AN ECSTASY PARTY

First of all, almost everybody at the party was on ecstasy. In fact, that’s what it was: an Ecstasy Party.

Needless to say that it would involve neon green, pink, and orange straws. I went to the local 7-11 with my friend Fred to get some supplies.

“Hey, man.”

“Yeah, bro?”

“The straws are over here.”

“Oh good.” Fred laughed, almost giggling like a schoolkid before and after recess. Playing, fucking around was all that mattered to us. There was a certain gray area in childhood that turned into teenage recklessness. That eventually atrophied (or bloomed, depending on your perspective). Into gangly, awkward juvenile delinquency.

“We’ll need plenty of these,” I said while digging my hands into a pool of neon straws covered in plastic. At the cash register, we didn’t want to be too suspicious. So I decided to use some of my Yankee-charm.

“Evenin’, miss. You come here often?”

She was shaggy and lanky. And the roots of her hair were like a sandstorm frozen in time. Missing hairs, gray, a logline of turgid nothingness. Expelled through sweaty armpits, and dare I say crotch—poor thing. There was never any way out for any of us. So, you might as well take a part-time job at 7-11 while the Earth balanced with infinity. Ah, the time loop!

We wanted to escape it.

“And please, ma’am, don’t forget the orange juice.”

She grabbed the three quarts and rang them up one at a time. Then she placed them into a plastic bag behind the counter. Her cheeks droopy, solemn, distant, and in despair.

“Here,” I said, “can you put these in there too?”

I unloaded two handfuls of plastic neon straws. She looked at me. I paid her. She said nothing.

“Keep the change,” said I. She huffed a fart, or she’d been trying to speak but nothing came out.

“Okay, Fred,” I said, as we got into my ole beat-up Dodge Spirit. “Let’s go get fucked up.”

He laughed as I backed out of the parking spot and made somewhat of a screeching noise. Fred handed me a cigarette and we both lit up.

It was a Saturday night, a clean Saturday night at that. In a well-lit place. Sure. Why not?

“If you cross-breed cantaloupes with cotton mouth, whaddya get?”

Fred choked on his cigarette.

“Dude, what are you talking about?”

I opened my palm and showed him two hits of yellow butterflies.

“OH MY GOD DUDE! YOU HAVE SOME?”

“Open up, Fred, if you’d so kindly—one of those quarts of OJ. Let’s roll.”

It was like a movie. I guess it felt that way because drugs made everything more interesting. And when you’re not going anywhere in life things could get supreme-boring. Or supine. I didn’t know how to phrase any of my movie scripts back then. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t have a vocation and my job was shitty and I still lived at home. We all did.

And the town was festering with drug mules. Creeping into the localities from Camden and Philadelphia. And there were long-seated drug routes coming all the way from Spain or Italy. Or justifiable Panama after the U.S. invasion.

We pulled to the side of the road. Then we swallowed the pills. With the OJ, taking turns for big fat sips of that thing that happens when you know it in your mind. Ah, shit. What’s the name? Placebo! Yeah. That’s it.

“This will not be a circumstance where the Placebo Effect is … in effect.”

“Indeed,” Fred nodded. We smoked and I steered back to the neighborhood.

***

Parties are like butterflies. You have to let ‘em go.

What I mean by that is this was back before I had my own place. Where I could listen to Beethoven symphonies at night and get the Word down (“Have you heard? The word is ‘Love’,” said the Beatles) and I painted at night too. Horrible abstractions in my timidity of long-lasting alcoholism. That perpetuated because in high school we drank a lot. And after high school going to community college sucked. And we lived in an era where you were basic and fucked without a bachelor’s degree.

“For heaven’s sake!” Riley screamed as we entered the domicile. “Where the fuck have you guys been? We’ve been waiting for an hour or two.”

“Relax,” I retorted. Walking into his parents’-who-were-away-on-vacation house, you know how it goes. I went over to the kitchen table and placed the orange juice there. And then I turned the plastic bag upside down. And there fell out dozens of neon pink, orange, red, and green plastic straws. Riley laughed, taking a cigarette out from the pack he kept on top of his head. There were eight other people roaming around the house. Believe it or not, there was actually a girl present. (I don’t know what the hell she was doing there.)

“Where is everybody?” Fred asked.

“They’re down in the basement,” Riley replied. He opened three or four straws and shoved them into his mouth and began chewing like an ape.

I nodded. “This is where … this is fun … I have two arms.” I lifted them up.

Somebody laughed. Then we heard loud music coming from down in the basement. There was a drum set down there and guitar amps.

We walked down and the steps were shaky and the lights were off. Only there had been strung-up Christmas lights all around the edges of the wall near the ceiling. So it had a certain glow and aplomb that made the drugs go: Vrooooom!

A few people were sitting on the couch under the steps. Riley stumbled over to his red Gibson SG. He made static noises that vibrated across the room giving us chills.

Somebody was sitting at the drum set. I couldn’t tell if he had a mask on his face. I hardly looked up at him. I went over to the bass guitar, slinging it across my shoulders. And I waited for Riley to strum something, anything. He was in drop D. So there were dark vibes. He was messing around with his pedalboard, getting a wacky sound with his flanger. It sounded like bullets ricocheting in space.

“Oh my god,” Fred said, “that sounds insane.”

Riley laughed an evil laugh.

I thumped something on the bass.

The warrior behind the drums started tapping out a beat on the kick and snare.

We heard screams from upstairs.

“Quiet!” Riley said of a sudden very terrified and afraid. We heard big booming steps above us. “Oh shit,” he said, “I think my dad’s home…”

We froze, mortified.

“Riley?” somebody spoke in a low voice. It was his dad!

The basement door opened and the lights went on. And it was terrible. No words could describe the blinding light as it tore at our irises. It was like forks and corkscrews falling from the sky.

“Yeah, what the hell is going on down there?” It was Riley’s sister, Evelyn. But everybody called her Eve.

“Dude, your sister was supposed to let us know if your dad was coming home!”

“Fuck, I know!”

They started walking down, steady. Almost in slow motion. It was torture to have to face reality when you were peaking on ecstasy.

“What’s this?” Eve asked with a wicked smile on her face. She had long brown hair, dark. Tan skin. Green eyes. Skinny. She took pleasure in defeating her brother whenever she could. It was the brother-sister dynamic from hell. “You guys got a little jam session going?” She knew damned well we'd blitzed ourselves into attrition. “Myers,” she said to me immediately, “can you even see straight?”

Everybody laughed, grabbing each other on the couch … if only to hold together. Like ice cubes in a tray.

“And what the fuck,” Riley’s dad said, “is Adam doing behind the drums? Is he wearing a fucking Halloween mask?”

Tears started streaming from the come-up to the plateau. As Riley’s dad and Eve observed quite a scene.

“And what’s with all the fucking straws?”

We were very much caught.