stoner adventures V

	As usual an auburn day in spring when Spike and I (Burr, that is,
stoner by example) went to the carnival after smoking some of that wonderfully
exciteful insightful Kawaiian green bud, the kind that virtually pops out of
the bag it is so big and fruitful and beautiful and fragrant, like mint just
like the scent of mint on my mother coming in from the garden, standing in the
kitchen doorway to let the sun out of her eyes so she could see her home as
anything but a cave.  She's dead now, but her mintiness lives on in these
abundant plant parts that Spike and I grappled for with sweatrembling fingers
in our greedy lust for dope.
	"Where is the instrument of destruction?" I queried Spike, and he who
must have taken so many bong hits from his sad soft slitted eyes led me into
the bathroom which was fitting for his rathole apartment building, an aging
creaking wonder with urine for tiles and faded yellow lather for walls.  All I
saw was a cracked-up titanic bathtub and a toilet, with the ripped and sagging
shower curtain like the dress of a crucified woman between them.  "Where?" I
said again, lifting up a tube of toothpaste in case it was the instrument in
question.  "Look," said Spike gleefully.
	It was an older toilet with a high tank and a low lever.  I stared at
it for some time but couldn't figure it and then realized there was a spare
hose leading off of the back of the tank.  I when I looked at the lever to
flush the thing I saw it was a real bowl, a thick wide one, on the end of a
tubular lever device.  "Dude, that's gross!  I'm not smoking out of a toilet!"
	"Relax.  Do you know how these things work?  Ignorance kills you again;
this water is harmless, it's the clean water.  It runs into the bottom bowl (so
to speak) and flushes out the unclean.  You are in no danger.  Trust me, as I
am your friend" (all of this was true, and still is, because Spike despite his
faults is a caring person and a good friend).  
	"Okay, fuck it, load the bowl!" (gleeful greedful & Spike complies,
stuffing in fat sweet greenness with hope in his eyes).  I picked up the hose
to look and then gave it to him but he pushed away my hands with the light
touch of a fresh spring frond on a palm tree and said you try i've been baking
all day long and so I did and took a huge, sweet, powerful bonghit and realized
the beauty of this thing, that noone would ever suspect it and there would
never be any evidence as bongwater could be flushed in two flushes and my how
easy and bow wow boy was I stoned.  "My god, that's gargantuan bud," I
stammered, letting my lungs relax and flex and twitch.
	"Yeah," said Spike.  "I lied:  I only took one hit today, and it wasn't
big.  Nothing near that size."  I would have replied to this except that for
that moment speech seemed highly unlikely, so I played with the gossamer
playland of the mind that was the shower curtain, and Spike took another hit (I
might add that the position for these hits was incredibly ludicrous; one sat
backwards on the closed toilet and grabbed the bit of hose and inhaled while
lighting a lever-bowl nearly at one's crotch level) this time a biggie and I
saw his eyes roll.  We both took two more, and the world around us was lit up i
mean lit up like winter sun blazing from my eyes & then we headed into the
swirling dry winds of autumnal spring.
	Everywhere around us people clustered like leaves and swirled into the
parks and parkways of our city, talking and gesturing like excited birds
heading south in the cold but indecisively skittering through the clearing
skies.  Spike and I entered a cold doorway and stood in the warmth, dripping
and figuring what we could see in the obscurity.  The starchy white ceilings
hung above us and the dark wood floor resounded to our eyes & ears as we
climbed, thumpsliding our way up two flights of stairs.  Spike knocked on a
door jeweled with brass and the numbers were fluid, moving along the frame, and
a face appeared where the door fell out, and we went in.  This was Neb's hole,
a collection of mattresses connected by strewn clothes and ripped paper and
beer bottles and even the body of a man, beer spilling from his mouth like
blood, with a lighter in one hand and a beer in the other.  Beer was
everywhere.  "We were just having a small very small drinking session," said
Neb, casually slurring the finally sounds into obscurity, "when you stopped by. 
What's happening in your reality?"  Spike held up the bag, with the big,
succulent, enticing buds hanging like demonic phalli in the light.
	"A lot, I see," Neb let the words slip like smoke from the corner of
his mouth, where a cigarette sounded its claim to his face, the territory of
which was darkened with dirt and days without sleep.  Somewhat tall, with dark
hair in half-dreadlocks and dark eyes held in thrall by his days of his beers
and cigarettes, Neb was a friend from some days past when we had consumed an
entire bag of imported bud from Iceland, which we figured would suck because
... hey, Iceland, no sun, right?  but apparently someone up there converted and
old fish-gutting plant into the world's greatest hydroponic growing factory,
using the natural elements and vitality in the viscera and excrement of the
local fish to produce this wonderful bud of a thick greenish-pink color.  It
reeked of fish, and we had figured then that it doubly sucked, so we decided to
smoke the whole bag, but it actually turned out to be potent with the added
side effect of not kicking in until twenty minutes after consumption, which
caused us to be very stoned very suddenly, which was a complete legacy when
Neb's mother (he was living at home at the time) threw a TupperWare party and
we came in and bought all kinds of tupperware, and then went upstairs and made
a really nice bong out of a TupperWare juicer.  It was an electric bong, and
delivered a really nice hit, but his mother eventually discovered it and tried
to make virgin pina coladas in it, which resulted in sticky white fluid being
squirted across the room with arterial timing just as her husband came home,
causing him to stop drop his briefcase and shout "I'm in the valley of
heartbreak & fear" and go flying out to his genericman car and drive for days
in the suburban desert until they found him holed up in a 7-11 reading jackmags
and stimulating himself with a gluestick, at which point they hauled him to an
insane asylum to join his wife (& from where there they later deposed
themselves to aid a well-known millionaire run for office) and then Neb left
home and has been a fellow wastoid ever since.
	Neb's companion had had too much beer (if that's possible I suppose)
and was looking at the wall with the fixed stare of the really passed out which
means I guess that he was indeed passed out and not looking at the wall but
rather the wall was in front of his eyes.  Neb said, "Let's smoke."
	The new bong which Neb had been telling Spike about while I had been
staring at the passed out man (whose name was Gordon Bleu) came out and
appeared to be made from the most tarnished dusty & battered tenor saxophone
that I have ever seen.  Any one of the holes used to make notes would work as a
shotgun, but Neb showed us some chords that delivered bongs hits like I have
never experienced since.  It was a masterpiece.  "Dad and I made it," Neb
explained, alluding to his grandfather who had fought in WWII and gone a little
nuts and charged off to Vietnam but was arrested because he was fighting
without being in an army.  The 175th Motorized Rifle Brigade was grateful for
his presence, however, and repeatedly said things about a certain ambush that
he resurrected from failure & slaughter.  Dad had a whole crowd of shop tools
that we borrowed one day without him knowing to make a bong out of a motorcycle
gas tank, but Dad caught us and appeared mad but then laughed and showed us how
to put the drill bit in and we made a helluva bong and offered him a hit but he
said no he had to make some plastique that afternoon for the Libertarian rally
& wanted to be clearheaded (and so we smoked his share but loved him with our
foggy hearts).  We each took hits, pausing every now and then to stuff more of
that juicy sensuously amazing almost sexual bud that sprung back up to full
form after we crammed it until until we had to thrust with our fingers until it
hurt and then it stayed in, in, in and burned brightly and scented the entire
room with its brilliant smoke and orange warmth & light.  On the side of the
bong was written in grey marker the words "Inhale" and "Saviour."  There was a
large dent in the curvature at the bottom.
	Neb was staring out the window with the impassiveness of someone who
figures that everything is illogical and figures he has no involvement and
therefore he should simply accept it and watch it and hopefully someday
remember it and see it again.  Spike was sort of leaning against the wall,
smoking the cigarette with the smoke creasing the edge of his mouth like the
blood of a dead man after a vicious gunshot staggers him backward into another
realm of agony and the crushing collapse of his chest and life into the painful
unknown.  "What goes," murmured Spike, less asking than talking.  Neb stared.
	Outside there was a crowd, rushing at each other and tearing.  They
were protesting the arrival of the Bohicans, a race of people with large
soft hands and big orange eyes, like the eye of a glowing bowl of dope.  They
were not stupid, but they were excessively quiet, and into that quiet like the
drumbeat at a Melvins concert you could hear the fear sweat and ooze and sizzle
like spit on a hot grill, and the people out there were swarming around some
Bohicans, the people from the dark & warm land up to the north.  Spike and I
had once smoked out with Bohican Mike, a longhaired Bohican who loved the music
of Venom, so we got really stoned and sang sweet Satan songs in slow time until
we all passed out.  We had liked Bohican Mike, but he had moved to find a job
in the other valley over, over this crest of buildings apartments and jails and
we had never seen him again.  Two Bohicans held soft butterfly-fan hands in
front of querulous faces, and as Spike and I stood smoking the sax we thought
we felt the gentle hands of Bohican Mike stroking our spines near the base of
the skull.  Fear came from the sweat of the crowd, and it was joined by the
sweat of the Bohicans like the smoke from a flame fresh pure and stingingly
painful, making the eyes twitch closed and the waters aflow.  Fear brought the
sacrifice.
	Bohican Mike had his ways, but my ways Spike's ways Mike's way all were
our ways when we smoked together.  We also hung together sometimes, but because
we are stoners and can only speak think dream of drugs and are always smoking
we always ended up smoking out.  Some stoners dick you in the dirt, smoke your
shit and leave, but noone there was like that, and for the year we lived in the
flatroof cheap plastic apartment nightmare above the canna plants we lived well
and found ourselves okay.  Bohican Mike had his culture -- apparently in Bohica
they worship someone like Satan and listen to loud amplified music, so he was
perfectly at home with songs like "Women, Leather and Hell" and didn't mind the
louder newer metal music coming out of the LA basin from people so mad they
would tear the flesh from your eyes except they never seemed to want to do that
only to be mad and sad and energetically gleeful at the same time much like
Bohican Mike, although I don't know how he is now because living in the dark
tunnels of the cities (like the dark tunnels of chords) changes someone and
dulls their eyes and makes them smoky and slow and bitter and crass.  We all
went one time to the police station to meet a cop who we knew was you know wink
nudge pay and bought from him a bag of what turned out to be very good dope and
we liked him because he sold it to us cheap and would really help but two years
later he got sick somehow and he died and his family buried him in a cheap plot
and when we went to go burn with him yes even after death we couldn't find it
and noone knew him, just like noone knows the living dead flesh of a junkie or
alcoholic deep in the skids but this cop was a good cop one of the few if not
the one, and now he is a mailbox somewhere collecting bills chain letters and
fliers for hair repair.  We missed Bohican Mike, just like we missed many
others, but stoners drift through life accepting and enduring not trying to do
anything really because we tried it once honest and some quit and some came
back but in the end we're all here trying to stay patient and load the bowl and
not look at the faces reflected in the mirrors or the tattoos on the hands of
the children in the pictures on the news because we know that that is the world
outside the warmth of our circle and alone we can't touch it because it is cold
and dense and wet.
	We saw the blood beneath the feet of the crowd before anything else, a
seepage like slow tears from under closed eyelids gritted against the pain of
the loss of a lover or friend or maybe even a life entirely yes no gone and
dead and there in the grave the smoke doesn't permeate because these are the
corpse alive, and they can't even flail like children wrapped so tightly they
cannot breathe.  They were moving squirming like one, like a giant sea creature
crushing and churning and fighting like the storm with the storm, and under
their shoes their bargainbrand fake leather flat shoes dollhouse dimensions
from the second floor window there was the hot red steaming lava of the pain
& rage & fear of generations descanted and naked in backlash whiplash ecstasy
of the tasty riot.  Ned stared and I stared and Spike left the room and we saw
him walk forward but someone brushed him he fell down and Ned and I were going
to help him but we met him coming back in and he was shaking his head nothing
was wrong no nothing could be done and then we bolted the door against the
pounding and the screaming.
	The sacrifice was over, but in the back of my mind I could see.  And
they were out there the two of them meeting at the main place wearing the
costume of their ancient home and all of its absurdities the maroon leather and
soft floppy caps the goofiness like the ears of some aged elephant and smoking
something probably not dope but probably harmless in any case when some came up
and asked them for help and they tried to help him but spoke not the language
and did what was taught them from birth until death which was carry the
helpneedful to someone who knew and there was a cop down the street they had
seen so they picked up the child where he had fallen and carried him down the
street previously unseen but the masses unleashed themselves called out a war
and went on the charge and damaged the two, and there they were outside staring
around speaking no language utt'ring no sound and then they were fallen the ire
so rising like flames from a fire tearing through the ceiling.  Spike and I
joined with the coroner's crew, still staring at bodies and collecting clues. 
Noone was mentioned and noone was blamed, but in the bronzed snow there was no
need for names.
	In Ned's apartment we heard the child falling, the knee skinned and all
of us sat for a second and remembered the joy of a family when parents could
hold on to limbs and make the pain heal for the majority of times.  Spike
banged the bong against the table.  "It's dust," he said.