I WAS A TEENAGE SHROOM FIEND
He was the last greaser in a world of hippies . . .
NOBODY MEANT FOR THE PIGGLY WIGGLY TO burn down. Or any of the rest of what ended up turning to smoking rubble, not exactly. So let’s clear that up right now.
You never really see these things getting out of hand until after they do. Up to then, it’s all just normal stuff, going about your usual day. Like any other typical late Friday afternoon, me and Maddox in his old Dodge Coronet that looked like a rocket ship, with the huge fins and the four taillights poking out like shooting flames, making his rounds as his customers got fortified for their weekends.
Sugar Grove was a sleepy little college town, a fact you’d never know from the side we lived on. Cruising from south to north was like going to a whole other town. Once we got there, Maddox would wheel into the park near the campus, next to the big splashing fountain, or in the lot by the pond with all the weeping willows around it, or near the brick bathrooms, and pretty soon some sleepy-looking guy would amble over. Different guys in each location, but the same long hair to his chest and same stars on his pants or rainbow on his shirt, and the same vacant smile on his face. They looked like they never had a worry in the world, and I found an appeal to that. It had to be more than the drugs. I hoped.
I’d have the glove box open and as often as not Maddox had a better idea what the customer was after than the customer himself, so he’d tell me what to fish out.
“Gimme the baggie with the little green footballs,” he’d say. Those were the chloral hydrate gel capsules.
Or, “That one, with the little tiny ones, whites and yellows and blues.” Valium.
Or, “The one with six of the big yellow round ones.” Percodan . . . the Cadillac of downers.
All that, plus codeine, Darvocet, Darvon . . . Maddox carried it all. He had a guy inside a pharmacy, a part-timer named Jimbo, a year behind me in high school, who did deliveries and things like that. You couldn’t steal the good stuff outright. They’d notice that. But the system had a weakness ripe for exploiting. The pharmacy supplied two hospitals and several nursing homes, and they were always returning meds that had been prescribed but never used. Most of it could go back into circulation. But there were certain controlled classes of drugs that couldn’t. When those came back, they were supposed to be destroyed. Which was Jimbo work. It seemed like a huge waste, but that was the law. So Jimbo would pop them all out of their blister packs into a gallon-size plastic ice cream tub they kept in the back, and when that got full, it would be time to empty it into the outside dumpster. Only Jimbo got really good at skimming the cream of the keepers.
Maddox would exchange the pills for cash, then we’d rumble along to meet the next customer while I sorted the money and kept the denominations arranged. We didn’t get away quite as clean with the day’s last one, a guy with a droopy mustache almost as long as his hair.
“Hey man, what about those mushrooms I asked for?” He curled his fingers over the driver’s door. “Any luck with the shrooms?”
“I’m working on it. I got a line on a source a couple nights ago.” Maddox gave the fingers a look as dirty as their nails. “Don’t make me peel those off.”
The guy backed away looking nine kinds of surprised, like he didn’t even know what his fingers had been up to. As we drove away, he was all apologies, and looked that way in the mirror for as long as I could see him.
Maddox grumbled and shook his head. “Holy Jesus, but I hate hippies.”
“Then why do you sell to them?”
“Cause their money spends better than they smell. And none of them ever tried to rip me off.” He looked across at me, a good half-acre of front seat between us. “Bikers, they’re the ones you have to watch out for. They’re not the ones buying downers, either. They’re speed freaks. You roll up to do business with a biker whose pupils are already down to black pinholes, there’s trouble brewing already.”
“Then what are you complaining about the hippies for? Next to that, they don’t seem so bad.”
Maddox had to grouse a little more, then relented. “They’re not, I guess. A bath might go a long way toward raising my opinion with most of them.”
“The girls are cute. Them too?”
Maddox uncorked his cigarette from the corner of his mouth and stuck it by the window so the slipstream would blow away the ashes. “They seem pretty free with the goodies, and that makes up a lot of ground for the b.o., but they’re not really all there when you bone ’em. Their heads are off in Middle Earth or someplace. It’s weird.”
This sounded like a problem I wouldn’t mind trying to overcome.
“Shitty music, too. I don’t know how they could listen to it if it wasn’t for the pills and the reefer. It doesn’t ever seem to end, or go anywhere in the middle. Holy Jesus, but I hate that music of theirs. Speaking of, let’s have something else.”
Manning the eight-track player was another duty of mine. Maddox made tapes off his albums at home, and he never got tired of listening to anything, just eager to hear the next one, nothing but wall-to-wall twang and double-time stomp and crazy yelping vocals like the singer was ready to jump through the speakers. Give Maddox enough Charlie Feathers and Duane Eddy and Link Wray, and he’d run out of gas before he ever ran out of road he wanted to get down.
We weren’t done for the day yet, though. Maddox hated frat boys most of all, but not so much he wouldn’t sell to them, too. Closer to campus he cruised a stretch of main drag with a lot of cheap restaurants and cheaper bars, then whipped into an alley and met a guy who looked like he was waiting for us, even if I didn’t recognize him and Maddox didn’t either. Preppy looking, Sigma Chi, not a hair out of place and creases on his slacks sharp enough to cut the hair.
“Nice wheels,” the guy said, except I couldn’t tell if he really meant that or not. “It’s still from the twentieth century, right?”
“Fifty-nine, motherfucker.” Maddox looked him up and down. “I don’t know you. Where’s Scott?”
“I’m Heath. Scott has his necktie hanging from the doorknob to our room. Which means he’s having more fun right now than all three of us put together.”
Heath dropped down for a look inside over at me, I guess to make sure I wasn’t having extra fun. He stared too long, like I knew he would, with a hoo-weee expression blooming across his face.
“Hey kid! What time are you supposed to be back at the circus? I want to catch your act!”
“Eight o’clock,” I told him. “But stick around. It’s nnn—” I hung stuck on the N, the way I sometimes still did, but sliding through it was less a giveaway than grinding at it like an engine that wouldn’t start. “—nnnot just the eyes. If you’re lllllucky, I’ll bite the head off a chicken, too.”
Motherfucker was right.
Maddox drummed his fingers on the top on his door, a galloping sound. “You bring Scott’s money with you or was this a wasted trip for me?”
Heath slipped it from his pocket and handed it over. Maddox let the baggie of little green footballs slip from his fingers to the alley, with an “Oops, sorry.” When Heath bent over to pick it up, Maddox levered the door open and banged it into his head. As the frat boy tottered backward holding the top of his skull, Maddox slid out after him.
Six lanky feet of gristle and bone with a pompadour—that was Maddox. When his little brother Hazel and I were still kids, I used to think Maddox was the coolest guy on earth. And I guess he was still up there in my estimation, but now it was more that I admired him for sticking to his guns. He was the last greaser in a world of hippies. Outnumbered 10,000-to-1 by bellbottoms, he wore pegged jeans so tight that, even if someone got in a lucky punch and knocked him out, the jeans might have kept him standing. I never knew how he could even move in them, let alone stash a bicycle chain in his back pocket, but he could, and did. He whipped the chain out and around and up from below into Heath’s balls. It got the expected reaction.
“I’ve got a bigger chain in the trunk. Just right to fit around your ankles so I can drag you up and down this alley a few times, and then we’ll see who’s ready for the circus. I’ll make a lizard man out of you before sundown, you’ll look so scaly.” He grabbed onto an ear and dragged Heath over and slammed his head on top of the door. “Or you could apologize. It’s your choice.”
Heath burbled and sputtered, but squeaked it out all right.
Maddox peeked in across at me. “Does that cover it for you, Wyatt?”
“It’ll do. Thanks.”
Maddox yanked him away and pushed him aside. Skull, balls, and now his ear, Heath needed a third hand just to cover all the hurt.
“Have a good weekend,” Maddox told him. “And tell Scott I said for him to run his own errands from now on. If he sends you again, I’ll massacre you both faster than Sitting Bull on Custer.”
We were a couple blocks away, and he was in a happy mood again, when he asked if I was okay for a detour before we got something to eat, and I asked where.
“What I was saying earlier,” he told me. “I got a line on some magic mushrooms. Heavy on the magic, maybe.”
***
I THOUGHT HE’D BEEN LYING, just to shut the hippie up or string him along, since I already knew good and well that a couple nights ago—which is when Maddox said he’d learned about the shrooms—he’d been spending a night in jail for drag-racing out on Route 44.
Maddox didn’t see a contradiction. “Where do you think it was I got that line on them in the first place?”
“Oh. Okay. I guess that makes sense.”
“The trick to a successful night in the hoosegow is to keep the idiots talking while you don’t give up anything.”
He made this sound like a pearl of wisdom I should hang onto for future reference. I supposed if I kept hanging around with Maddox, sooner or later I’d need it.
Didn’t many people want me hanging around with them, but Maddox was always cool with it, now more than ever. His brother Hazel was the first friend I ever had, the two of us going back so long I don’t even remember meeting him. Hazel and I were tight before he knew better, that he was supposed to make fun of the same things about me that everybody else did, but by the time they tried to set him straight, it didn’t matter to him. Hazel took my crummiest years and made them better. Until he drew a bad number in the draft and got shipped over to Vietnam, so until he got back, I guess to Maddox I was the next best thing to having his kid brother around.
I didn’t care what he did or what all mischief he got up to. Maddox stuck up for me, and there’d never been a line of people waiting to do that.
From way back I had the lazy eye and the stutter, and because of the eye I could be clumsy. In school most everybody treated me like it was catching. And they were the nice ones. With the others, my spot in the pecking order was as one of the main tackling dummies for pecking practice. The day isn’t complete until you put the retard in his place. I mostly got over the stutter but the eye still did its own thing. By then, though, the damage was done and never going to get better. I could wear a big pair of Ray-Bans like Maddox’s and keep my mouth shut, and the past was all anybody else was ever going to see or hear.
As we tooled back down to our side of the tracks, he told me the story of the other night, how after the cops had shut down him and Hunter Sykes, doing their Snake & Mongoose routine out on 44, he’d been cooling his heels in his cell for a couple hours when they brought in a sad, jabbering case of humanity starting to come down off what sounded like a pretty bonkers high, and deposited him in the next cell.
“Jail’s just like study hall,” Maddox told me, “only your neighbor has better stories.”
The guy had gobbled a few mushrooms earlier, and by half past nine, the cops had been called to come scoop him off the floor of the Voodoo Mama Lounge. He’d taken up permanent residence down there, but not like your average passed-out drunk. No, he was busily engaged in being an active weirdo, pressed out as flat on the wood as he could get, heaving and humping and splorching along through the night’s swamp of spilled drinks, trying to climb up people’s legs and telling anybody who’d listen, “I’m a blob! I’m a blob!”
“Johnny Law assumed he was hopped up on goofballs and let it go at that, but I got the straight skinny out of him. It was homegrown he was on.”
“Was he the one who grew it?”
Maddox shook his head. “Nah. He just helped himself.”
He drove us to where the southernmost edge of town petered out toward the river bottoms. The air always felt wetter and heavier down here than anywhere else around, and smelled like mud, and two minutes in you couldn’t help but break an extra sweat to flush the mucky feel back out of your skin. He pulled us up to a peeling bungalow set in a cluster of old trees that looked like they’d been gagging on the air for the past two hundred years.
“This is where he said he got the mushrooms.” Maddox shut down the engine. “You know Sheena Halliday? She waitresses at the Voodoo.”
“How would I? I’m not old enough to go in there yet, you know that.”
Maddox sighed. “We gotta get you a fake I.D., that’s all there is to it.”
He leaned on the horn to announce himself, then we got out and weren’t three steps away from the car when what had to be Sheena barged out through the bungalow’s front door. She was the realest unreal thing I’d ever seen, in a leopard print skirt and high heels and a busy lime green top and hair as red as anger piling around onto one shoulder. If they all dressed like that at the Voodoo Mama Lounge, I couldn’t get that fake I.D. fast enough.
“Was hoping to talk some business,” Maddox said.
“Could you pick a less terrible time? My shift starts in thirty.”
“How about Erik? Is he here?”
She hesitated just enough for the silence to catch my ear the wrong way. “Erik’s not seeing company right now.”
Maddox must have noticed it too. “He was seeing company a couple days ago, for no good reason at all, it sounded like. At least I got a reason.”
“Who? Who was here?” She looked suspicious now.
“They call him Trenchfoot Tommy—you know who I mean?”
“Oh, god. He was here? Was this before they hauled his loser ass in?”
“Right. He said he came over in the afternoon to play something he called ‘booper balls.’” Maddox wasn’t the type to go uncomfortable and shuffle his feet, but now he did. “I, uh . . . I don’t know what that meant and didn’t want to ask.”
Sheena nodded like she knew anyway, and didn’t like any of it. “Pong. It’s this stupid new game that connects to the TV. Like ping-pong, but on the screen. It makes a boop sound. It’s fun for about two minutes unless you’re brain dead.”
Maddox and Sheena looked at each other for a second, then they both just nodded. Yup. Tommy.
“What else did he tell you?”
Maddox gave me a tap on the elbow and leaned in close enough to mutter, “Flash some greenbacks.” So I held up a shy fistful of everything we’d collected from the hippies and the frat boys.
“It was more what he implied. That there might be an opportunity here for some mutual benefit. Supply and demand, and all.” Maddox poked me to raise my hand a little higher. “I figure you have a sweet little crop of something or other growing out back. This is a good place for it. I could always swing back by when you’re not here, but I don’t want to be that way. I may be a dirtbag, but I’m no thief.”
Eyeing the cash, Sheena gave her head a big dramatic toss and whirled around with an impatient wave for us to follow. “Then get yourselves inside, you idiots.”
You could see the bluish glow of the TV at the windows, and in the living room it was the only light at all, if you didn’t count the big purple lava lamp doing its slow motion churning along one wall on a table next to a bong. The log stretched out on the couch, facing the big console TV, must have been Erik.
“There he is, if you can get much of a rise out of him,” she said.
Maddox stepped up to say hello, then jumped straight back with the loudest “Holy Jesus!” I ever heard leave him.
Sheena stood with her arms crossed. “There’s your sweet little crop of something or other. You still want to talk business?”
I couldn’t see around Maddox yet, and wasn’t sure I wanted to, then he got brave again and crept a little closer.
“He just lays around like that all day. And night. Twenty-four-seven, just about. It’s been weeks since he’s come to bed.”
Maddox looked up. “Let me be the first to say that’s a crying shame.”
Sheena snorted a cute little laugh. “You’re not the first, and not yet, it isn’t. If you want to know the truth . . . ” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I kinda like him better this way.”
Maddox glanced over his shoulder at me, still hanging back near the door. “Get your bony butt up here, Wyatt. I bet you pay closer attention in science class than I ever did.”
Sheena looked at me with camaraderie and my heart melted down into my shoes. “That’s a low bar.” She hitched her thumb at Maddox. “He never showed his face in science class at all.”
Maddox put his hand on my shoulder and steered me the rest of the way toward the couch. “What do you think?”
What did I think? What was I supposed to think? I think I would rather have been back in the Dodge topping 100 m.p.h. with the speakers thumping Duane Eddy so hard they were about to tear themselves off the rear deck. But no, instead he had me looking down at a long, skinny guy stretched out watching I Was a Teenage Werewolf on TV, with glazed eyes and mushrooms growing from his skin. They were a blue-gray color, speckled with purple spots . . . big fat ones popping from his neck and down his chest and belly, between the sides of his open shirt, and a bunch more little ones across his forehead like a fresh outbreak of zits. He had a few more on his cheeks, but not so many they got in the way of his eyes. I didn’t want to know what things looked like under the rest of his clothes.
Maddox leaned in close to my ear. “That’s not normal, right?”
“What are you asking me for? I’m not the one who works in a pharmacy!” I looked over at the movie on TV, at the werewolf in a varsity letter jacket. Yeah, people bug me too, Tony. “Maybe it’s normal for him.”
“It started last week,” Sheena said. “I came out here one morning, ready to get coffee going, and he was like this.”
“No doctors? No trip to the emergency room?”
“He said he was feeling fine. Look, he hasn’t worked in almost a year. I hardly notice the difference. I don’t think he does either.” She jabbed at the TV screen. “I bet he’s watched this three times the past month alone. They run the same spookshows over and over, and every time one comes on again, you’d think it was the first, he’s so fixated.”
Maddox slipped right up between the couch and the coffee table. He clicked open his switchblade, then scraped at one of the mushrooms on Erik’s chest. After a moment of working it, it popped free and tumbled to the cushion next to some Cheetos. He speared it with the tip of the knife and held it up for inspection.
Erik’s eyes finally left the TV and tracked us, then he broke into a hazy smile. If he wondered who I was, he didn’t show it. “Hey, man. When did you guys get here?”
“A few minutes ago, is all.” Maddox held the mushroom out and down, to make sure Erik saw it. “This may be a delicate question, but you do know about these, right?”
Erik processed things slowly, but it all got through eventually. “Sure. It’s kind of weird, but . . . it’s no big deal.”
“These don’t hurt?”
“I don’t even remember they’re there half the time.”
Maddox popped off another one. “How about now?”
Erik only giggled. “That tickles!”
“So you’re not worried about this?”
Erik just shrugged. “I figure it’s just how I sweat now.”
“Are these the only ones there are, or . . . ”
“No, they keep coming. I broke some off and put a couple bags of them in the icebox the other day.”
“Good man. Sorry to interrupt,” Maddox said, then stepped back and turned to Sheena again. “Honestly, I don’t see as there’s a problem either. You got the best of both worlds here, you know. If you’d like for him to start earning again, I don’t think he has to do a thing different than what he is now.” Maddox held up the shroom on the knife point again. “There should be a solid market for these, if Trenchfoot Tommy’s reaction was anything to judge by.”
Sheena only just now got it. “You’re telling me that’s what wigged him out the other night?” She looked like she was about to gag.
“You’d be providing a valuable commodity—look at it that way. A lot of these dope fiends and hopheads, what they put inside them, nobody even knows where it comes from, or if it’s purely what it’s supposed to be. With this, at least we know.”
Sheena stood tapping her toe against the floor while looking up at the ceiling. “Why can’t people just get drunk anymore? Drunks leave tips.” Then she looked us both in the eye. “Okay. If you can sell them, you’re welcome to them. Just keep them from getting anywhere near the Voodoo again, or somebody’s balls are getting cut off.”
I laughed, until she showed us the scissors.
***
NEXT DAY, MADDOX MADE some calls that made some hippies happy, then we made the run back up to the north side and met in the park to make them even happier. The one who’d asked about mushrooms the day before had brought friends, and they’d all brought money, so I figured I was happy too and just didn’t know it.
One of them, so hairy there wasn’t much of his actual face to see, held his baggie to the sky and gave it a good eyeballing. “They’re pretty. But these don’t look anything like psilocybin shrooms.”
Maddox held out his hand for cash or return. “That’s part of the magic, Sasquatch. You want ’em or not?”
Of course he wanted them. They all wanted them.
Once the transactions were concluded, Maddox called over their ringleader with the droopy moustache. “Are you guys planning on sticking around here in the park while you take them . . . commune with nature, that kind of thing? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
He grinned like he’d never heard a better idea. “That’s our bag, man.”
“Then live long and prosper. Or whatever else it is you do.”
We watched as they trailed away from the fountain and off among the trees, then Maddox fired up the Dodge and found another spot to park, close enough to still keep an eye on them but far enough away we didn’t have to hear the clash of acoustic guitars and bongos.
“Are you worried the mushrooms aren’t any good?” I asked. “Is that it?”
He unrolled his pack of cigarettes from the sleeve of his T-shirt and lit up a fresh one. “These walking stinkbombs would get high off them no matter what. But I’ve got a feeling there’s something to them. I just want to put out a test batch and see what it is.”
I held up one of the remaining baggies to do some eyeballing of my own. “How do you think they work? Science class or not, I can’t even guess.”
“Now that I’ve had time to think about it . . . ? Well, back at Sheena and Erik’s, you saw the bong. Guaranteed there’s a lot more there you didn’t see. I think he’s hit it all so hard for so long that it’s built up inside him and now it’s coming back out of him however it can. So it’s just as well he’s not boning Sheena these days. Can you imagine her knocked up from him now? That’s one baby who’d be doing good to pop out with nothing worse than two heads.”
Which made me wonder anew. I’d never blamed my parents for the lazy eye and the stutter, but then, how much did I know about their habits before they had me? It wasn’t like I’d never caught them in lies before. Maybe all that clean, virtuous living they yapped about at me was more of the same.
And I couldn’t take my eyes off the shrooms. I hadn’t even eaten one, yet they still seemed to pulsate and dance. Even an inexperienced dork like me knew that, when it came to weed dealers and pill pushers, you had to be a mighty stupid one to get high on your own supply. But the longer we sat and I looked at these, the easier it got for me to forget about their growing medium, because they looked like most any other normal dirt-grown mushrooms, only prettier, and to wonder what would it feel like, just a few, for just a while—?
Maddox snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “You best not be thinking what it looks like you’re thinking.”
“You’re not tempted? Not even a little bit?”
“You pick your poison, and that’s not mine. If they’re going to scrape me off the Voodoo Mama Lounge’s floor, let it be because I’m puking on someone’s shoes, not because I’m trying to eat them.” Then he sighed and dialed it down. “I used to not mind a puff of reefer every now and then, but the hippies stole it away from the jazz cats. It doesn’t have the same appeal anymore. The only thing I’ll tolerate for myself is speed, and that’s mainly because there’s times you need to fit thirty-six hours into a twenty-four hour day. The rest of it is there’s a heritage to it.” He reached down to give the eight-track player a gentle pat. “All this righteous musicality I’m honored to introduce you to, most of what you’re listening to is the pure, headlong, drive-it-over-a-cliff sound of Benzedrine in action.”
“No joke? I didn’t know things were like that back then.”
“You’ve just got yourself a watered-down view of history. Fuck American Graffiti. Fuck Grease. And fuck Happy Days twice.”
He flicked his butt out the window and fired up a fresh smoke.
“You think Elvis got his break at Sun Studios because the guys there were touched by the fact he wanted to record a gospel song for his mama? Like hell they were. Nobody took him seriously until he started bringing in bottles of mama’s diet pills. Then he seemed like somebody worth keeping around.”
Maddox shook his head with great sadness.
“Seen him lately? He should’ve just stuck with the speed.”
So we sat and whiled away the afternoon, and every so often we’d take a stroll and watch the hippies frolic among the trees. So far, so good. A little later, as evening settled over us, that’s when most of them began to run around looking a lot more agitated, and snarl and howl and fight each other, and as far as Maddox was concerned, this was a million times better.
***
I THOUGHT CRAZED HIPPIES were just something from the movies, like in I Drink Your Blood that double-featured with I Eat Your Skin at the drive-in theater a few years earlier. Which I only got to see because the Dodge Coronet had such a big trunk that it could’ve fit four of Hazel and me when Maddox snuck us in, with room left over for a giant bag of popcorn. But those were Satan-worshipping hippies who got rabies from infected meat pies. I would really have liked for that to be true, but it didn’t match up with how I’d seen the real ones out in the wild. They seemed pretty docile all around.
So curiosity got the better of me. Two plus two equals . . . what, here, exactly?
Erik had been watching a lot of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and next thing you know we had a pack of shroom-gobbling hippies baying at the moon. But what about Trenchfoot Tommy? Oozing around the Voodoo Lounge’s floor trying to engulf people from the ankles up, calling out how he was a blob . . . suppose he wasn’t just any blob. Suppose he thought he was the Blob.
I opened up the TV Guide for earlier in the week before Mom could pitch it out, and started flipping through the pages, and there it was:
THE BLOB (1958). Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut. A shapeless creature from another world lands on Earth and gets bigger with every meal.
Open and shut, your honor.
I brought my findings to Maddox, showing him right there in the TV Guide, and told him how it may not have been the reefer and who knows what else coming back out of Erik. Or at least not exclusively. The real mojo was in the movies. I knew that much from growing up with them, my best place to go to get lost. They were my rock to hang onto, and the strength to do it. Where Maddox had his way-back music, I had movies. Sometimes they were all that got me from one day to the next, or through the weekend before the start of a new school week. When you’re the resident human piñata, there’s nothing a TV or theater screen can show you that’s more horrifying than the idea of another Monday morning.
I’ll take a werewolf or a rabid hippie or a flesh-eating zombie any day before I ever take a second-string football player looking to entertain his buddies for the next five minutes. Nobody has to convince me of the power of movies.
So it seemed like a sound theory to me: Erik lying back on that sofa for the best part of a year, soaking in the TV’s blue glow 24/7, and the area where they lived was dank anyway, and the air probably lousy with spores . . . something was bound to mix and mutate.
“Interesting,” was about all Maddox had to say about it. “You could be onto something.”
I wasn’t sure how I expected him to react. Me, I was thrilled he took it seriously.
“I wonder what else he’s been watching lately.” Maddox grinned like he’d been watching too many movies himself, nothing but devils and rogues. “You want to find out? Give everybody up there one last blowout for the weekend?”
“You don’t think they’ve had enough for this one?”
“As I see it, it’d be doing them a favor. Did you hear them last night? They sounded more alive in one night than I’ve seen them in two years. They need more of that, don’t you think? Life is more than rainbows and tree-hugging.”
When we cruised back down to Erik and Sheena’s, she wasn’t any happier to see us this time than she’d been the first, not until I handed over their cut of the sales. She was out of her Voodoo garb now, in cutoff jean shorts and a halter top, and when she gave me a bouncy hug, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for her short of murder, and that was still on the table.
“And people are actually buying this?” She hadn’t yet moved beyond disbelief. “They really are getting high off this?”
“You on-shift tonight?” Maddox asked.
“No, thank god.”
“Then come with us and see for yourself.”
She was right on the verge of saying no, I could tell, that she’d seen all of it she wanted to the other night, when Trenchfoot Tommy blobbed out on the floor. But then she looked around, caught between the purple light of the lava lamp and the blue TV glow of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and something else came over her. Like she maybe started to get the idea that automatically saying no to too many weird things was how she’d landed here, in a neighborhood that smelled of mildew with a boyfriend so inert that mushrooms were growing on him.
If the weird is going to take over your life anyway, you might as well go out and find it first, so you have some control over the situation.
“You know, I think I will,” she said.
Ten minutes of harvesting, and we were back on the road.
***
I LEARNED SOMETHING NEW that day: If you have a half-price sale, even people who wouldn’t normally buy something like magic mushrooms get to thinking, well, why not? The hippies definitely didn’t need convincing. Quite a few of the vegetarians even mentioned that the previous batch had given them a new appreciation for meat. Next, after we found the Sigma Chi house and sought out Heath from the other day, with Maddox claiming to be bringing a peace offering, we got to be pretty popular along Fraternity Row, too. They wouldn’t want to know us tomorrow, but today we were gold.
After that it was just a matter of going to the park and waiting for the show to begin.
As the sun started to dip low, it was like a drive-in movie come to life around us, the biggest monster mash ever. We heard it before we saw anything, with the howls of more born-again werewolves rising in the distance. After that it was all moms grabbing their kids off the swings, and boyfriends and girlfriends running for cover. As the park began to fill up and be overrun, you could chart Erik’s viewing habits and tell who’d ingested what by the way they moved. The werewolves were the most agitated and erratic, and the only ones who went up into the trees after the squirrels. The vampires skulked and tried to bite. The Frankenstein monsters blundered along with a low frustration tolerance, slamming into things and knocking them over. The mummies, they more or less just plodded. Then there were the ones who scurried around on all contorted fours, like giant ants, and worked together in teams to go after their quarry. They’d scuttle up on the roofs of cars and lift their heads for a better overview, and you could almost see antennae twitch before they scampered on their way again.
“This may be getting out of hand,” Sheena said.
“In this dead-ass town?” Maddox said. “Something needs to.”
After a time, he kept the Dodge in gear and kept us on the move, motoring from one vantage point to the next as the hubbub became a rolling wave through town. Any six men could overturn a car, I remembered one of the characters telling another in Night of the Living Dead, and where zombies were concerned that may have been true, but seeing our human ants scale the sides of buildings was a display of strength on an altogether different level.
When the Greeks showed up, though, that’s when it all went to hell in a hurry, a sweaty tide of screaming frat boys and fire sweeping in from the opposite direction. It only made sense in hindsight. If you’re going to have monsters on the loose, sooner or later you’re going to have a mob.
“What are they carrying?” Sheena asked. “Where did they get all of those in such a hurry?”
In my whole life, I’d never seen Maddox mortified. Not until now.
“Tiki torches,” he said. “Leave it to these smug assholes to get everything wrong.”
They’re pretty much universal laws: Monsters run from fire. And mobs, once they’re stoked, aren’t going to be satisfied until they burn something. Really, though . . . did they have to start by torching the Piggly Wiggly? I guess they did. I tend to think that, under threat and under the influence, a herd of otherwise harmless hopheads and shroom-gobblers are going to take shelter where they instinctively feel safest . . . and the place with the most munchies was it.
Once the smoke started to billow, they scattered, and so did the loudmouthed guys with the torches, in pursuit. One fire became four, turned into eight, and within half an hour, the night was full of red lights and sirens, and you couldn’t see the moon for all the smoke, and three blocks of the campus-adjacent downtown was either burning or had its front windows smashed in. And the one thing definitely looked to be true: Any six men could overturn a car.
But not ours. Any time anyone got too close, Maddox jumped out whirling the bicycle chain to drive them away. Which we should’ve done for real, but the three of us felt like we had an obligation to see it through, to bear witness to this chaos we’d set in motion, as it whirled toward its blazing zenith.
The downtown bell tower clock was out of the danger zone, and by the time it bonged midnight, we were scuffing and scraping along a sidewalk full of ash and grit, taking it all in, while the fire crews kept busy hosing things down a block ahead of us.
“You know I never meant for this dealing thing to be permanent,” Maddox said. “I always told you, as soon as I get my grubstake together, it’s shit through a goose time for me, I’ll be so gone-daddy-gone.”
This was true. He’d been talking about his grubstake for years. Either it had to be sizeable enough by now to get him anywhere he wanted, or it was all talk and no cash. Either way, this time he meant it for real.
“Tell me you’ve got room for three,” Sheena said.
“You’ve seen that beast I drive. I’ve got room for four, if it comes to it.”
A couple minutes later he said he had an idea, and slipped through the smashed glass storefront for Featherstone TV & Appliance. Another couple minutes and he was out again, lugging a little portable television, a floor demo plucked off a shelf.
“It runs off batteries,” he said. “We can use that.”
I didn’t move. Maddox may have been a dirtbag, and now maybe an arsonist by proxy, but he had standards. The stutter was coming on, the way it still did when things mattered most, so I battled through until I got it out: “I thought you weren’t a thief.”
First mortified, now sheepish. Tonight was full of firsts.
“You’re right. Hold this,” he said, and stuck the TV in my hands while he dug in his pocket for a wad of cash, and ducked back inside.
***
WHEN THE SUN ROSE on the north side of town, they were still raking through the ashes when the three of us southsiders finished packing.
Sometimes all it takes is a whisper in your ear to tell you it’s time to move on, that your future lies down a road you won’t recognize until you’re on it. Other times, it takes a fire under your ass. Maybe we’d all three been hearing the whisper for a while, and ignored it until the heat came.
We picked up Sheena last, because the logistics made sense that way. Then we stood around outside under the sky and the wet, heavy trees, the world so quiet we could hear the rushing of the brown river water a block away.
“If I never smell mud and wood rot again, or feel some drunk’s hand trying to get up my skirt, it’ll still be too soon,” Sheena said, then got in the car while Maddox and I hung back to wrap things up out here.
We looked down into the trunk. Maddox had rigged the portable TV to an aerial on the car, and we had lots of batteries, so it seemed like the arrangement would do for now.
“You hear about this new thing they’re coming up with in Japan?” he said. “It’s called a VCR. Video Cassette Recorder. Anything you want to see, anytime, anywhere, it’ll be on the tape. You just load it in and press play.”
“Wow. He’ll like that.” The existence of such ingenuity made me smile. “Go on, get the motor started, I’ll finish up.”
If, back in our drive-in sneaking days, the Dodge’s trunk could’ve held four of Hazel and me, it meant Erik had all the room he could ever need. I reached up and took hold of the trunk lid.
“Do you need anything else before we get going?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer, didn’t even look at me, just smiled a slow, hazy smile, like he’d heard me from somewhere down by the river. He was good. He had everything he needed.
Just before I shut the lid on him and the blue glow, I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then popped a couple growths as big as drawer knobs off his forehead and gobbled them down quick as I could.
We were somewhere around the county line on the edge of tomorrow when the shrooms began to take hold. Link Wray was tearing it up on the speakers and Maddox was drumming on the steering wheel and Sheena’s hair was streaming in the wind and I couldn’t believe how my hips were wanting to move.
How ’bout that Erik? Somewhere into the mix he’d thrown an Elvis movie or two. And the road ahead may have been winding, but for a kid with a lazy eye, I was seeing straighter than ever.
Called “a writer of spectacularly unflinching gifts” by no less than Peter Straub, BRIAN HODGE is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made thirteen novels, around 130 shorter works, five full-length collections, and one soundtrack album. His novella, “The Same Deep Waters as You,” was recently optioned by a London-based production company for development as a TV series.
He lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect through his web site (www.brianhodge.net), Twitter (@BHodgeAuthor), or Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).