Hsssssssh.
I drag deeply on the mouthpiece, slowly counting down in my head as the acrid fumes fill my lungs, relaxing me. I exhale and lean my head back against my overstuffed chair. I let my eyes lazily drift around the room before slipping the inhaler back into my pocket.
“Your asthma again?” asks my friend.
“You know it!” I say, giving him a high five, but not too hard-I bruise easily.
“So like I was saying, I think we should have a party, but no beer. It should be an all hard liquor party. That would be chronic,” he says.
“Yeah, but it’s been done before. I say we have an all hard drug party,” I reply.
“That’s a great idea,” he says, his face lighting up like an orphanage burning to the ground on Christmas day. “I like you, Merriweather,” he continues, appreciatively. “I think I’ll kill you last.”
Later that weekend
“Who wants to do a coke wheelbarrow?” yells one of my roommates, pouring out a line about a yard long on the thinly-carpeted floor.
Before the preppy-looking gentleman by the door is finished yelling “I do,” his feet are in the air, and my roommate is pushing him, nose first, as he struggles to snort the entire line.
“of blood shoots out of his nose, ears and eyes. He bursts into flames, incinerating before our eyes. We cheer.
I walk over to the group of kids shooting heroin in the corner of the room, one of whom asks me if I want to take a hit with them. They start making fun of me when I decline the needle, claiming that I can’t handle the high.
“Nah, it’s not that,” I reply calmly, “I just think needles are for sellouts.” Then I punch my fist through a glass window and roll my bleeding arm around in a pile of heroin on the table in front of them. Ahh, yeah. That’s the stuff.
A pair of first-years shove their way into the party, demanding, “Is the keg kicked?”
“Yeah,” I say, looking at the empty garbage bag full of coke. ” But we got Electric Kool-Aid-Acid Beirut going on.”
“Sweet!” they reply in unison. They rush over to the table and start pounding their empty cups. We play a couple of quick games, and the first-years lose.
“That was a whole lot of acid you two just ingested,” I remark.
“I know, but there’s no need to shout. You know, it just occurred to me that since there’s a dark side of the moon, why isn’t there a dark side of the earth?”
“What about nighttime?” I ask.
“What about daytime?” he shoots back quickly.
“Touche,” I say, reaching for my mace.
“Man, what kind of acid is this? I can’t even feel my face!”
“Well, I ran out of LSD, so I had to fill the rest of these cups with the only other kind of acid I could find,” I say holding up a bottle marked, “Sulfuric,”as their bodies start to melt.
A number of us, hungry from the exertion of inhaling so many drugs so quickly, decide to order a pizza. It seems to take forever, but eventually the door opens, and there’s a group of underclassmen standing on the landing. They are led by a dude in a red and white polo shirt with the collar fully popped.
“The pizza’s here!” I roar, advancing on the guy in the lead.
“What? I’m not a pizza,” he protests before I rip his arm off and start chewing, with my friends following suit. Later we all agree that it was a good pizza, but decide to ask for one that doesn’t scream so much next time.
Bored, I walk over to two kids on Ecstasy with pupils the size of dinner plates, who are busy hugging each other to death.
“I love you!”
“No, I love you!”
“Oh, I love you both,” I say, rubbing their backs and leaning into the group. Having won their trust, I mace them both.
A couple of wallflowers standing in the corner seem bored, so I saunter over and show them a little trick I picked up the last time I was in jail (I was there for drug use and prostitution, although I was originally sentenced for tax evasion). Mixing liberal amounts of heroin, meth and nutmeg (for flavor) in a spoon, I inject the mix into a joint rolled with acid blotter. I hand it to the person directly to my left who takes one drag on it before being reduced to a violent seizure, then bursting into flames. Too much nutmeg.
Hoping to calm down for a minute, I enter the opium den, filled with luxurious tapestries and Asian merchants, in the middle of the apartment. I try to engage them in small talk, asking if they know any place on campus where I can buy stamps. They answer in unintelligible Confucian limericks, so I just sit there smoking from one of the elongated ivory pipes being passed around.
“But what I really want to know is how you got in here,” I say, pointing directly at the giant centipede sitting hunched over, drinking a can of Busch Light and smoking a cigarette.
“Eh, I came with Greg,” he says motioning toward a six-foot-tall beetle, who, though seemingly familiar, I’m unable to place until he reminds me that we’re in the same Intro to Ethics class.
“Oh, right,” I say, thinking about how to make conversation with a giant beetle. “So how do you think you did on the midterm?” I enquire casually.
“I hate you,” he says.
“Me too. You gonna eat that apple?”
Tired of the opium den, I stagger outside yelling, “Less bugs and more drugs!” to the assembled throng. “Hey, that rhymes,” I point out to no one in particular before blood shoots from every orifice on my body and I collapse in a fit of convulsive laughter. My laughter comes to an abrupt stop when my asthma flares up and, upon reaching for my inhaler, I discover that it’s been kicked. In desperation I grab my Asthma Attack Alert Whistle. I wheeze into it as hard as I can, but my lungs give out.
“Is someone playing a kazoo?” I hear some girl ask a friend before I pass out.
