“Who?” asked the man, who seemed really very annoyed.
“I think we both have the wrong number,” I said, and I started to hang up, but then the not-Thundercat started getting all shouty, but I couldn’t really understand him, and I thought that he was probably just angry at the sudden disappointing realization that he would never be a Thundercat. Then I suddenly realized that it was entirely possible that I wasn’t even talking to anyone at all, and that perhaps this was all a hallucination. Maybe I wasn’t even on the phone. Maybe I was standing here talking to an apple. Or a gerbil. Then I realized that if it was a gerbil it would probably soon burrow into my ear and eat my cochlea, so I dropped it on the ground and walked away, and Travis was all, “Who was on the phone,” and I was like, “It was not a Thundercat. It might have been a gerbil. Does my ear look okay?”
This is when Travis probably should have just turned on the answering machine, but I think he’d actually taken a hit of acid himself, because he seemed to be melting, and it’s been my experience that most sober people don’t do that. And then I started throwing up. I said, “Wow. I think I’m going to throw up,” and Travis said, “No, you just think you’re going to throw up,” and then I was like, “God, that’s a relief.” And then I threw up. On Travis’s feet. Then Travis gave me a mostly empty bag of SunChips to throw up into, and I sat in a dark room and threw up—a lot. Like, so much that I suspected I was throwing up things I’d never even eaten. Travis put on a single of the Doors singing “L.A. Woman,” because he said it would help, and it actually did help, in spite of the fact that the whole house seemed to be dissolving, haunted, and filled with hairy goblins. Also, I was pretty sure all the closets had small fires growing in them, and every time the Doors tape would reach the end, I would start throwing up again and Travis would hear me and have to rewind it and start it again.
This basically happened every five minutes for the next four hours.
But somewhere in between the time when I was stomping out imaginary closet fires and the time when I finally fell asleep, I did apparently have a few moments of clarity and inspiration. I know this because when I woke up later, next to a bag of sullied SunChips, I saw that someone had written a bizarre diatribe about Smurfs on the wall, and it was in my handwriting. And also I’d written my name several times on the wall pointing to it, because apparently I didn’t want anyone else to take credit for my discovery that the Smurfs were actually peaceful bisexual communists. And that’s when I realized that drugs were bad and I never took them again.1 Then I left and decided to get all new friends, but first I scratched out my name on the wall and replaced it with “Travis.” I suspected that he might try to pin it back on me, so I dotted his name with a heart, since everyone knew that I was not the kind of person to dot i’s with hearts. Then again, technically neither was Travis. I was probably still a little high at the time.
Anyway, my point is that drugs are a bad idea, unless you use them only to distract people from embarrassing dildo stories. And also that aside from all the vomiting and paranoia and embarrassing myself, it was actually kind of cool in retrospect, although really not at all at the time. Much like life. Also, you wish Lion-O the Thundercat would call you, but instead you spend a lot of time unnecessarily worrying about gerbils getting stuck inside of you. Which is also kind of a metaphor for life. A really, really bad one.
1. Except for pot a few more times. And one time I accidentally did cocaine. And also I did acid a couple more times, but I never did it again at night, so I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. You know what? Never mind.
And That’s Why Neil Patrick Harris Would Be the Most Successful Mass Murderer Ever