Dimetapp.
Come allergy season, this stuff is more fun than kittens.
…but you wanted something lurid, didn’t you?
The drug in question is illegal, and I do not condone its use, for reasons which will soon become obvious.
It happened a long time ago – somewhere in late '82 or early '83. The seventies were over… the Reagan years had begun… but we didn’t know that yet. Drug abuse was still considered a legitimate means of self-expression, Cheech and Chong were still making movies together, and no one I knew had ever heard of AIDS yet.
Rusty and I, we’d gone to a really wild party in Austin, somewhere up around Spicewood, and by 3 A.M. or so, we were all pretty seriously twisted. The evening seemed very much like one of those old drug movies where somebody jumps off a high place at the end and dies… The front yard was full of bombed UT ROTC guys playing “search and destroy” with the lawn ornaments, and the back yard was full of naked people.
There was a bottle of whiskey going around. I was not aware that someone had dropped a whole blotter of acid in it.
I hadn’t planned on getting as blown out as I did – I’d actually planned on driving home around one or so --but by three, I knew I’d be lucky just to find my car; the interstate would simply equal a sudden, messy suicide if I tried it. I was a mess. Too much booze, too many drugs, too much sensory overload. My stomach felt like it was full of molten lead, and my head was full of furry little metal thoughts all chasing each other around and clanking too loud when they collided, and I was looking for a relatively inexpensive place to throw up.
Eventually, I wandered into a dark bedroom and shut the door, not bothering to turn on the lights (which should have let me know I had ingested LSD; no other drug that I know of lets you see in the dark). Immediately, I felt better; away from the lights and noise and people, I could think and breathe better. Relaxing, I lay down on the bed and found it covered with coats. This was fine by me; all I wanted to do was pass out and wake up sober enough to drive.
Trouble was, I couldn’t. There was enough booze in my system to flatten a bear, but the acid wouldn’t leave me alone. At one point, thinking the cops were raiding the place, I burrowed under the coats; awhile later, hearing the party continue unabated, I decided I’d been wrong about cops. I remained under the coats, though; it was warm and safe under there, and I felt in need of a little soothing.
After awhile, I begain to wonder what the rest of the party was looking like. I didn’t want to go back out just yet, though – one of the things that had driven me away from my fellow human beings was a minor hallucination in which everyone at the party, male and female, began to resemble pro golf player Arnold Palmer. I then began to get nervous – what if a group of these people sneaked in here to toot some coke or something?
Well, no sweat. All they’d see would be a big heap of coats on a bed. Oh – but what if they started digging around for their coats?
Hmm. Well, (my drug-addled mind spat out,) we’d fool them by pretending to BE a coat.
The idea was actually pretty intriguing at the time, which gives you some idea of how far gone I was. How does one impersonate a coat? Well … you cover up your face, for one thing. You lie very still, and loose, and floppy, and … you try to … to think coatlike thoughts.
I had gotten as far as deciding to be a nice Burrberry trench coat, or maybe a London Fog with fur lapels and a belt in the back, and was thinking about how it would feel to be dry-cleaned when the door opened and the couple came into the room.
They didn’t turn on the lights, for which I was profoundly grateful. They moved towards the bed; noticing the pile of coats, they stopped, paused, then sat down beside the bed instead. By now, my eyes were quite well adjusted to the dark, and I could see fine. I even had color vision, despite the lack of light. Hell, with a little effort, I probably could have managed X-Ray vision at the time…
I couldn’t see the guy’s face, though; his back was to me. I could see his girlfriend, though; she was facing him (and me), and I remember thinking she was vaguely unattractive. She had frizzy blonde hair, and an odd-shaped nose, and looked sort of like Harpo Marx in drag. I couldn’t see what the guy looked like, but I was greatly unsettled to hear that his voice sounded uncannily like Arnold Palmer’s. I was glad I didn’t have to look at him.
“I want to hold you, Deedee,” he said. “I want to feel us melt and run together like butter and syrup on a hot, erotic waffle.”
“I can’t, Chad,” she replied. “I’m thinking in stereo, and my liver feels like it’s full of popcorn.”
It occurred to me then that although that bottle of whiskey with the blotter acid in it was certainly no longer with us, it had touched a great many lives in its passing.
They sat and talked. I was able to decipher the gist of it – Chad wanted to make mystic, spiritual mookie-oonoo on the carpet, here and now; Deedee was feeling much too high to be comfortable, and was having trouble maintaining her reality anchor – fumbling with fleshly plumbing in the dark held no appeal at the moment.
He cajoled; she begged off.
I listened for awhile until I remembered that I was supposed to be a coat; I then tuned them out and concentrated on whether or not I should have a zip-out lining, and whether or not having a zipper would itch. This coatish line of thought flew apart some time later when I noticed she seemed to be naked.
He was naked, too; they’d apparently stripped while I’d been thinking about wood vs. wire hangers. He was caressing her shoulders, sides, and breasts, his demeanor somewhere between gentle massage and sneakily copping a feel. Absurdly, I thought again of Harpo Marx and the bicycle horn he always carried around in the movies. At one point, he squeezed one of her breasts, and I fully expected it to go HONK!
The only sound, though, was their breathing. She was beginning to sound aroused. She sounded more aroused as his hands stroked her belly, hips, thighs … and zeroed in on something below her navel.
He shifted position, then, and I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. Something did seem to be happening, though; within minutes, her breathing had become deeper, more rapid, and she occasionally twitched.
Shortly thereafter he stopped, and leaned back against the bed. “Is it my turn, yet?” he asked dolorously.
She responded by leaning forward … towards his crotch … her mouth forming an O … and paused. Her hands dropped limply to the floor. “I’m sorry, Chad,” she whimpered. "I can’t. It … it just looks like a big worm."
Now, for some reason, this sort of struck me funny.
It also kind of took me by surprise.
I burst out laughing.
Well, not laughing, exactly; “extremely loud hideous uncontrollable cackling” might be a better description. Take a deep breath and shout “GLAAAAAAAAAAAAGHAGHAGHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA (GURK-glag) GHGAHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!!” at the top of your lungs, if you really want the full effect.
The effect on Chad and Deedee was galvanic; they leaped about three feet in the air, screamed, and ripped out of the room like the fiends of hell were after them; I had apparently startled them a little. I didn’t care. I just lay there and laughed until it hurt.
Whereupon Arnold Palmer did come forth into the room, and with a fierce golf cry, he did smite me repeatedly with a flaming nine-iron.
Fortunately, the coats soaked up most of the impact, and I yelled at him to stop. He did, and immediately ceased to be Arnold Palmer; now he was just my friend Rusty (who had accompanied me to this particular party), standing there looking confused and holding a curtain rod. He’d seen the naked people flee screaming from the room; understandably curious, he had peeked in and seen a pile of coats, heaving and snorking. Quite naturally assuming that the clothing had somehow mutated into some sort of mad giggling textile monster, he had quite naturally attacked it.
We barely had time to recognize each other when someone turned on the lights.
The room was full of people.
I didn’t know any of them. For that matter, I didn’t know who the hosts were. We hadn’t even been invited; we’d simply been informed of the party’s existence by some of the other guests en route.
Thinking fast, I grabbed my jacket and struggled into it, grabbed Rusty, shook a few hands, pecked a few cheeks, made a few excuses, and seconds later, left a quarter-inch of rubber in the parking lot. It apparently worked; no lynch mob gathered in the time it took to find an on-ramp.
The conversation lagged on the way home; we were tired and wasted, and it was taking most of my concentration to drive fifty-five in a straight line.
“Awesome f****n’ party,” said Rusty, at one point. He was looking dumbly at the curtain rod, as if he were realizing it didn’t really belong in his hand or my car.
“Yeah,” I replied. My denim jacket was really starting to bug me; it had somehow shrunk during its stay on the bed, and was way too tight in the shoulders.
We were outside the city limits before I realized I hadn’t been wearing a jacket when I arrived at the party…
