About the time I herniated a disk in my back, a new guy named Joe transferred into my unit from a grunt battalion. His leg was held together by about fifty brazillion pins, thanks to a drunken sergeant who hazed him and about three other guys late one night and kicked Joe over a railing. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that hazing in the military is dead; it’s alive and well, just a little more subtle these days.
Anyway, Joe and I became friends soon enough, bonding over our shared injuries, our mutual love of house music and shitty action flicks, and eventually we moved into a barracks room together.
Joe had a hot girlfriend, a model from Monrovia, that would come and plow him into a coma every weekend, and soon it got to the point that they adopted me, after a fashion, and decided to completely remake me into a party boy.
I had been going through an identity crisis for quite a while, trying hard to reconcile the person I had grown up as with the person that I was finding myself slowly turning into on the other side of the country from everything I had ever known.
The first thing that went out the window was my language; it quickly devolved into a most murky stew of curses, inappropriate slang, and general crassness that’s stuck with me for years. Thankfully I’m a fairly intelligent guy, so I know when it’s an opportune moment to drop an f-bomb, instead of having swears be 95% of my entire vocabulary, as an alarmingly high number of military folk seem inclined to.
Joe and his girl and I began hanging out in places like LA, Palm Springs, Hollywood, anywhere and everywhere we could find a party. The next thing to go, with the deepening of my friendship with Joe, was sobriety, something I wouldn’t be on speaking terms with for at least another year and a half. Joe introduced me to this exotic concoction called the Adios Motherfucker; it glowed blue, as if it were radiation leaking from some undersea steam vent on an alien world, and it had pretty much that effect on me. My favorite thing to do whenever we went out would be to buy two Adioses, down them both as quickly as humanly possible, and then hit the dance floor. Alcohol does wonders to make you forget you have vital fluids leaking into your spinal column from a ruptured disk. Of course you pay for it the next week, but when you’re young and you have cash in your hand, what do such things matter?
I guess it was around the time that I pissed myself while bending over that I realized I should probably take the injury a little more seriously. I was having strange spells where my legs would go numb, and one night Joe hooked me up with one of his girlfriend’s friends. Things got a little heated, but nothing was happening with my little private. That was the last straw for me; I went to physical therapy the next morning. No more partying for the next couple of months for me; I toned my drinking down to something approaching manageability during the week, and eventually got the pain within tolerable limits.
Three months later, Joe told me about the grand high rave of the year, a phantasmagorical affair called Candyland. I was reluctant to go; I had never been to a rave before, but Joe and his girl kept insisting that it was going to be a blast, so I finally agreed and we all piled into his tiny Civic and took off on the quest that would end my life.
Don’t worry, I got better.
Joe told me that he had purchased some stuff for the night to help us enjoy the rave better. He produced a tiny red pill with a peace sign stamped on one side of it. I took it and looked at him in confusion. “We don’t know if it’s good, so we need you to try it, to make sure we didn’t get ripped off,” Joe told me. “I’m driving, so I can’t take it now.”
I figured, what the hell, and downed the thing. It had a chalky, bitter taste and left me coughing for a few minutes. After driving for about thirty minutes with absolutely nothing happening to me, Joe concluded that we had indeed been given a bad batch and told me we’d score some guaranteed stuff at the rave itself.
We finally arrived at the warehouse this thing was at, and Joe parked the car a couple of blocks away. His girl hopped out of the car and changed right next to it, from jeans and a t-shirt into a black thong, pasties, and thigh-high leather boots. She also fastened some brightly colored streamers in her hair.
I think it was the brightly colored streamers that told me something was off; the colors seemed to pulse in the dim streetlights, to writhe and jerk spasmodically out of the corner of my eye. I looked around at the street and realized that ALL the colors were doing the same thing. Joe noticed and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Are you rollin’? Smeagol, are you rolling, man?” I looked at him in confusion.
He grinned at his girl. “Oh man, he’s rolling HARD. I think they must have laced it with something.”
Joe turned me and he and his girl each took one arm, escorting me down the sidewalk to the rave. I tried not to stare at her boobs, covered only by the tiny pasties, and she giggled. “Nerboy’s rolling hardCORE!” she sighed, stroking my sweaty hair. “Don’t worry, Nerdboy, we’ll take care of you tonight.”
We turned the corner and there was the building before us, light and sound pouring forth like a wave of living, magical liquid. We were almost to the door and I noticed a bronze plaque on the wall; it was fascinating to me. I reached up to touch it and Joe grabbed my arm, quickly pulling it back down to my side.
“Not in front of the cops, Smeagol. Just be cool.” I never did see the cops he was talking about, but then again I was also currently smelling the colors and tasting the sounds, so how the hell could I trust my senses?
Inside the club… there are no real words in the languages of man, elf or dwarf to describe it. Transcendent? Otherworldly? Scrumtrulescant? Perhaps. If I had to sum up the things I saw in one sentence, that sentence would be, “beams of crystal magic starjamming forth from a wizard dinosaur’s psychic vagina.”
Throughout the night, as I danced and danced and danced again, Joe would appear from the sea of thrusting flesh around me to press bottles of water and, once, another red pill into my hand. I was so very thirsty; I had no idea why, but I just knew that the water was clearer and brighter and more refreshing than any liquid on Earth. I must truly be beyond the shell of the Crystal Sphere; light and music and love abounded as far as the senses extended, all mixed together in a sweating, heaving mass of sex and passion and glow-in-the-dark party favors.
At some point I remember kissing a girl who turned from beautiful, young, and nymphlike, to whithered, aged beyond vast epochs of time, and then was gone, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined the entire thing. I looked about and there was no one around me. No other dancers; I seemed to have wandered into an empty part of the building, actually, not part of the building at all; there was running water and refuse piled. I was in an alley. What had happened?
Everything hurt. I felt like I was about to melt; lava coursed through my veins and then I saw the headlights.
Joe’s car, coming down the alley. Joe’s girl squatted next to me, her makeup streaked with tears, and she quietly intoned, “please come back, please come back,” over and over. I stirred and she shrieked. “Joe!” she screamed, “Joe, he made it! He came through!”
Joe quickly bundled me in the back of the car and tore out of the area, getting us lost down a labyrinth of side streets before finally finding the freeway. I saw blasphemous things on the freeway on the way home; giant spiders and robots and my mother cooking her own entrails.
That was the night I took a tainted ecstasy and died for six minutes.
Image source: Smeagol ©
