“Okay. So that’s part one of this tale of mine here. Part two is, there’s an ad on the TV—we got the TV on while we’re telling these stories—this ad for this new kind of PerFormula, Stumbler. Remember that one? It flopped. They don’t sell it anymore. It was boring as shit. Weak soup, Stumbler. Curio just kinda has shitty motor control. The best thing you could do with it, as I remember, was, you’d leave the room a little while, and then pop back into the room, all smiley and over-happy to see your cure, probably playing whatever version of peekaboo you mighta taught it, and as it runs toward you, so excited, to see you so excited, it…trips. Or whatever. Falls off a table, maybe, and painsings. Anyway, the Curios in the Stumbler ad, they looked, what? They looked banced. Ninety-nine sheets to the wind on the wall. Cures looked fucked-up. And I said so. To Burnsy. And given the conversation we’d just had about my maybe getting slightly pleasantly high on catnip and Burnsy’s uncle’s Dalmatian’s getting unpleasantly high on heroin, we thought: ‘It’s weird we never tried to dose ourselves with PerFormula.’ So we went to the store, bought a bunch of Stumbler, and…drank it.”
“That didn’t work, did it?” says the woman, offscreen.
“Of course it didn’t work! But did it work’s not the point. The point is the seed was planted, and we were a couple of blindly faithful, rabidly tenacious, and bored kinda-rich kids. We spent the next few weeks doing all sorts of stuff with different kinds of PerFormulae. We did everything but injected them really—we were afraid of needles, you know? There was Burnsy’s cousin the BMXer overdosed to death, and also we were just naturally squeamish. No fans of blood. But we’d drink them, of course, the PerFormulae I’m saying, and we’d, you know, pour them onto pans til they dried out, scrape ’em off the pans, toot the powder, smoke it, try to mix it up like crack with ammonia, with baking soda, smoke that when the bind took…Finally, you know, I guess we’d tried all the different kinds of PerFormulae we could get our hands on, in all the different ways we could think to like get them inside us shy of needles, and we thought: ‘Shit, all this research, we’re working too hard.’ And we went out and bought a couple microdots—that’s a cute little like Pez-colored candy-looking pebble of LSD, you know? Mixed with speed in this case.
“And there we were again, at the house, bored, waiting for these microdots to kick in, when Burnsy starts saying about how he heard that acid stays in your system forever, that you never get rid of it, and that that’s how come people can have LSD flashbacks. Cause the acid’s stored in you, and something, some kind of stress or something makes it squirt out and then you’re high all over again. Now, the thing that’s interesting about that is this: there’s no such thing. There’s no LSD flashbacks. That’s propaganda to keep the kiddies off drugs. If you freak out on acid, then maybe the next time you freak out about something while you’re sober it kinda reminds you of that time you freaked out on acid, and you think, ‘Shit, I’m having a flashback,’ but except that’s just the propaganda you swallowed back in childhood like fucking with you. What you’re having is a plain old regular panic attack. It reminds you of the time you had your bad acid trip because all a bad acid trip is is having a panic attack while being on acid. I didn’t know that at the time, though. At the time, I’d heard the same rumor about LSD staying in your system forever, too, and what’s more I’d heard that it stayed specifically in your bone marrow. I said so to Burnsy and he said he thought that yeah, that seemed true, but he didn’t quite know why it seemed true, just that, when I said it to him, that bit about the bone marrow, my voice had taken on a certain quality of like, Walter Kronkite–type authority. It had resonance my voice, and firmness, Burnsy said. My voice was like the voice you hear talking over old WWII newsreel footage. It was, and I am quoting directly here: my voice, according to Burnsy, was ‘virtually fucking monochrome in its tonal properties of all-time wisdom and goddamn authority.’ And when he said that about my voice, and I realized that I understood exactly what he meant, I quickly concluded that we were, indeed, feeling those microdots come on, and I wrote down Burnsy’s quote in my little notebook I had in my pocket because back then I was in a phase of thinking I was gonna be the next Kerouac or Bukowski or even the next Tom Robbins or something, and we went for a walk on the beach I’ll be damned if I remember as anything but sunlit laughter and mushy gushy warm insides.
“Next morning, though, I’ve had a fitful sleep and I’ve got real achy bones from how the speed in the microdot just had me clenched up, you know? And I think: bones, these bones hurt, bones, bones—marrow! And my mind kinda wanders, and I say this thought out loud to Burnsy, who’s passed out on the couch opposite the one I’m passed out on. I say: ‘Dude!’ I say, ‘Buh-ro! What about when the fuckers get the grievies!’ And Burnsy, he knows just what I mean. And what I mean, of course, is: there’s gotta be chemicals, like heavy druglike chemicals going on inside the cure when it doesn’t get your body heat. I mean that’s gotta be what gets them acting so sadlike and looking so desperate and eventually auto-deactivating, right? Chemicals. And maybe we could get high on those chemicals. The autodacting chemicals. Because like sure, the PerFormulae don’t get us high, but they gotta be pretty weak stuff compared to the grievy chemicals, right? Because the grievy chemicals end up ending the cure.
“And so we proceed to have this conversation, Burnsy and I, which is part three of our story, here. And the conversation goes something like me saying, ‘The Dalmatian didn’t seem to like heroin, a drug people do like, and yet the Dalmatian was definitely affected by heroin. Maybe what hurts the cure will feel good to us,’ and Burnsy saying, ‘Totally, Woof, totally. And but the only thing is, though, we’ve, like, overloaded by mouth on grieving cures and we didn’t get high, so.’ And then me saying, ‘Yeah, but we never OBM’d on a cure that grieved all the way. I bet no one has! Except for some kind of weird sickos or something who we’d never meet anyway. And maybe it’s gotta grieve all the way to auto-deactivation before the chemical that would get us high is in a large enough proportion to our bodies to get us high or whatever.’ ‘Or maybe,’ Burnsy says, ‘it’s that there’s the grievy chemical that mixes with some other chemical in their system, like a hormone or something, and it makes a third chemical that makes the cure autodact, and it’s that third chemical that would get us high.’
“So we put a couple cures in a shoebox with some pellets and water in it, and a few days later, when we stop hearing their painsongs, we open the shoebox, find them autodacted, next to some marbles, and swallow them down, a little gagging-like, cause they’re all, you know, cold.”
“And that worked a little or what?” says the woman offscreen.
“Hell no it didn’t work! And we were in the dumps. A couple of disappointed would-be chemical revolutionaries. But like I said before, we were blindly faithful and rabidly tenacious, and, the following morning, when I did my morning two—pardon me for this part, but it’s central to the story—when I did my morning two, I saw a couple little like, you know, white little bone-white pieces in there. Bone-white pieces of bone. Looked like they might be those little discs in their spines or whatever. Maybe a heel bone. An elbow bone. You know. Nothing new there. I’d overloaded by mouth more than a couple times, and that’s just what happens, as I’m sure you know, though not, of course, via firsthand experience, you being a beautiful woman and all, eye eee a person who has never even once in her whole gorgeous life dropped herself a deuce, be it morning, noon, or night time, heh heh. So yeah, that’s just what happens: some of those bones, you just don’t digest. But this discovery, or I guess, rediscovery, was, not to get all punny, but it marked the real like holy shit moment for me. For us. For me and the Burns. I threw the soiled toilet tissue I wiped with into the garbage can so as not to like occlude or obstruct the all-important gaze I would, after having thoroughly washed my hands thank-you-very-much, invite Burnsy to cast upon my morning two, and then I went and woke him up and made him go in there and look. We were good friends, me and him. He was a good sport. I mean, who else would indulge a request of that kind of…Goddamn it I miss that guy! I, well…