“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 nigh
t 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.
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