In the interest of truthiness I should point out that there was one time when I’d actually felt truly high. I’d smoked some Mexican weed with my friend Hannah, whom I’d been drawn to because we both had a penchant for wearing baby doll dresses, purposely torn stockings, and combat boots. We both had complete contempt for everyone else in the town who followed the herd mentality and was afraid to be unique and individualistic like us, the two Goth chicks who were dressed exactly alike.
When Hannah was a kid she’d had this Betsy Wetsy doll that she carried around everywhere. You were supposed to feed her with a bottle and then she’d pee, but Hannah would always just pry off Betsy’s head and fill her up to her neck with the garden hose. She also decided to skip the whole diaper thing and would simply squeeze Betsy’s distended midsection, and a half-gallon of faux pee would squirt out of Betsy’s rudimentary plastic urinary tract onto the neighbor’s bushes. “She takes after her father,” Hannah would explain. “Runs right through her.” Eventually Betsy’s neck hole became stretched out from her head being pulled off so much, and the body was lost, but Hannah held on to Betsy’s head, possibly as a reminder that she probably shouldn’t have children. Then Hannah got older, and we went through this stage where we made everything possible into a bong: Coke cans, lightbulbs, melons. Then one night we used the baby’s head as a bong. (I’m pretty sure that’s the only time that sentence has ever been used in a memoir. One would hope. I’d check it out on the Internet, but to be honest, that whole horse-enema-fetish stuff scared the shit out of me, so I’m not even going to look.) We poked some holes into the top of Betsy’s head, covered it with a wire screen, lit the pot, and sucked the smoke through Betsy’s pink rosebud lips. After a few hits I realized I was giggly and dizzy and nauseous . . . and totally high. Hannah cockily claimed it was her exceptional Mexican marijuana, but I suspect it was the toxic fumes from the burned plastic of Betsy’s soft spot. Regardless, it seemed worth the accompanying cancer risk, because it was the first time that I actually felt high, and I didn’t want to take anything away from Hannah, because honestly this was kind of the pinnacle of bong crafts, and I thought it would be like the first guy Leonardo da Vinci showed the Mona Lisa to asking, “Why’s it so small?” And this was pretty much exactly what was going through my mind the night I took acid from the pizza boy.
Wow. This is a really convoluted story. I blame the drugs.
Anyway, I waited two hours for the acid to kick in and felt only mildly dizzy, and I began to resign myself to the fact that the only thing that might ever get me high was Betsy’s burning scalp. Then suddenly things felt different. My body started to ache and get tight, and I figured I was either about to start tripping or I had the flu. I asked Travis and he assured me that this was normal and was caused by the strychnine. And I was all, “Uh . . . strychnine? Like . . . the stuff in rat poison?” and Travis nonchalantly said, “Yeah. They add a little strychnine to get the acid to bond with the paper, and it gives you mini-convulsions, but it’s not enough to kill you, so chill out.” Then I was like, “I’M PRETTY SURE YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL SOMEONE ON LSD THAT THEY’RE HAVING CONVULSIONS FROM RAT POISON, TRAVIS,” but I didn’t say it out loud, because I was suddenly afraid my shouting would go into my tongue instead of over it and then it would swell up and I’d choke to death, and that’s when I realized I was probably high.
Then I got distracted because I could hear this ringing sound, and I kept telling the other people to shut up so I could figure out what it was, but they were too busy licking the walls because they said the texture was exactly like licking a jawbreaker. I considered pointing out that it was exactly like licking a jawbreaker made of lead-based paint, but then I remembered that we had all just ingested rat poison, so I figured the damage was done at this point, and that if we survived it would only make us stronger.
Then I heard the ringing again and I started creeping around the house on my knees, because I thought maybe I could get under the sound waves of my drugged-out friends, who were now freaked out at the revelation that no one could ever see their faces in real life because “mirrors couldn’t be trusted.” I wondered whether Travis thought to hide the kitchen knives before we began, and I was going to find him and ask when the ringing started again. Travis was struggling to pry a can opener out of a girl’s hands, and he yelled, “Could somebody answer the goddamn phone?!” And that’s when I realized what the ringing was.
That’s also when I realized the amazing beauty of the ringing phone, a sound I now knew the sober world would never truly appreciate. Even the idea of the phone seemed somehow more significant. “It could be anybody on the other end of the line,” I thought to myself. “It could be Mr. T. Or one of the Thundercats.” The possibilities were overwhelming. I picked up the receiver and listened to the sound of the staticky emptiness across long-distance lines.
“Uh . . . Hello? Travis?” asked the man on the other end.
Me: “No, this is not Travis. Is this a Thundercat?”