Wherein there are chicken fingers.
The Drag, covered in lights and sound, hipsters and Drag rats, students and slackers, was a cornucopia for enhanced and garbled senses. However, it was not unknown or unfamiliar to us. As students, we spent a fair amount of our time on the Drag. It was dangerously off-campus, but at the same time close enough for a short walk. Things happened there, and even if they were the same old things for the Drag, they were new to us. Consequentially, a walk down the drag on drugs was a revisiting of familiar places.
After the church and the homeless, the next place we passed was the Church of Scientology. I’m not sure if it was by design that Scientology was right next to a Christian church. The Scientologists just had a store front and offices, so they paled next to the stone edifice of Christianity. In their favor, they were actually trying to recruit while the church stayed silent. Typically the Scientologists had a folding table in front of their storefront and offered personality tests. You took the test outside, but if you wanted results, they took you into the building, up an elevator, and sat you in a windowless room. More than a few adventurous friends who tried the test found themselves uncomfortable by the results process. After the test, there was explanation of Scientology, donations that could be made, etc. There was nothing untoward about the whole process, just everyone who had tried it always felt uncomfortable.
Next up was Insomnia. In college I spent far too big a chunk of my life in that place, especially freshman year. Insomnia was an aptly named twenty-four hour coffeehouse. There were others near campus, but Insomnia was one of the closest and the always-open quality was a huge draw for students. Its minimalist décor was not a draw. The walls were brown brick, the ceiling exposed beams and metal fans. The tables were simple glass and the chairs were profoundly uncomfortable metal chairs probably designed by some famous German designer we had never heard of. Many times we mused that the chairs were like that just so we wouldn’t spend many hours there. It didn’t work; having a place to hangout for many hours just for the price of a single coffee far outweighed the numbness of our butts.
As we approached Insomnia, I had the presence of mind to pickup the pace and usher my friends forward. We knew too many people that frequented Insomnia. Bumping into one of them in front of it could trap us in a time sink vortex without end – as we finished up talking to someone, another would appear entering or leaving, which would tie us up longer until someone else showed up. Hours later, we’d find ourselves sobering, the sun rising, and still there would be someone Basquiat knew that he swore he would need to talk to. And if we were sucked into the building itself, it would be Game Over. Insomnia was a whirlpool of lackadaisical slacking and impassivity that would destroy even the most active and eager. One did not leave Insomnia; no, you excused yourself to use the bathroom and ran… you ran until its claws got you and dragged you back in.
Next up was the first of the two arcades on the Drag, Le Fun. No one really know why someone needed to Frenchify “fun”, as the actual French word for fun is not “fun”. I guess someone might have decided that “Le” would make it sound classy and avant, but it was a video arcade – no one needed the place they played Street Fighter to be avant or classy, in fact typically those would work against it. Regardless, I stared at Le Fun with a certain longing. I could hear the sound of space aliens being attacked and the shouts of various Yoga Flames, my eyes saw the flash of lights, the dance of the words Game Over, and the dull grey of quarters put up against the screen. I heard the sound of Ms Pac Man, for some reason always the loudest and most recognizable sound of any arcade. Through the help of my friends I was yanked past, saving myself from endless hours watching other people play and the drug-fueled disappointed of me getting my ass kicked by some dude who always plays Akuma. Why did I pick Dan? Why must drugs make me pick Dan?
The drugs were kicking in overdrive by this point, and the rest of the drag was a whirlwind gloss of colors and trails, as we dodged around people like a river. I’m not sure if we walked too quickly or too slowly. I’m sure drunk or drugged students were no new phenomenon for the Drag. Our paranoia had left us for a time, and now we just rolled along like bubbles in a rambling stream. Our conversation wound down as the world roared around us, every sight a feast, every sound a discordant cacophony. Part of the experience was enjoying and examining the mutations on perceived reality that came up. A different part of the experience was trying to scrub off the additional reality to get down to what was really happening. This was important: we were out and about, and grasping the underlying reality below everything was important. When crossing the street, our lives depended on our ability to separate fact and fantasy.
Somehow we ended up at Burger King. I’m not sure how we had decided we were hungry or if we actually were, but we had entered Burger King. The Dark Lord of Stroganoff had faded from our minds under the weight of an acid-soaked reality thick with sweat, radiance, and cold fish-like limbs. I remember the grey blue décor lit by banks of yellowish lights. The Burger King was mostly empty; it must have been late evening by the time we had finally made it there.
We walked through the winding corral of dividers intended for organizing long lines even though there was nobody on line. I ran the flat of my hand along the tops of the dividers as I moved, enjoying the sensation. The cashier chuckled at the silliness of us doing this, clearly knowing we were on drugs even as we thought that was a secret. We got up to the front, stopping and staring up at the gigantic imposing board of the menu. There were so many… options. How could we know what to order?
My gaze drifted down to the cashier and I had a frantic moment where I couldn’t tell what was real and what was my crazy mind. I kept staring trying to differentiate. Though dressed in the requisite blue Burger King branded shirt and hat, the cashier was wearing makeup and painted nails. This was confusing, because everything else told me that our cashier was definitely male. The face, the proportions, everything said male. But I was also seeing eyeliner, lipstick, painted nails, large gaudy earrings. I blinked a few times, trying as I always did when I felt I was looking at augmented reality, as if mere disbelief and will would cause whatever I was hallucinating to fade away to leave cold, harsh reality. It didn’t work.
The cashier smiled back at me. I couldn’t tell if he understood my discomfort and was bold about his life choice or what. I considered asking my friends, but to talk about it in front of the cashier would be rude. I stayed quiet, but I had a profound disorientation to my reality.
Friends later confirmed that a transvestite worked at that Burger King, one even saying she knew him. I saw that cashier one other time at that Burger King, but I was also on drugs at the same time. Why did I only see him when on drugs? I went to that Burger King dozens of other times, but never saw him. But when on drugs, the most confusing possible cashier was always there. There’s nothing wrong with his life choice, it’s just disorienting when you’re already distrustful of what you’re seeing.
“What do we want?” said Other Mike out loud. It was met with silence and the rubbing of our chins as we looked at the menu.
The smiling cashier must have known what was up with us, or at least had an idea that we were somehow intoxicated.
“How about chicken fingers?” he suggested.
We three all turned and looked at each other, nodding. The idea had taken quick root. “Yeah, yeah, we want chicken fingers,” we said.
“Chicken fingers, please,” I said decisively.
“Three orders of chicken fingers?” asked the cashier.
I looked to Basquiat and Other Mike. Basquiat shook his head and Other Mike winced at the idea. This confirmed what I already thought.
“Nope, just one order,” I said.
“For the three of you?” asked the cashier.
“Yes,” I said, like it was the most natural thing in the world for three men to walk into a Burger King and order one small appetizer.
The cashier shook his head with a grin and we paid the bill. It was almost a comedy of errors as we searched our pockets for crumpled bills and coins. I’m sure one of us had a wallet with crisp bills, but none of that occurred to us as we scavenged among our pockets for three dollars and twenty seven cents in change. Triumphantly we put it down on the counter and our order was in. Instead of sitting down, we stood stupidly at the counter until our order was up.
We took our tray and walked to the far end of the restaurant by the windows. With clumsy, shaky hands we opened the cardboard container to reveal the chicken fingers and the bbq sauce container. Basquiat peeled the lid on the sauce container and the sweet, acrid smell of bbq sauce overwhelmed our senses.
We each grabbed one of the chicken fingers because we all knew that we wanted one –intellectually. Once that intellectual idea encountered reality, however, there was some confusion. We each held the chicken finger in two of our own non-chickeny fingers. We held it up in the air, examining it. Intellectual ideas aside, we weren’t sure what to do with the chicken fingers. We had the idea of hunger, but for the most part our stomachs were shut off due to the drugs. We wanted the experience of eating without any actual eating going on.
I took a tentative bite of the chicken. It was a small nibble. Have you ever given something to a cat that they never had before? They will take it from you, but then lay it on the floor. They’ll sniff for a moment, then take a very shallow bite to nibble and discover if they like it. This is the relationship the chicken finger and I had. I took a nibble. The taste of fried chicken was weird, dazzling my taste buds in the way something more like Skittles candy would. But then I swallowed. I could trace my entire alimentary canal from that one bite of chicken. Once it hit my stomach, I felt the awakening of something horrible, like the birth of some Eldar God that was writhing among my stomach acids until the stars were right.
Somehow I kept it under control and looked to my compatriots. By the expression on Other Mike’s face, he clearly had also tried eating a bite. No matter the sensations going on in the kettle of my stomach, they did not feel as bad as the discomfort I was reading on Other Mike’s face. Basquiat was still staring at his chicken finger, a combination of fascination and scientific curiosity on his face. I quickly advised him to put the chicken finger down and step away from the bbq sauce. He complied and so I felt I did not have to draw my gun and shoot him. It was only fifteen minutes later when we were back on the street that I realized I had no gun and chuckle at the impossibility of it.
On the street, Other Mike suddenly doubled over and threw up. Since he had nothing but a nibble of chicken finger in his stomach, he mostly just wretched for a moment. I persuaded my own stomach to stay where it was by looking to the sky. A dark night of purple clouds rolling across the sky grabbed my attention until Basquiat had helped Other Mike up.
We walked for a while longer through the dark night and a haze of strip malls and soon to be apocalyptia, a world falling apart as we watched it. People walked back and forth like soulless automatons, streaks of color and light piercing the world at strange angles. We walked like refugees who had escaped some dire literary prison through the fourth wall, now just seeking and searching for something we can’t recall why we ever wanted.
As if to answer the unasked question, the fog of confusion and darkness parted in front of us. As if illuminated in a ray of light, we saw it in front of us. Sketched out in lines of garish colors and kitchy words, Toy Joy was in front of us. I saw the name spelled out as if using tinker toys. I saw stickers of Hello Kitty, Japanese robots, wigs and Elvis. I saw the promise of weirdness and goofiness. I saw a place the crazy could go to make friends with insanity, standing in a place so weird that both sanity and insanity were warded off into a dead space where mind could just be. We were up to our gills in acid and tripping balls, but we had reached our destination.
If only it all hadn’t fallen to shit afterwards.
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