chapter 13: party

party

I’m waking up. Jack Roberts, the third came over last night. You might remember him. I went to the casino with him one night. He called me yesterday evening. He said he had all the money he owed me and wondered if he could swing it by. I told him that would be fine and then I went into the kitchen, fed my cats and cracked a beer. Budweiser Light. I turned the tv on and there was some documentary on PBS about sadomasochism. I’ve been really into documentaries lately. They’re more interesting to me than the normal stuff on tv. It sounds corny, but true stories are usually crazier than fictional ones. In this documentary, there was this guy who said he couldn’t get turned on unless he felt excruciating pain. He had to be cut with knives to get an erection. He showed his arms and he had scars all up and down his arms. He said that he let his partner cut him with box cutters. He said being cut was the most sexual thing he could imagine. The other guy interviewing him asked him if he had any experience in his childhood that led to his fascination with knives. The guy said he couldn’t think of anything. Then the interviewer asked him if he had any sexual experiences as a child that led to this fetish. The guy told him he didn’t have sex until he was in college. He hooked up with his roommate, and then they started dating. He said it was a fairy-tale romance and a few years later they got married. And now his husband cuts him on nights when he wants to have sex. He said it’s a very healthy and trusting relationship. Interviewers hate when there is no baggage from your childhood. Most people like it a lot better when there’s some sort of childhood trauma to analyze. People hate when things just happen with no logical explanation. That’s the beauty of what’s real. Things just happen, and usually there’s no reason why.

While I was watching this documentary I felt kind of turned on and I didn’t really understand it. I mean I’ve only ever been interested in women, but something about the cutting made me feel kind of turned on. While I was thinking about this I heard a vehicle pull up. I looked outside. There was a large , white van. Jack got out of the van. There were three women with him. One blonde, one brunette, and one redhead. He knocked on the door and I let him in. “Hey buddy,” he told me,” I’ve got the money. Just picked these ladies up from the martini bar. I don’t drink martinis, but I like to buy martinis for women. Especially beautiful women like these three here.” They all looked at him and smiled. I thanked him for the money, and since I was in a good mood, I asked them to come inside and have a drink. The girls all said beer would be nice. Jack told me again that he didn’t drink. The women were very beautiful. They were all dressed up very similar, like friends who all went out together. When they came inside I realized that they were wearing wigs. I’m glad they had different colored wigs or I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.

Jack told me, “sorry to bring all this over to your house, buddy. We’ll leave after they finish their drink. We’re gonna go back to my house.” I told them that if they wanted to stay and party that would be okay with me. “You sure?” Jack asked me. I told him I was sure. “Well if that’s the case do you mind if I do some speed?” I told him that it would be fine if he let me do speed too. Jack pulled out a little bottle of pills. The three women sat on a couch together and watched us quietly. Jack took out a Discover credit card and ground up the pills under it. He used my Budweiser Light beer bottle to mash at the pills. Then he got out a $20 bill, rolled it up and snorted a line of the pills. I took the $20 bill and snorted another line. Then the three women came over and all snorted a line. We all went into the kitchen. I got more beer for everybody. Jack pulled a pipe out of his pocket and started heating the end of it which was a bulbous shape. Then he took a long puff from the cylinder shaped end. He passed it to me and I repeated the action. Then all the women took a long hit from the pipe. We drank some more beer.

“We’re celebrating Megan’s 30th birthday,” the blonde girl told me. I didn’t care but I nodded politely and told her that was very nice.

“We’re all 32, but Megan just turned 30.” I told her that was nice.

“I’m only 31,” the brown haired girl told me, “My name is Fiona.” I said hello and told her that was an interesting name. Then the blonde-haired girl started crying. I asked her why she was crying. She told me that her dog had died last week. I told her that was really sad.

“Listen,” Jack said, “tonight is a night to celebrate. Let’s forget about your dog. Let’s do some molly, and let’s feel good.” I told him that was a good idea. He got out another pill bottle. I gave everyone another beer, and then I got a frozen pizza out of the freezer. I heated up the oven. Jack stood over my kitchen table. He snorted a line and then we all did. Then we drank another beer.

“Happy birthday, Megan,” said the blonde girl.

“Thank you, Holly,” she said.

“Amelia Earhart lived out the end of her life on Gardner Island,” Jack said, “I was reading about it online, and I think there was a tribe on the island. They took her as their prisoner. They probably had never seen anyone with hair and eyes that were a different color. I think they worshipped her as a god, but they kept her in a cage. When you find someone who you think is god, you don’t let them get away. But humans always end up killing gods. I mean they killed Jesus after all. After they killed Earhart they buried her in a box. They’ve found her bones, but the tribe is long gone. When you kill a god, you’re doomed. I bet they all took off in a boat into the middle of a sea, and fed themselves to the sharks. Jim Jones would be jealous.”

While Jack talked to the girls, I started to feel really good. Really happy for the first time in a long time. It had to be the speed and the molly. Sometimes it’s just really hard to be happy, and there’s no reason why. Usually when this happens you just have to drink and smoke and snort whatever you can find, and hope that it makes you happy. Sometimes it makes you even more sad, but if you’re lucky, then it makes you happy. I put the pizza in the oven and waited for it to bake. When I looked back over at Jack he had his cowboy hat off, and the girls were all feeling his head and laughing.

“I got a hole drilled into my head,” Jack said, “look at it. It’s called trepanation.” I looked at his head and you could see a little indentation where the skin hung down loose.

“I took acid when I was 10 years old, and I loved it so much I just kept taking it every chance I could get. Later in my youth I was out west doing mescaline on an Indian reservation. This Indian man told me that one of the village elders could drill a hole in your head and you could trip forever. I told him that sounded good, and the next day we went over to this trailer and there was this old Indian man. He had long braided hair and his eyes looked like they were completely worn out. He made me drink this tea, and I started to trip. I saw beautiful fluorescent lights and I repeated the phrase “spy of the mind, soldier of the heart. Symmetry, not sympathy. Symmetry, not sympathy.” I guess I can be a poet when I’m on drugs, but then again, who can’t? For every “poet,” there are a thousand junkies on the street screaming nonsense into the wind that would be studied in universities if they had a pen and a paper and could write it down. When I woke up on his couch the two Indian gentlemen were watching the Price is Right on this old black and white tv, and I had a hole drilled into my head. It’s not like I am just tripping all the time, but my consciousness is elevated. The thing is, they told me, that consciousness is just a byproduct of brain metabolism. I’m just paraphrasing what they told me, I don’t actually know what any of this means. Something about how glucose is the only energy source for your brain, and blah blah blah, basically your brain needs to expand and pulsate, but when your skull seals in your brain it can no longer do that. So I opened the son of a bitch back up, and my brain pulses, baby! It’s like being a kid again. Everything is more fun. It’s probably why I don’t feel the need to drink. You aren’t hallucinating every day, but you are on some sort of trip. I guess life is just one big trip, isn’t it? Anyway, every year I go back out to that Indian reservation and do meth and hallucinogens with those Indians. I love that Indian reservation.”

“I think you’re supposed to call them Native Americans,” the brown haired girl said.

“Right. Native Americans I meant,” Jack says, “Anyways last year when I went out to that reservation the village elder told me this story. He said there was a man in the village who was an alcoholic and he came to the village elder and asked him for help. The village elder took him miles into the middle of the desert. Out there he had dug a hole. At the bottom of the hole was fresh water, from some sort of spring. A minor miracle in any desert. But he had also put a rattlesnake down in the hole, right next to the water source. He told the man to close his eyes, and after an hour of meditation under the unbearable desert heat he should decide what he should do. Then the elder left him. Later in the middle of the night the man came crawling back into town. He was so dehydrated he was hallucinating. He looked like death. I have no idea how the man made it back to town, but he had decided not to drink the water at the bottom of the hole. After that the man never felt the urge to drink alcohol again. Now he’s a Christian preacher in the village. Hasn’t touched booze in years. I asked the village elder how he knew that this situation would work, and he said ‘I didn’t know it would work. That son-of-a-bitch had beaten my sister one night when he was piss drunk, and I was just hoping he would die.’ I thought that was so funny.”

I went to get the pizza out of the oven, but when I pulled it out I tripped over a beer bottle on the ground, and I dropped it on the floor. The cheese side landed on the ground. It was ruined. The red-haired girl started crying. The other two girls held her. “It’s okay, Megan,” the blonde girl said, “It’s just pizza.”

“I know,” the red-haired girl said back to her, “I’m not hungry.”

I apologized. She said it was okay, and wiped her eyes. We did some more molly. Then we snorted some more speed. We drank more beer and then we went back into the living room. I proposed that we play a game. I was feeling really good. I just made this game up in my mind, I had told them. It’s like spin the bottle, but instead of kissing the person you cut them on their arm with a boxcutter. It’s like a trust fall with a box cutter.

“I’m not playing that game,” the blonde girl said.

“Me either,” said the red haired girl. We drank some more beer.

“I know a game,” Jack said, “Let’s play seven minutes in heaven. Just like back in middle school.”

“I’m not playing that game,” the brown haired girl said.

“Me either,” said the red haired girl.

“I’ll play that game,” said the blonde girl.

“No you won’t,” said the red haired girl.

“Okay,” said the blonde girl.

“I know another game,” Jack said, “It’s called I wrestle your ass.” He lunged at me and tackled me to the ground. I tried to knock him over, but he was way stronger than me. He pinned me easily. “Don’t take it too hard,” Jack said, “I won semi-state in the 165 division in high school. I’m a natural wrestler.” As Jack stood up I grabbed him around the ankles, and tripped him to the ground. The blonde haired girl jumped on top of us, and before long we were all wrestling around on the ground. It felt like being a little kid again.

After we caught our breath and were lying on the ground laughing, I told them I needed to go to bed. “We’ll join you,” Jack said, “it’ll be like a sleepover. Like when we were kids.” We all went to bed, and we wrestled on my bed in a different kind of way. I won’t go into details, but I tried things I’ve never tried before. They should do a documentary interview about that night.

At one point in the night the girl who wore the red wig woke me up and kept saying “It’s nothing, it’s all nothing, there’s nothing.” I asked her what she meant by this, and she told me she didn’t know. I laid there for a while and didn’t know what to say. About an hour later we were both still awake, and she was just staring at the ceiling. I asked her again what she meant earlier and she just said “Nothing. I meant nothing. Just don’t think about it.” Eventually we both fell back asleep.

The next morning Jack woke up and headed back home with the girls. He thanked me for everything. The girls told me it was nice to meet me, and they laughed and followed Jack out to his van. I fell back asleep. I’m waking up now. I decide to just go back to sleep.