Storymania - Chapter 1 by Tom M Fisher

Chapter 1
Tom M Fisher

It’s dark in the room when Larry finally comes home. I’ve been so fucked up, I can’t even tell the time of day. It’s just dark. The shapes in the apartment are just enough to catch your bearings and that’s it. The deadbolt clicks and the key turns the knob open. I open my eyes just in time to see the lights in the hall cast shadows across the entire place.
Silhouetted in the doorway, I can see the outline of Larry’s bulging pockets, and that’s how I know it’s going to be a good day. Whatever day it is. I can’t tell because it’s so fucking dark.
“I got one thing to say to you, man: free for all,” Larry exclaimed. His face was lit up like a child who’s walking down State Street in December ogling the window displays.
By the time the door was closed, I was ready. Our kit was on the table. It was a pretty decent set up considering we didn’t pay for any of this shit.
“Spark that blunt, dude. I gotta tell you about today,” Larry says impatiently.
“Hey, speaking of today, what is today?” I ask.
“Who cares?”
“Uh, no one. So what were you saying?”
“Oh, yea. This guy comes into the clinic completely ripped out of his mind. He just falls to the floor, clutching his chest. It turns out he took a whole sheet of blotter acid and had a heart attack.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, when they tried to resuscitate him, they cut off all of his clothes and threw them to the side.”
“I’m still not following.”
“I took the guy’s stash, man.”
“What happened to the guy?”
“Well, ten hits of acid is too much freedom for the mind to handle.”
I could tell more was coming, this was just foreplay. I raised an eyebrow.
“Once we pumped him with enough thorazine to knock out a room full of insomniacs, he started watching Barney. This calmed him momentarily. But something about the way he was screaming about a cannibalistic Barney ravaging the deaf kid on his show didn’t sit right. He ripped the TV off of the wall, only it fell on his head and broke his neck.” It was like listening to Dick Vitale announce for the Final Four. Total insanity.
“Jesus Christ,” I remark.
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
And that is when I noticed the contents of Larry’s pockets. I was anxious to see what goodies he brought home today. Whatever today was. If there was one thing that connected me to Larry, one thing only, drugs. That’s how I met him. Two years ago, back in my sophomore year in high school, he introduced me to a whole new world. He was my own little present-day Christopher Columbus discovering uncharted territory. It’s amazing how much you can explore from 16 years young to 18 years old. Moving from one hallucinogen to another. From weed to shrooms to “that white bitch” to a whole array of candy colored pills and capsules that I couldn’t even pronounce. It was heaven really. He had everything I would ever want or need at any given time, place, or circumstance. He was God. Today was our lucky day. Today, whatever day it was, was ketamine and some fine Georgia Home Brew. Both of which are highly hallucinogenic and dissociative. This is the shit people take and you hear stories of them peeling themselves with a Swiss Army knife.
That guy you heard about on the news last week: The one who went missing and was found naked 12 miles away from his apartment in the woods. Yea, well, you don’t just hang upside down from a tree and try to remove your own penis with a butter knife for no reason. It’s called lysergic acid diethylamide ladies and gentleman. LSD. Acid. Blotters. Tabs. Black sunshine. Freedom.
He obviously never learned the key rules to a safe trip: Lock all sharp implements and car keys away. The last thing you want is to perform surgery with a fountain pen and safety scissors on one of your friends because he thinks a smurf just crawled up his ass.
“You up for mixers?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Plow that rail, my man.” There could be an assortment of mind altering substances in that tiny white line of escape. That was half the fun with Larry though; you never knew for sure what he might give you.
Instant nose bleed. Fuck it, I say, it’ll go away in a little bit. So I sit there, in the dark, feeling the cold red drip out of my nose, waiting for a clot.
“Give it an hour. You won’t know what day it is.” Maybe he wasn’t paying attention, because I still didn’t know what day it was.

I’d woken up on the beach before. Usually, I realized after several moments, I had passed out at a bonfire the night prior. Not this time, though. This was different.
Imagine the most beautiful sunset. The kind when you can almost see the brush strokes in the sky it’s so perfect. Where the heavens cast a purple and pink hue down to Earth. With the right kind of cloud covering, the sunshine can look like a blanket of Elvis’s glimmering sequins across the tops of every slow and subtle wave. The water was a clear Bahama blue and I had the feeling if I touch it, I will become as pure as what I was seeing.
I couldn’t tell what had woken me up. Maybe it was the gentle lapping of waves as they glided across the sand until the sunk and washed back out. Maybe it was the ringing silence. Ever the air had that distinct taste of freedom. There was a slight hint of something so unearthly. So clean and uncorrupt. I think it was the lack of civilization. I felt distant and infinite. And I couldn’t help but think, I hope I’m dead.
There were no footprints surrounding my placement in this godforsaken scene. I noticed when I got up and saw the imprint my body made in the sand. Curled and infantile. It looked like a fetus had been stamped into the beach. I couldn’t help but see how pathetic and defenseless it looked. It was out of place.
I was trapped in Valhalla. I decided to walk and try to figure out some fathomable explanation. I was lost and alone. I tried to remember the last time I felt so blind after witnessing something so breathtaking.
Strip away a city and you’ll be left with a beach. Take down the skyscrapers and monuments. Make the coffee cafes and porno theaters disappear. Take away every consumer competition, every car, cell phone and useless electronic. Everything that distracts you from realizing you will die as nothing. But it’s all worth it in the end, knowing you’ve spent a lifetime working for paychecks you use for shit you don’t need. Strip the city bare. Once you do that, you will have your Valhalla. We are dead and your job, your paycheck, your loft on the 52nd floor, and your closet full of Italian made casket ware, is just another thing keeping your mind from the truth. Give them a pension and a bonus and they’ll give you an invitation to their pre-planned funeral. You’ve given them everything they think they’ve ever wanted. And be sure to mention how nice their outfit looks when you stop by their grave every morning before coffee break. I mean, cubicle.
I walked along and the footsteps I left behind made me feel like I was going somewhere. So remember that. Every straight A report card tacked on the fridge with those “Good Job” magnets and every youth football game your daddy trained you to win is a footprint. You’re going somewhere and that’s all that matters these days: how much tracks we can make.
I noticed a bottle sticking from the surface of pulverized rock and pebbles we call sand. Really, it’s just the finest grain of ruins. The clouds and sun made a streak of bright fuscia reflect right into my retina. Anything not fluorescent these days, means one of two things. You are outside or you are dead. If you ever wonder why there are fluorescent lights wherever you work, it’s because the lights keep you in a deep theta trance. Alive enough to keep you working, too dead to care. Those exec’s could get you to do anything, watching above from there non-fluorescently lit perches.
I could only imagine the insobriety and mayhem the bottle brought upon some beach-goers. How many people drowned because of this bottle of spirits? How many 16 year olds lost their virginity to a bunch of washed up beach bums from this? Then I thought, where the fuck is everybody?
I reached down to the bottle, and I must have triggered something within this dreamscape. It turned into the contents of a magic 8-ball. The ground trembled and the sky blurred. I lost my balance.

“Wake your fucking ass up, you tweak,” Larry was screeching. Two inches away from my face is the sweat dappled pasty face of Larry, with his dilated pupils looking right in mine.
“I thought you were dead, dude.”
“Yea, me too.” My head was pounding and I couldn’t help but notice the floral design start to vine its way across our humble abode, stretching its arms and engulfing our apartment.
“Turn the fucking volume down, Larry,” I screamed. I think it was the trippy musical interludes or the overly introspective, subliminal mind-fucking commercials that keeps him so attached to MTV. That or he likes seeing fat chicks get nexted after 4 seconds. I wonder what is on. I take a look and I hear the most gut-wrenching two words ever.
“Sweet Sixteen,” is whined more than sung and I can almost feel my brain going into post-traumatic shock. I can feel my heart convulsing inside my ribcage. And to make everything perfectly fucked, Larry was rambling in the background.
“Dude, what if they did this on your 18th?” he mumbles through a face mask. He is convinced that the government is releasing mind-controlling substances into the air to take over the world.
“Yea, that’s realistic.” I couldn’t help but find amusement in his idea, though. I don’t think TV would be ready for such a leap. Scripted, drama competing, reality TV to felony committing, down lifting David TV. Man, my birthday was fucked up, was all I could think and before I knew it, I found myself lost in my mind again.

D-Day: MY SWEET 18Th

What day is it?
It was then that I noticed the blinking and ringing red clock digits read 6:00. Shit, whatever day it is, it’s too early for a free thought. The same routine over and over, day in, day out. GEHEN SIE AUS! Quarter after. Get up, quickly remove all trace of the night before. Anything that could reveal your dirty Class A Misdemeanor secret. Your body and especially the hair must be cleansed, so you run mass-produced potions and brews over yourself.
I’d just finished drying off and dressing when I heard honking. Fuck Larry, why can’t you wait until I get in the car to start acting like a cunt? Speaking of cunts, where was mother? If I could make it out the door without running into her, it might almost make up for not having enough time to jerk off in the shower.
I run down the stairs and flash a peace sign out the window. Two more minutes. I just need enough time to heat up my Pop-Tarts and put my mom’s tumblers into the dishwasher. To my surprise there was a partial bottle of Southern Comfort on the counter. This was strange for two reasons: she usually finishes the entire bottle, and if she doesn’t, she empties it into the sink. Either way, I now had a reason to go to school. I put the cap back on and stuff the bottle into my backpack. Just then I notice the big red circle on my mom’s calendar. BGC 6:00, and below that, in pencil: David B-day. Maybe the SoCo was my present.
What was more interesting was where she was at. BGC, probably Billy Graham Convention over at Wheaton College. Today was ritual book-burning and fiery hell condemnations mixed with a perverted, apologist version of Christian theology. When she gets home later today, it would either be an uplifting enticement to Heaven, or a judgmental, rage-based drag towards Hell.
This is the suburbs, where the great urban and rural superpowers test their ideologies and fight their proxies. Larry and I are like the bastard children of some Saigon barfly who fucked some 18 year-old draftee for a pack of Lucky Strikes and some heroin. We don’t belong anywhere really.
“Yo nigga’, happy birthday,” Larry says casually. He slips the car into reverse and peels off towards school.
“Dude, check out what my mom left in the kitchen,” I say, opening up my backpack in the passenger seat. Larry swerves the car right after he sees what I packed.
“Sweet,” he says, “your mom must really love you.”
“My mom doesn’t love me, she just enjoys having me around.”
Larry goes quiet and stares straight ahead like he’d just farted during a math test. Most of the time, when people hear something negative about other people that happens to ring true about themselves, they pretend nothing happened and hope the smell goes away. Larry just farted in algebra, and because it’s not a weighted class there aren’t any Asians to blame it on. Larry’s parents had Larry so they could justify their Ford Expedition and five-bedroom house. He’s a junior in high school and his parents not only decide what he wears, they also decide what he does. Put on this football jersey and tights; don’t be a faggot; go to college; join a frat; get a business or engineering degree; get a corporate-weenie job; get a wife from one of the blond factories in the suburbs; knock her up; repeat. To the average God-fearing adult, Larry is a straight-shooter who always uses his turn signal. On the road of life, there are passenger and there are drivers; then there are people like Larry, who drives down the Ike expressway in his father’s BMW at 90 miles-an-hour, blinkers on, with a spliff in one hand, an Amstel Light in the other, and a coked-up, 16-year old cheerleader performing at least two acts of sodomy in the passenger seat and over the center console underneath the steering wheel. I’m in the backseat, watching with a mixture of awe, horror, and amusement.

Once we find a good parking spot I break out the bottle. Before Larry can reach in the backseat to get his shit for school, I’m lining up a collection of shot glasses on the dash. There’s one from Great America when we decided to venture on some rollercoasters with heads full of mescaline. Then there’s a glass from this one strip joint we went to where we got kicked out of for having fake ID’s and snorting lines off a strippers ass in the VIP room. I have six lined up and before Larry can tell me about all the sexcapades he’ll partake in today, I’m pouring my way to freedom. “The fuller, the better” we used to say.