8th
Ignorance (Part 1 of 4)
The pill was green. It was double-stacked and closer to a sphere in shape than a disc. On both sides three eyes were etched in a triangular orientation. It had cost Luke thirty dollars but he was told that it was well worth the extra money. They said it was the best stuff Portsmouth had seen in a long time.
Initially, Luke thought he’d snort it. He carried a razor-blade wrapped in duct tape in his jacket specifically for that purpose. But Jason said that snorting it wouldn’t last as long and Luke wanted to be someone else for as long as chemically possible. At 10:30, Luke placed the pill gently onto his outstretched tongue and slowly reeled it into his anxious mouth. Jason and Megan ate theirs at the same time.
Megan was Jason’s girlfriend. She worked at Pizza Hut. She spit on pizzas that were ordered by cops and Asians. Jason was a fairly good boyfriend, as far as boyfriends went in the 90’s. He chain-smoked Newport Menthols and drank Heineken on a daily basis. When he and Megan fucked, he liked to keep a tight grip on her neck with his left hand. The muscles in his left forearm were slightly more robust than his right. Megan always used her tongue sparingly and with a teenage caution. Jason could always tell when she was getting really into it because she would peck its head against his tongue and then back away as if she were testing the temperature before jumping head first into a swimming pool.
Luke’s friend Robert was there as well. He never did anything besides marijuana and he patiently watched television, stoned, while the other three consumed their own drugs. It was five days before Christmas and Robert was watching the live coverage of a local parade. Due to the fact that Santa’s facial hair somehow resembled Jesus Christ, they had replaced the final float with a singing Christmas tree. This was to avoid the same tension that they had received last year from concerned parents. When he was twelve, Robert had once marched in a parade with his Boy Scout troop. They had constructed a float that was a giant stocking made out of wire, wood, and lots and lots of paper mache. Because he was a younger scout at the time, Robert wasn’t permitted to help in the actual construction but was given a major role in painting the float green. After a month, the group attached it to the back of a truck so that it could be towed in the parade and ten scouts scaled the side of it into the opening of the stocking fifteen feet from the ground. It had railings so that they could keep their balance with one hand while waving with the other. Again, because he was a younger scout, Robert was not allowed onto the float, and was one of the fifteen who walked behind it, handing out candy. Throwing candy had been barred several years previously due to the fact that some thought it promoted violence. There was a boy named Trevor who walked in front of Robert during the procession. Trevor had stolen five dollars from Robert during one of the meetings. About thirty minutes into the parade, Robert stepped on Trevor’s heel and kicked the back of his knee at the same time, causing Trevor to fall onto his face in front of a crowd of gasps. He left the hospital with five stitches and a broken front tooth. Everyone believed Robert when he told them it was an accident. He had always been such a good scout. He accumulated merit badges so quickly. The two had always been such good friends Robert could never have intentionally hurt Trevor like that. But Robert hated Trevor and Robert’s father signed off the merit badge requirements without Robert’s participation and Trevor was a devious fuck who poured white-out into the scoutmaster’s coffee when he wasn’t paying attention, scoffing at the man’s inability to recognize the obvious change in hue that followed.
The green pill tasted dry and bitter as Luke closed his mouth over it. He moved it to one side and opted to chew it, accomplishing only two grinds before he had to swallow it else the unadulterated taste of chemistry make him gag. A half-full glass of Pepsi absolved his tongue. Forty-five minutes and counting.
Greg arrived with a six-pack of Budweiser. Jason refused to drink any of it. He was on his forth Heineken. Forty minutes and counting.
The five piled into Greg’s Toyota Camri. It was white. Greg couldn’t remember the car’s year. His parents believed he was spending the night at Tony’s house. That’s where they had popped the ecstacy. It’s where Robert was reminded of boyscouts and Tony’s mother had let them into the house because Tony wasn’t home but they could wait for him anyway and she was in the basement playing pool with some older friends, which actually involved less of a pool table than a tin-foil poked with holes, a lighter, and a sticky wad of opium.
Tony never arrived so they left the house at 10:55. His mother was still downstairs and the distinct sound of pool balls striking one another had completely ceased. Greg snapped open his first beer and steadily swallowed it as he pulled onto Old Dover Road. He passed his own house, which was right down the road from Tony’s on his way to Dover. They were all headed to Jason’s house. Twenty minutes and counting.
Jason lived by himself. He used to live with his parents but they were both killed by a drunk driver while crossing the road, hand-in-hand, from an Italian restaurant to their BMW on their fifteenth anniversary. Jason was vaguely reminded of this as he watched Greg snap his second Budweiser. They had been driving for ten minutes and were near Chili’s Restaurant. Megan wanted to stop and get some food but didn’t want to be in there with people when the x kicked in. She also wanted to get back to Jason’s house as fast as possible so that they could fuck. But she kept that to herself. The amphetamine cut was making her unusually horny. Ten minutes and counting.
Greg brought the three remaining beers into Jason’s house and Jason brought his small vial of cocaine. He had done only three lines at Tony’s house and still held a pretty good buzz. Megan didn’t do cocaine but she wasn’t adverse to a week-long sleepless binge of crystal methamphetamine. Five minutes and counting.
Jason and Megan went into his parents’ old bedroom to fuck and Luke turned on the Playstation in Jason’s bedroom. It had a sticker of a red alien on the front and it was given to Jason as a gift from Megan. An imported fighting game was in the system and Luke complained that it wasn’t written in English. No one else seemed to care. One minute and counting.
The three could hear Megan moaning and coughing. Robert and Greg played the first round. Greg got the first hit in, following it with a combo. The game’s theme was different members of a school (teachers, principal, students) fighting against each other for an ultimate diploma. Forty seconds and counting.
Luke sat against the wall on Jason’s bed. His eyelids were half closed. He scanned his body, analyzing his somatic sensations, and wondered why it all felt so normal. Luke wondered if he had inadvertantly purchased bunk pills. Twenty seconds and counting.
Luke wondered if Robert and Megan would want their money back. Ten seconds.
No, he thought, it’s definitely fake. Motherfucker… Five seconds,
Ripped, four…
Me, three…
Off, two…
One.
Luke blacked out for exactly one second. He woke up and everything had turned dark red. He felt a little nervous. But on a literal second though, he felt terrified. He could hear Greg and Robert playing the video game but it sounded so far away. Hell, it looked like it was occurring miles away. Everything was so dark, so…
Luke blacked out again, for five seconds this time. He thought he was going to die. Was there such a thing as lethal ecstasy? Was Jason going to die too? He couldn’t hear anything coming from the other room Wait a second; he couldn’t hear what Greg and Robert were saying either. In fact, the only thing that he could hear was static. It was as if the gain had been turned up too high on the amplifier within his ears.
Without warning, Luke felt the chemicals actually being physically pushed, all at once, into his brain. It felt like warm saline being injected into the very center of his head. The vacuoles of serotonin were being squeezed so tightly that they shot from their pre-synaptic cells with the velocity of a bullet fired from a gun. The receiving neurons, bombarded by cannon balls did their best to man the defenses and send couriers to the rest of the body but some lines failed and the cells they protected were killed in the mayhem. Rather than being released from their receptors, many of the neurotransmitters were actually sucked into the cell as the torrent grew in ferocity. There was simply no physical place for them to go. It was nothing less than a cataclysmic meteor shower occurring within the confines of the human brain and Luke was feeling every bit of it.
The room was filled with laughter and Robert and Greg stopped playing their game as Luke leapt from the bed. He ran out of the room, giggling, and Greg began to laugh along with him. He put down his controller and followed Luke.
Luke began pounding his fists against the bedroom door that hid the intense, practically lethal intercourse, screaming,
“Are you feeling this?!? Are you fucking feeling this?!?” This went on for half a minute before Luke gave up and darted into the kitchen, compelled by singular motivation of thirst. Greg greeted Jason, half-clothed when the door finally opened. Over Jason’s shoulder, he could see the room. The blankets were half off the bed since they had gotten tangled in Jason’s legs when he jumped towards the door to answer the maniacal pounding. Megan was lying on the bed in only her panties and she was massaging her crotch. There was some blood on the sheets.
“Heyyyyyy, what’s up Greg…” Jason mumbled, embracing his friend. Greg pushed him back and said,
“Fuck this, I need a drink. You fags are having way too much fun.” Robert was watching this all from Jason’s bedroom and he reached into the paper bag that held Greg’s beer and handed one to Greg as he entered the room. Greg sat down in front of the television and picked up a bottle opener off the floor in front of him. It was bent but it still worked. He used it to open his Budweiser and took a long sip from the bottle. He offered it to Robert and Robert took a considerably smaller one and handed it back. They resumed their video game that no one could understand because it was in Japanese.
Luke’s entire spinal cord was tingling. He kept experiencing uncontrollable shivers that felt better than any orgasm he had ever had. He couldn’t stop thinking about flowers. He could smell roses and buttercups and pine trees. The refrigerator’s door seemed almost too strongly attached to its unit; either that or Luke was simply too weak because he couldn’t seem to get the damned thing open. But it turned out to be the funniest thing that Luke had ever experienced and he fell onto the floor in epileptic laughter.
“Need some help?” Jason asked between laughs. He reached over Luke’s body and grabbed the refrigerator’s handle and pulled as hard as he could. Luke remained in the fetal position, watching as the lines became curves and colors formed infinite circles across Jason’s pant legs. There were no longer any definable objects that Luke could perceive. Instead, he just saw shapes, colors, and infinite lines going in infinitely many directions. Luke couldn’t recall what it was like to actually perceive something with real structure. His body was floating two feet above the floor and he was being spun around like a game at some circus. He could hear the song “New Sensation” by INXS coming from somewhere in the distance. Luke couldn’t recall anyone actually turning on a radio but he didn’t care where the music was coming from. The only thing that could possibly hold any relevance to Luke at that moment was the fact that he had to, at all costs, lay perfectly still. He had discovered the most comfortable position that the human body could ever manufacture, sprawled on the floor with his left leg straight and his right bent at an astonishingly precise 45 degree angle. His arms formed the shape of a circle above his head and to Jason he resembled a figure skater.
The magnet holding the refrigerator’s door finally lacked the proper force and Jason fell backwards, barely keeping hold of the handle to stay upwards. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t concentrate on anything but the three inches of cold handle beneath his fingers. His chest felt as though it were bulging out in the middle and his heart felt five times its natural size.
Megan slowly got up off the bed. When she sat up, she felt a rush of blood leaving her head, as though she had been hanging upside down for a year. She was smiling, singing to herself as she pulled on her jeans. The two of them hadn’t even had a chance to get past the foreplay before the drugs hit them both like a truck passing through their heads, burning an everlasting hole. The possibility of brain damage didn’t matter to her anymore. Nothing did. The only thing she knew was that she couldn’t remember the last time she had ever felt this good. Megan was a religious girl. She attended church when she had a chance; when she wasn’t busy cutting up her arms and stomach, or bingeing and purging. But this was the first time in her life that she could truly feel God’s presence. He had enveloped her in a light of warmth and beauty that she hadn’t even had the imagination to pray for. Everything was darker yet her sensory perception had heightened. She could smell the leftovers in the open refrigerator that was in another room. She could hear every tiny beep that made up the sounds coming from the video game in Jason’s bedroom. She was in absolute love. He was the only one for her. He was everything she ever needed. Thank you God.
At that moment a trinity was formed, much like the three pairs of eyes that formed a twin triangle on both sides of the pill. There was a temporary perfection that existed in the house on Sixth Street in Dover, New Hampshire. The three drug induced individuals were all feeling the exact same thing at exactly the same moment. Their emotions were paralleled, and in that sense, linked into a circular chain that gyrated continually, sending pulses of light in a spherical direction. But the three sides of the triangle were different sides of the same triangle and they interpreted and acted upon these feelings differently. For without three different sides, neither a triangle nor a trinity can exist. Robert and Greg would never realize that they were witnessing something sacred, something that was far beyond the expectations or comprehension of any human being. Only a true God could have planned this perfection and it was felt by people within a five mile radius. They blamed it on the full moon.
There comes a time in every drug user’s life that they realize that they’ve actually been alive for a reason. Ecstasy was what did it for these three on that night at Jason’s house. Every pain, every worry, every anxiety, every single neuron firing in their nervous system that was meant to tell their body that something was wrong were suddenly clouded by the overwhelming force that is joy; that is ecstasy. There are endless lists of words to describe what happens to the human spirit when it find itself in the presence of a power of love much greater than themselves and they are every bit useless. If these three had to go back to their normal lives, taking a step down from this religious height, they knew that they would absolutely die in a single breath. Nothing, not a single thing on the planet Earth could ever compare to this green, double-stacked God. The existence of God was unquestionable in this space, as only a being with the unconditional love attributed to God would create a human body that has the biological capacity to react to a combination of chemicals in such a profound way. Evolution was proven to be false on that night.