LSD - It's What's For Lunch... (An excerpt from "A Bunny Screaming")

I received the following message regarding my blog about fire ants: "Remind you to tell you about when I laid in the middle of a bed of red ants while photographing friends skydiving.. while I was on acid..." Now, the first sentence was intriguing - the second sentence catapaulted the statement to the level of "Classic - Genius".

Not that I have ever taken acid - I want to be on the record about that - however, I did write an amusing ancecdote that might have happened to someone else. Or it could be pure fiction. Or someone might have spiked someone's kamikaze, in which case, the acid would have been taken accidentally... Who knows, really? Enjoy...

We had procured some of the “dreaded Lysergic”—as George Harrison had referred to the drug—from a friend and deemed a sunny spring afternoon as the perfect time to enjoy a leisurely trip through the blue skies of psychedelia in suburban Scottsdale.

We took our tabs at lunch at the Red Robin at Los Arcos Mall and drank a couple of beers along with a couple of Finlandian Kamikazes, fetched up by our professional bartender, Forrest. Once we felt the tugging of the magic Lysergic, we left the Robin and wandered through the mall to the video arcade that abutted the Los Arcos Theater (where I had spent much of many of my summers in the sumptuous air conditioning, sitting through an afternoon’s worth of screenings of whatever double-feature happened to be gracing the screen, such as “The Poseidon Adventure”, playing with “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”—seen five times that summer, thank you).

We roamed the arcade, marveling at the visions on the screens of the games that lined the walls. We didn’t spend a penny and laughed and hooted and cried at the spectacular visions of the Lady Pac Man eating the docile, magnificently-colored dots that littered the screen in her path. Finally, the paranoia of being on an acid trip in a video arcade coupled with a man brandishing a nametag who suddenly saw fit to loom around every machine where we attempted to settle in for more marvelous animated glory made it uncomfortable to remain in the arcade. “I need space, man,” I said, not even realizing that I had used the word “man”, just like the hippies of a generation earlier—apparently, acid was the great equalizer

“Yeah,” Taggart agreed. “That dude with the horns and the purple forked tongue is kind of freaking me out…”

I glanced at the lurking name-tagged man, just in time to see his purple forked tongue shoot back between his sneering lips. “Sure,” I agreed. “Should we kill him before we go?”

Taggart considered this for a moment. “No, he’s harmless, I think—we are in no condition to make judgment otherwise…”

We walked out of the arcade and into the bright sunlight outside, which seemed to explode in ultra-vivid showers of red and gold. “It’s a nice day,” I smiled to the sun, which mumbled to me in what I could only figure was an ancient Aztec tongue as it attempted to scoop me into its glorious rays and carry my willing body to the heavens. I spread my arms for the flight.

“Yes,” Taggart said. “We need to keep moving…”

I frowned. “Are you sure?”

Taggart raised a hand and for a moment we both stared at its outline against the raining red and gold sunbursts. “Don’t question me,” he said. “We linger, we never come back…”

I nodded and brought my arms down to my side in a sweep of swirling, glittering afternoon gossamer. I smiled to the sun. “Maybe later…”

“Yes,” Taggart agreed. “Maybe later.

Just then, a voice called out. “Taggart!” We turned to face the sound, uncertain if a swift, bloody battle would be required, or simply evasion by particle dissemination.

“Fuck,” Taggart muttered. “It’s Jim and Tammy…”

“Make them go away,” I said, near panic.

Taggart nodded to me, his eyes spinning like colorful pinwheels, then turned to the intruders with a kind wave. “Hi!”

“What are you two doing?” Jim asked, a smile on his face. He was a classmate of ours, a year older than me—the same year as Taggart, and president of their graduating class. I liked him, practically idolized him—it would be a pity to have to eat his face.

“Nothing,” Taggart said. His smile twitched slightly and then in my mind continued to twitch over and over, like the needle of a phonograph hitting the end of the grooves again and again—to eternity. I wondered if Jim noticed. “Why?” Taggart asked, paranoia creeping into his voice in the form of a visible bluish shadow that hovered in the air above his head.

“We’re going to a movie,” Tammy said. She had been a cheerleader in high-school and she and Jim had been the dream couple of the decade. Rumor also had it that she had had more abortions before graduation than most of us had performed the act of sex, thanks to the combination of her uncanny fertility and Jim’s incredibly aggressive, Type-A spermatozoa. “Do you guys want to come?”

Taggart and I burst into laughter. Did we want to come? Was that some sort of joke? My mind shuddered at the thought of her great gigantic, fertile womb hungrily gobbling up all ejaculate within a six-mile radius. “No,” Taggart managed. “No, thank you….”

I smiled best I could and it felt as if I were stretching moleskin over a drumhead. “No… No thanks,” I reiterated and squealed a bit as their faces turned red and began to swell with boils that burst and left trails of puss on their ruddy cheeks.

“Are you okay?” Jim asked, staring at me with concern.

“Yep,” I said. “Aces, man…” I pulled at Taggart’s shirt, which snapped back at me with little, needle-sharp teeth. “We gotta go…”

“I know,” he said to me, panic creeping into his voice. He turned and waved at Tammy and Jim. “See ya!”

We ran away from the mall and I could still smell Tammy’s ravenous, insatiable womb sniffing the air for ejaculate and suddenly felt sorrier for Jim than anyone in the entire world. “Poor bastard,” I yelled to Taggart as we ran. “Yeah, imagine all those bats!” He shrieked with a gust of laughter. I giggled along with him as we made our way out of the parking lot onto the sidewalk, where we slowed to a walk.

“That was close,” Taggart said.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to concentrate on moving the flippers that had at some point replaced my feet in a normal walking motion. The flippers were stiff—apparently I hadn’t had to use them in a while.

“I used to live over here,” Taggart pointed. We wandered that way, my flippers growing more comfortable with the movement as we walked. My third and fourth arms were having no such luck, struggling with the shirt I had chosen to wear that only had two sleeves. We walked around South Scottsdale for a couple of hours, trading stories of our youth and sexual conquests, while weathering the Lysergic Storm best we could.

Eventually, we ended up at Eldorado Park at dusk and lay on the ground by the marshy lake where the birds lighted for the night in the reeds. Great, swirling black rivers of birds flew overhead and twisted and turned in the currents of the evening air, before landing in the reeds, forcing others to take to the air in sweeping flurries that continued downstream along the streams of the greenbelt to more hospitable quarters.

“It looks like a big, black river in the sky…” I said, marveling at the movement, as if one, of the birds that flew above us.

“Yeah, huh—freaky…” I noticed Taggart had bird shit on his shirt. I decided to say nothing in the hopes that the giant green worms that were crawling up his legs toward his torso just might eat the shit and be done with it.