage.  Even more mysterious is Peter, who shows up for his 4 o'clock shift looking a little ruffled, but otherwise fine.  Bastard slept all day. 

The next day I feel only slightly better.  And the day after that a bit more.  It's only until day three that I feel normal again.  Three fucking days of being higher than God.  Never again, I tell myself.  Too much.  Way too fucking much.  Zambezi puked from his double dose, and rightly so.  I can only imagine what would have happened had the cook used the recommended dosage.

I also realize that the girl with all the make-up on was X herself.  How was I so messed up so as not to recognize her?  Or was she just made made up beyond recognition?  I guess I'll never know, as no photographs of the night exist.

About a month later, I run into another one of our friends, who also partook in the festivities.  "That was the most fucked up I've ever been in my life.  Nightmarish, dude," he says, something with which I can totally agree.  He pulls a frozen chunk out of brownie out of his freezer.  It's at least one and a half. 

"Is that the last of them?" I ask.

He nearly throws it into my hands.  "Get this shit out of here.  I don't ever want to touch it again."

Remember when I told myself I'd never touch the brownies again? 

Well, I lied. 

*I don't remember much of this conversation, as I was laughing so hard that it came out choppy.  The part I remember best is the James Bond thing.