Drugs

It’s 1969. I’m desperately trying to get a volunteer from the childrens’ Braille Institute off Cahuenga Boulevard to go for a days outing at a friend of mines cabin at the upper Kern river. Her name was Connie and I was wild about her. I also tried to stay on my very best behavior when around her. She gives me her phone number. It was the Pac Bell van that put me over. The phone company wouldn’t hire a psycho killer, would they? I was on cloud nine as we picked her up that Saturday morning in North Hollywood. My good pal John was driving his brand new Chevy one ton truck with a new camper shell on it. It was so new, he hadn’t had the small, rubber enclosed boot installed so the people in the ‘six pack’ camper in the back could talk to the people in the truck. Ah, who cared. I was soon in the camper, yakking away and telling stories to Connie and another couple I didn’t know who were friends of John‎…Now, in the camper, we had no control over starting or stopping the truck. We were isolated from the driver and the crammed cab. They also had a stereo that blasted constantly. We, on the other hand, had the cold beer and food. No bathroom though. The girls made sure to take advantage of our last pit stop in Bakersfield prior for the last leg to the cabin. The other couple were hippie types. Nice enough. The day turned grey and drizzly. The cabin had no firewood and everyone was freezing. We decided to head home early. It grew darker and darker as a big storm was brewing. It looked like Connie was having a lousy time. The hippie guy hands me a lump of coal and winks at me. I stare at him, then down at my hand. “Hey, dude, it’s a peyote button. It will mellow you out. Your chick will dig the new you, guaranteed!” His girlfriend is nodding her head like a toy dashboard dog. I figure it couldn’t hurt, swig it down with a half a beer. As we clean up the cabin and load the truck for the ride home, I’m feeling nothing different. I pound down the last two chili dogs no one wanted and some chips. Now, back in the camper, the sun has gone down and rain is pounding on the metal roof like a drummer gone mad. No lights in the camper. Not hooked up yet. We did have comfort and the ice chests though. Connie is bundled across from me on the camper floor while the hippie couple laid up in the cab over bed. An occasional flash of headlights illuminated the interior through the half-curtain of the tailgate doorway as we rounded curves leaving the Kern river behind. Just as we got on the freeway past Bakersfield, two things happened at the same time. The storm really broke loose, and, the Peyote came on. I guess in the right place and time, I could have had a religeous type of trip, crossing my legs and lifting my hands with palms up, talking with god. Not this trip. My first reaction was some gurgling in my stomach, then a red alert to my brain that explosive diarrea was heading for my asshole at light speed. Anything in my stomach was coming back also, through whence it had came, out my mouth. Putting all my will power into an emergency ass hole steel door block, I start puking violently and with great gusto, all over the front of Connie’s new parka. She was able to block most of the blast with her left hand. It was far from over. My brain screamed that my emergency ass block would fail in five seconds at best. Tme seemed to stand still as the drug slammed my brain around. I knew one thing though. It was either going to be in my pants, or, not in my pants. Like the drug crazed maniac I had now become, I wrench open the back door of the camper, drop my Levi’s 501s, spin and grab onto the fridge and closet front, and let go. It sounded like a shuttle taking off as these enormous blasts flew from my back end. As I stared into Connie’s eyes, the flash of the cars’ high beams then low beams on the freeway behind us made her features change like an old time movie. Drivers screamed at me as I nodded at them with the rain pouring off my face as they passed us, trying to dodge my ejecting spasms of hot magma…The emergency over, not much was said the rest of the drive…Connie dumped me. What a shallow bitch…