Wherein we explore Toy Joy, paranoia rears its ugly head, and things fall apart.
Before us was Toy Joy, bathed in a holy light, the destination of our pilgrimage. We three wise men had traveled across streets and realities far and wide, traversing a multitude of trying situations that our drug addled brains made far worse. Before us lay our goal, our destination, our holy land, the song, the sign, the alpha and omega of our desires. With only an endless moment spent gawking at its exterior, we rushed inside, like air sucked in through an open door. The door dinged as we made our entry.
Inside the toys very nearly jumped off the walls at us. Stuffed animals lined some of the shelves, so packed that taking just one down would start an avalanche of fake fur and plush that would bury lesser men. Even a dexterous step to the side would be a failure; the pile of stuffed animals next to you would provoke embarrassment as you mumbled something to the other patrons and staff as you fumbled to somehow try to get the animals back onto the shelf, effectively resetting the trap for some other unfortunate victim.
“I pity the fool!” came Mr. T’s iconic voice from behind me. I turned and saw Other Mike with a Mr. T sound box. With a small picture of the T himself on it, there were 8 buttons of different quotes from Mr. T. Unfortunately, he ignored the other 7 buttons and continued jamming on that one button.
“I pity the fool!”
“I pity the fool!”
“I pity the fool!”
I clutched my head and groaned in anguish like Chewbacca being tortured in Cloud City. I slapped the sound box out of his hands. He turned and gave me a dude-what-the-fuck look. I cocked my head and threw up my hands at his idiocy.
Basquiat came around the corner. “Hey guys, look at this, I just found a Mr. T toy! It has all of his popular sayings…”
Other Mike and I scattered to the winds. I found myself in the Japanese room of Toy Joy. While there were little strange Japanese things here and there, they seemed to concentrate most of it in one room. You walked in and you were bombarded and enclosed in pure Japanese cuteness. It was as if there was a little Japanese girl in the corner eternally squealing, “KAWAI!”
One entire wall was taken up by Hello Kitty merchandising. HK was interspersed throughout the whole room, but one entire wall had Hello Kitty-branded objects. Backpacks, dresses, hats, ears, lunchboxes, decorative flowers, dog leashes, cat leashes, surface-to-air missiles, ritual implements, sex toys, poker visors, hash pipes, soccer balls, blue balls, chainsaws, black books of diabolical import – you name it, it was branded with Hello Kitty or one of the associated characters. I saw what must have been a homemade green sculpture of Cthulhu that someone had replaced the Old One’s ugly mug with the mouthless cuteness of Hello Kitty. The stars were indeed right.
While most Hello Kitty-aware individuals are aware there are other Sanrio characters in the Hello Kitty universe, they are not as often seen in-the-flesh as merchandise. But at Toy Joy, they were all represented. If you wanted anything of Chococat, from a backpack to bondage gear, you could find it here. If you wanted some gloomy object with Badtz-Maru’s frowning face stamped on it, you could find it, from anti-depressants to goth kid razor blades that would be a best seller in Hot Topic a few years hence.
But it was Keroppi that really struck me. The green frog friend of Hello Kitty, the love child of Super Mario Bros’s Hammer Brothers and a gigantic set of eyeballs that the underground knew merely as “Sally the Wonder Eyes”, Keroppi is cute to sober people and frightening to a drug soaked mind. A whole section of the wall was covered in his not-occurring-in-nature shade of green, his gigantic googly eyes staring into the souls of man, judging and damning all that he saw within. While the other merchandise had images of the characters, the Keroppi merchandise was Keroppi – from backpacks to lunchboxes, they were all the shape of Keroppi, his gigantic eyes staring their vacant stare. A whole army of Keroppi stared at me from that wall, not even the soothing white of mouthless Hello Kitty able to calm me. Unnerved, I left the Japanese room.
I found Other Mike and Basquiat in the main part of the store playing with toys. Other Mike held a Boxing Nun while Basquiat was using a Boxing Godzilla. Their little arms kept bopping each other in the face (snout for Godzilla), but there was no clear victor. In my mind I wondered what sort of world it was where one badass nun could take on Godzilla and fight him to a stalemate. I rummaged through the bin of toys next to them and put on my own boxing puppet, Boxing Abraham Lincoln. Joining in the fray, Boxing Lincoln began distributing punches to both the black-clad nun and the severely non-proportionate Godzilla. I wondered whether Godzilla had reduced in size or if through some Atomica-era procedure the badass nun and Abraham Lincoln had grown to Godzilla size to take on the green reptilian menace. I wondered how much more awesome a world it was where a fifty-foot Lincoln saved the world from Godzilla while dealing with the conflicted loyalties of a kungfu nun.
Somewhere during our play I noticed I was battling the Nun exclusively. I looked over and saw Godzilla and the controlling hand limp at Basquiat’s side. He was staring intently at the register area. I followed his glance and asked what’s up.
“She’s on the phone,” he said ominously.
“So?” I said. Behind me, I vaguely noticed Other Mike wandering off.
“Remember the Three Cookie story,” he said.
The Three Cookie story was part of our circle of friends folklore. It was a funny story when told by the right person. It involved two friends drugged out on acid that visited a Subway Restaurant for, among other things, three cookies. They were extremely fucked up and crazed, with hilarious results. However, there was a moral to this story: when you’re fucked up on drugs, retail/service industry workers are told to call the cops so they can come take you away. This was, of course, a completely false fact. Unless you are dangerous or refuse to leave, they’re not going to call the cops. They will just do their best to get you out of their store where you will then be not their problem. Calling the cops is a hassle for them and the cops. Everyone wants drugged out kids to just go somewhere else. But we were dumb college students and we didn’t know how the world worked, we just knew this story and thought it was true.
By mentioning the story, Basquiat was indicating that he thought the employee on the phone was calling the cops about us. I looked over to the girl on the phone. She was talking on the phone, but there was nothing suspicious about it. Of course, there was not anything not-suspicious about it, which would be exactly how I would act if I was trying to not be suspicious about calling the cops. She was also twenty feet away, so I’m not sure if she needed to be suspicious. I squinted and tried to look at her better, but then I wondered if I was now being suspicious, so I turned away.
“See?” said Basquiat, as if my reaction proved it all. “She’s calling about us. We need to get out of here.”
“She might not be calling about us,” I suggested.
“What else is she doing on the phone at… what the fuck time is it? At this time. In the dark. Who makes calls from a toy store at night? Shit, what is a toy store even doing open at this time? It’s a trap! A goddamn trap! It’s Them! They set this up to trap us!”
I quickly put a hand over his mouth to shut him up, which got me the uncomfortable spittle from his frothing ranting. I looked back and forth quickly to see how much of a disturbance he made. Right or not, he might be causing enough trouble that would get someone’s attention, and not the attention we might want.
“Be quiet,” I hissed. “We don’t know yet what’s going on. Maybe something, maybe not. Are you willing to be quiet?”
He nodded and I removed my hand.
“Whether I’m right or not, we should get out of here,” he said. He noticed my expression and then continued. “If I’m right, things are going to get bad real soon. If I’m wrong, nothing happens. You get to tell me I was wrong. But if it’s bad, it’s really bad. Is that a gamble you want?”
I admitted it was not a worthwhile gamble. I looked longingly over to the four foot wide replica of the Millennium Falcon in one corner of the store I hadn’t gotten to play with yet. One day, my friend, One day.
The next step was to find where Other Mike had disappeared off to. I suggested Basquiat check the Japanese room, because I’d be damned if I was going to encounter Keroppi again. I kept looking over my shoulder at the girl on the phone as I looked. Maybe she was just talking to her boyfriend or making plans after work. She kept making eye contact with me, which worried me. Of course, I kept looking at her as I stumbled around her store, so perhaps her attention was warranted.
It was I who found Other Mike. He was wearing a green frizzy clown wig, googley eyes, a fake nose, and a fake beard. I rolled my eyes.
“Take that crap off, we gotta go!” I said.
He looked at me and cocked his head, as if he didn’t recognize me or the words I’m saying.
“We have to go,” I said more slowly and firmly.
“Why?” he finally managed.
“Basquiat says Three Cookies.”
“Oh shit!” he said, quickly tearing off all the gear he was wearing and tossing it haphazardly in a bin. We walked to the front of the store and met up with Basquiat, who had just finished looking in the Japanese room. We nodded to each other, took a quick paranoid look at the cashier girl (still on the phone), and went out the door with the ringing of the bell.
We didn’t stop until we were half a block away in front of a pizza place. We caught our breath, unaware that we were running.
“That should be good enough,” said Basquiat, seemingly satisfied with half a block. I could still see Toy Joy and could walk back over there within a minute.
A car slowed to a halt next to us. Basquiat freaked out and stepped back a few. I quickly wondered if he was right to paranoid. The window lowered and a cute blonde girl with a blue streak in her hair stuck her head out.
“Hey, Other Mike! Is that you?”
“Yes?” said Other Mike, almost confused by his own answer. I marveled about the fact that it wasn’t just our circle of friends who called him Other Mike. Maybe it had caught on.
“We’re going to the lake tonight,” she said. “We’re going to just drink and party and then come back early tomorrow morning.” She paused and smiled to someone in the car, almost conspiratorially. “We have more girls than guys going and wouldn’t mind another guy coming.” She smiled broadly again and fanned her lashes. “Would you like to come?”
“Fuck yeah,” said Other Mike without even a pause. The back door opened for him immediately and he jumped in. The car sped away without a goodbye from Other Mike or the girl.
Basquiat and I stood there dumbfoundedly. “What just happened?” I asked.
“They know where we are!” decided Basquiat. “They’re picking us off one by one! They’ve got him now, we’re next!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “He’s probably going to get drunk and laid.”
“That’s what they want you to think!” He paused suddenly, his eyes widening in shock. He looked me up and down. “Wait, you’re with them, aren’t you? You’ve been with them since the start. Whenever I get close to knowing, you keep suggesting it’s not real. I can’t tell if you’re really my friend and just with me, or you’re a clever undercover agent!”
“What?” I said. It was less a question rather than a statement of complete and utter incredulous confusion.
“No, no more of it! Fuck you, you won’t find me!” He turned and ran off down an alley.
I stared at the alley for a long moment. “Goddamn it,” I finally said to myself.
It took a minute of standing there to realize my situation. I was alone standing in front of a pizza restaurant, nowhere near my dorm room and flying high on acid. I didn’t even want pizza.
This is where reality fell apart, this is where the story took an ugly turn. This is where everything went to shit. With two friends, I had some continuity to it all. While I strained to discern real things with them, I always had them and their reactions to test against. They stabilized me and my trip. If I were in a familiar and safe place, that would have also stabilized me. But I was suddenly far from home, alone, at night, on foot, with an onrush of cars and calamity.
I made my way towards my dorm, but I took a different route than we had taken here. Once we had actually reached our destination, another way back seemed quicker and more convenient. This took me down a few blocks, and eventually through campus. This route was not as well-lit and not as well travelled. I recall making my way through a dark forest of stone and wood, buildings and stairs. It wasn’t just this empty realm of darkness. A tripping mind abhors a vacuum, so I filled it with nightmare shapes and fears. Behind every bush lurked some malevolent darkness, in every vague whisper that carried over from some area I heard plots to hurt me.
Somehow I stumbled upon a strange scene. Three grad students were picking up a limp body and putting it in a van. Each of them wore surgical masks. Otherwise they were dressed in tee shirts like most students, but they were a few years older. Two went along their work, while the third paused and looked at me. He had his mask on the top of his head and was chewing gum. He watched me as I watched him. When they were done he gave me a wink and they drove off.
I somehow reached my dorm, but I don’t know how. I was not well versed in astronomy, so I could not navigate via the stars that streaked across the sky in dazzling patterns that I tried to watch even while avoiding the nightmares lurking behind every corner and avenue. I looked for my friends when I got back to the dorm, but found none. Later I found out they had gone to a club, but all I saw was a desolate emptiness of all my friends and full of nameless people I did not know, their vacant stares and meaningless conversations doing more to alienate me from the world.
I got in the elevator and waited twice the lifespan of the universe before it reached my floor. In every moment I was convinced that the elevator cable was going to collapse, sending me to my doom. A hopeful side had an idea that a second before that doom, I would be transported to a magical world that needed me to be their champion. That would be better than death, but all I wanted to do was climb into bed.
My roommate was not home so I climbed in bed without having to explain or engage in inane chatter, something my roommate excelled in on a daily basis. Sleep did not come. I tried putting on music, but I took no enjoyment from it. It was as if every note was discordant and uncomfortable, though intellectually I knew the songs sounded exactly the same as they had been every other time I listened to the album. The music brought me no comfort, nor did the bed. My shoulders were stiff, the music was sharp and the bed was rough.
I found myself staring at the walls, which was one of the worst parts of the experience. The longer I stared the more I saw hidden details I had never seen before. Written in glowing neon writing of blue, yellow, and pink, I saw dirty graffiti drawn in the style of Cracked or Mad Magazine. Caricatures of men and women doing nasty things to each other with speech bubbles of words I could not discern no matter how long I stared at them. I tried looking elsewhere. The graffiti was also on the other wall. I looked at my desk and discovered that in the wood grain pattern there was also hidden this graffiti.
I closed my eyes but found my mind couldn’t rest, my mind couldn’t stop. It ping-ponged around in my head, leaping from this to that, never rested, never safe. I begged for sleep, which my mind agreed to, but neither my mind could rest nor my body. I knew these were the effects of coming down from acid, but they had never been this bad, it had never been this terrible.
I tried putting on the most soothing music possible. Then I hid under the blankets, doing my best to block out the outside world and prevent me from looking at anything I shouldn’t. It was hours before sleep finally came. Agonizing hours. But I took to heart the thing I said as I shivered under the blankets, muttering to myself.
“Never do acid again, never do acid again, never acid again…”
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