There are a few pervasive rumors about the UT Campus.  Three in particular come to mind.

First, there is a small population of albino squirrels around the campus.  This part is not rumor, that’s fact.  The rumor or folklore is that if you see one of these rare but twitchily cute beasties right before an exam, you will get an A.  This rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else, but when stressed and freaked about an upcoming exam, you too might find yourself crouching by some bushes with some bread crusts from your sandwich making cooing noises for the rarest of all squirrels.

The second rumor is that there is a catacomb of steam tunnels running under and connecting the entire campus.  At first hearing, this doesn’t sound unreasonable.  Most large facilities have steam tunnels running under them which may connect two adjacent buildings so they can share boilers, waste channels, etc.  However, upon the realization that the UT Austin campus is 423 acres large, this moves from “obviously likely” to the “maybe plausible” category.

The third rumor was always an odd one for me.  According to this piece of folklore shopped around parties and side conversations as truth, there is a secret nuclear reactor under the RLM building.  The Robert Lee Memorial building was always one of the strangest buildings on campus.  Home to all the hardcore full frontal science courses, it was a tall behemoth, rising above any other building at that time.  A veritable tower of science, it was the place of indentured servitude for science students and a confusing maze of boredom for other students.  The first few floors of the building had escalators which you had to take to get up them.  The higher floors required an elevator that did not stop on the earlier floors.  The building went up to the sky and deep into the ground.  With the foreboding sciency way the building looked and the wily, laconic nature of most professors who had offices within, the idea that there was a secret nuclear reactor below wasn’t that much of a stress.  Why they kept it in the heart of a populous city made no sense, though.

These are all the rumors that many UT students learn.  Whether we accept them or not is up to us.  None of them are really verifiable nor do they really affect your UT career (unless you have a phobia of nuclear meltdown, in which case, sorry, they already have your tuition check). But they were always around and always made you wonder.  What was happening on this particular night was that I was learning some rumors that not every UT student hears.

“So, like, you guys might not know this unless you’re really in with a prof or go to grad school, but the departments are all at war with each other.  All their secret projects are in competition with each other.  Of course, the nature of the projects just might get us all killed.”

It was a strange way to start a new conversation.  It was a strange confession.  But if we put it into the context of someone seeking attention, it wasn’t quite strange.  Either way, I was glad the conversation happened.

It was Rachel that was telling us all this.  Rachel was the dark-haired girl that Zero met downtown.  She was a few years older than us, so she knew more of what went on around campus.  Since our trip downtown, she had been upgraded from girl-hooked-up-with to girlfriend.  She and Zero were joined at the hip.  Whether we liked her or not, we were stuck with her if we wanted to see Zero.  She was actually pretty smart, and Zero was… well, he was cute and girls liked that.  I guess he was the trophy boyfriend.

We were at someone’s apartment.  I can’t remember whose, but we were all hanging out, having a few beers.  The apartment owner and a few others retreated to a bedroom to smoke weed, but the rest of us alcohol-only folks had stayed in the living room to shoot the shit.  Trent was aimlessly plucking on his guitar as we talked.  Rachel was regaling us with her privileged knowledge.  Some of it was a little hard to swallow.

“What do you mean it could get us killed?” asked Other Mike.

“Well, just the nature of the projects,” said Rachel.  “Physics is building a death ray.  Electrical Engineering is building robots.  I think Philosophy is working on like these weird mind powers.  But with violent application.”

“Like in Scanners?” asked Becky.

“Exactly like in Scanners,” said Rachel, “but no one’s head has exploded.”  Her face turned thoughtful.  “Yet.  I think.”

“Why are they building such things?” I asked.

“Supposedly it’s some new competition or edict from the Dean.  Or that’s what I heard,” said Rachel.

“What, is our Dean some sort of super villain?” I asked.

“It sure sounds like it,” said Becky.  “But if so, I hope he uses those projects for some grand scheme to steal something valuable and lower our tuition.”

“Unless he’s stealing directly from the budget,” said Mike.

“Petty embezzlement is beneath a proper super villain,” said Becky, causing Mike to shrug.

“So do all departments have one of these secret projects?” asked Other Mike.

“Most,” said Rachel, pausing to ask Zero to get her a beer.  “There are a lot of them, in various stages.  But they all are trying to do something related to their department’s specialty.”

“What’s Classics doing?” asked Trent as he idly strummed.  The Classics department specialized in dead languages, Latin, Greek, Egyptian.

“I hear conflicting reports,” said Rachel.  “Classics is being much more secretive.  One person said they’re researching Pythagorian equations to change the nature of reality.  Another said they have a mummy.”

“Wouldn’t a mummy be more archaeology?” asked Other Mike.

“I know, I thought that too!” said Rachel.  “But that’s what I heard.”  She accepted her beer as Zero sat back down.

“So Biology is doing some sort of plague, right?” asked Becky.  “That would seem to be the most dangerous to us.”

“I would still say death ray as most dangerous,” said Other Mike.

“Biology is a strange department for this competition,” said Rachel.  “They’ve made it clear that the entire department must work on the same thing, no exceptions.  So the department party line is that they’re working on chimeras.  But I know from a friend that Professor Nemerson is purposely violating this to work on his own project.”

“What are chimeras?” asked Mike.

“A chimera is a monster from Greek mythology,” answered Trent.  “It is the combination of a lion, a snake, and a goat.”

“In modern biology, a chimera is a creature that is formed from combining the genetics of two others,” said Rachel.

“So abominations against God and Man?” suggested Other Mike.

“Exactly!” said Rachel with a laugh.

“But what’s this rebel Professor Nimrod doing?” asked Becky.

“Professor Nemerson,” corrected Rachel.  “He’s conducting even more secret experiments.  I hear it’s the reanimation of dead tissue.  But…”

“But what?” asked Mike.

“But that’s really just a stereotype,” she continued.  “’Someone in biology doing something weird? Oh no! Let’s toss the Frankenstein stereotype on them!’  You see what I mean?  I have no idea if it’s true.”

“I could see that,” I said.

“So what other strange projects are there?” asked Other Mike.

“Hmm, let me think,” said Rachel, now obviously a little tipsy.  “God, what can I remember.  Oh!  Folklore!”

“Folklore?  Like fairy tales and shit?” said Becky.

“That and the social groups and practices associated with them,” said Rachel.  “But yeah, fairy tales.  It’s a small department, but Professor Lichtenstein has one of the farthest along projects of the University.”

“What’s he doing?” asked Other Mike.

“It’s some sort of ritual magic,” said Rachel.  “I’m not really sure on the details, but I know his grad students have been setting up all sorts of things on Jester Dorm.  I think something big is going down with his project at Jester on Halloween.  Ritual sacrifice?  Summoning?  Fuck if I know.  Sucks for Jester inhabitants, though.”  She finished with a laugh and took a long drink from her beer.

There was a chilled silence as we all looked at each other, except for Rachel, who was a little drunk and still quite amused.

“But,” I said almost meekly, speaking words to what everyone else thought, “we all live in Jester…”

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…”

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.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, there were three of us just beginning to trip balls.  We had inadvertently discovered the destination for our quest:  Toy Joy, the kitchy toy store not far from campus.  Our next step became getting there.

Toy Joy was theoretically within walking distance, but it was not an idle walk.  Twenty to thirty minutes for a normal person, depending on the speed you walked and how urgent you were to get there.  For drug users, such a time estimate was impossible; it would be a feat worth talking about if we even arrived at our destination.  There was a route we could have taken through the heart of campus which perhaps would have been more direct.  This would have taken us across campus, through looping paths, steps up and down, either plunging through or circumventing campus buildings.  That could have been quicker, but it was a less interesting walk.  We particularly did not want to walk through any buildings we had classes in while on acid, just for the poor associations in our drug-addled minds.

The route we took was more L shaped.  Five blocks to the west, then about ten north.  The north trip would take us along the Drag, a long stretch of lights and sound.  This would be far more interesting than plowing through campus, especially when said light and sound would be augmented by our current mental states.

We set out the west exit of Jester dorm, walking down the steps with a sense of purpose.  It was still dinner time, so there were a fair amount of people on the street and the sun was setting.  This again was different from previous trips, all taken at night time where pedestrian density was less and far more used to nighttime revelers.  We each did our best to not look suspicious, to look like stupid college students rather than stupid college students on drugs.  In retrospect, I’m not sure anyone would have been able to tell the difference.

We walked past the Perry Castaneda Library (PCL), one of the biggest libraries I had ever encountered.  Six massive floors of books made it a dream for bibliophiles and a horror for anyone to find anything in unless they learned to brave the antiquated computer index system that crashed on you more often than not.  Out of their lobby collection of twenty terminals, typically about six were occupied by other students, ten were froze from a crash.  This meant learning where a book was became a game of “find the two uncrashed terminals before another student does.”  Now in my heightened state, I looked at the building as if I could stare through the stone walls of the outer shell to the books inside and feel them pulsate with knowledge.  We walked on past it.

It was past the PCL that paranoia struck.  Paranoia always strikes.  No matter what drug they are doing, if you get a group of people together on drugs, at some point paranoia is going to hit.  This is especially true if they are out and about rather than sequestered in a safe place.  When you mix the implicit illegality of every drug experience with minds made unstable by the drugs themselves, paranoia will come up.  The source will vary, but once it is added to a group, it is an insidious virus that infects all minds.

“I think we’re being followed,” said Basquiat.

“We’re being followed?” asked Other Mike.

“Why would we be followed?” I asked, looking around nervously.  There were students walking around, moving to and fro on whatever robotic paths their lives took them upon.  None of them looked suspicious.  No, strike that.  They all looked suspicious.  The ones to watch out for were the ones that looked measurably less suspicious than all the rest – those were the ones trained so well to hide their suspiciousness by whatever agency needed them to expertly fail to arouse suspicion.

“Maybe someone heard us at dinner,” said Basquiat.  “I told Zero we were doing liquid at dinner.  Just in case he wanted something for later.”

“Wait, why did you tell someone we were doing that?” Other Mike asked.  “If we had liquid, we have enough to sell.  Intent to sell.  Fuck.”  He paused, and raised his voice a little.  “Ahem.  I mean, theoretically.  If you had such a thing, it might be enough for you to sell.  I am not involved.  I don’t really know you.  We are not friends.  In fact, who are you?  I think I have an appointment to get to.”

Both Basquiat and I frantically shushed him.  I hit him on the back of the head for good measure.  My hand felt cold and fishlike.

“If they weren’t after us before, they would be after us now,” Basquiat said.  He narrowed his eyes at Other Mike.  “They heard you, man.”

“They?  Who’s they?” I said.

“They,” said Basquiat, “Captial T, They.  The ones who are after us.  They’re following.”

“Why do they get a capital T?” said Other Mike.  “I want a capital T.”

“There’s no T in your name,” I said, then to Basquiat: “But who are They?”

“Does it matter right now?” said Basquiat.  “We have to move.  Change our route.  Something.”

Quickly I pointed to the Dobie mall which was coming up on the left.  “Quick, let’s duck in there.”

The Dobie Mall was a strange amalgam of building.  I’m not sure I’ve quite seen anything like it.  The mall itself was small and two floors.  The bottom was a quiet labyrinth of stores including a comic book store, a travel agent, and a coffee house, none of which was widely frequented.  The second level was the more popular level.  The main part of the second floor was a wide open food court with far more tables that would be needed for the handful of fast food kiosks.  Around the food court were a record store, an arcade, and a very small movie theater that played mostly indie and cult films.  The movie theater itself wasn’t small, but in an effort to provide as many different movies at once, each individual theater room was small.  Not more than 40-50 people could be in one at a time, and the floor was not inclined.  With many movies this was not a problem, but if you watched anything with subtitles and someone was in the row in front of you, you had to crane your neck to see anything.  I watched an entire showing of subbed Akira with my neck stretched like some awkward bird that had extreme neck pain.

The mall part is not what made Dobie weird.  Rising to the sky from on top of the mall was an eight floor tower.  The tower was narrow and tall while the mall below was much wider and shorter, giving the impression of a gigantic dong of steel, concrete, and glass when viewed from a good vantage point.  The tower was a private dorm for students.  Only with a key card could you use the elevator to get to tower floors, but that elevator stopped on the food court as well.  For the students there was also a pool on top of the mall (also keycarded) and an attached covered parking garage.  As I said, I’ve never seen anything like it.

We entered the mall through stairs that went directly to the second floor food court.  We walked briskly, taking a few turns.  I suggested we turn down a long awkward and twisting corridor that led to the mall’s dirty bathrooms, but Basquiat stopped me.

“No, it’s a dead end!  Don’t you see!  We’d be cornered!”

“Cornered by who?” I asked.

“Them!” he said.

“Is that they same as They?” I asked.

“It’s another arm of their organization!” said Basquiat without even the tiniest sense of irony.

We turned away from that bathrooms and took a brisk walk through the food court.

“Do we want to grab something to eat?  I like the teriyaki stand here,” said Other Mike.

“Stroganoff!” I said.

He clutched his stomach as a wave of nausea washed over him.  “Thanks for reminding me,” he said.

I smiled.

We took the escalator down to the bottom floor and passed the comic book store.  I noted a standee of the Scarlet Spider staring at me.  Without stopping, we immediately got into the elevator and took it one floor up, putting us back on the food court.

“There,” I said, “that should stop anyone from following us, if they did follow us into the building, which we didn’t know for sure they did in the first place.  But if they did, and they followed us down, this should have shook them, unless we go back downstairs immediately or wait too long up here, in which case we may need to shake the persons who may or may not be following us again.  This is unless they have us under surveillance by a few people, in which case it doesn’t matter what we are going to do, because they’ll see us.”

Basquiat and Other Mike stared at me, each giving their own particular version of the what-the-fuck look.  I simply shrugged and stared at the teriyaki stand.  I always hated their teriyaki.

“Where to now?” I asked, forgetting that I was the only one who got things moving.  I received blank looks and continued.  “Well, whether we’re being followed or not it doesn’t matter at this point, since the result is the same, so we should get out of here.”

They shrugged and nodded, following me out a different door than the one we entered the mall with.  This put us directly onto the Drag, though a block or two south of where we had originally planned to hit it.  The sun was almost down, the sky almost dark and a few rays of light striking buildings.  We walked over to the crosswalk and I punched the button to cross.  We stood their trying to look nonchalant, but we were all jumpy.  I was impatient, as I just wanted to get where we were going, being done with all this waiting.  The other two were still paranoid, looking around for someone following us without making it too obvious they were looking around for someone following us.  Of course, that suspicious looking might just make someone follow us.

Paranoia, man.

The light changed and we clumsily walked across the street.  On the other side we admired a strange and familiar Austin sight.  On the side of the Sound Exchange record store someone had painted a large line drawing of an alien.  Ten feet tall and twenty feet wide, it was not a serious depiction of an alien – as compared to more literal interpretations of grey aliens by people who had never seen them.  This alien had a goofy smile and antenna that drooped to either side, each antenna ended with a playful ball.  We all stared at it for a long moment, engrossed in its art but also approving before we realized we were being suspicious again.  We started walking down the Drag.

The Drag is formally named Guadalupe Street.  No one pronounces it the right way in Austin.  If you hear “Guad-a-lup-ay”, you know it’s an out of towner.  Austinites call it Guad-a-loop, or more commonly the Drag when they’re talking to the part near campus.  The Drag was one long strip of stores on one side.  Places to buy school books, university paraphernalia priced to gouge, restaurants, a few bars, a church, a few coffeehouses, two arcades, a bead shop, clothing stores, and more.  For the main stretch these are all on one side of the street, the other side was officially campus and just was trees, stone dividers, and occasionally a building.  There was much to see on the store side of the Drag, especially as it grew dark and the lights grew brighter and the night crowd came out.

We walked a block, just marveling at everything in silence.  At the next intersection was a lone stone church.  I’m not sure if I ever saw it open for mass, but I was also aware there was a back entrance near parking where the congregation might enter and leave from.  The front of the church was almost always occupied by a group of homeless people, known as Drag Rats.  These often differed from normal homeless people in a few ways.  For one, their hair tended to range from the multicolored to the randomly shaven.  Many had piercings.  Their clothes weren’t always dirty and disused.  They tended to be younger than most homeless people.  They were also the rudest homeless people I had ever seen, constantly yelling insults at those who would not give them change or donate their leftovers if holding a box from a restaurant they just exited.

There was a reason for this.  It wasn’t some ugly rumor perpetuated by those who wanted to absolve guilt about not helping the homeless.  This came from people I knew who befriended the homeless.  There were some actual homeless mixed in: runaways, transients, homeless from other parts of town.  But many of the Drag Rats were not homeless; they were in fact the children of some of Austin’s richest families.  They went down to the Drag to be act homeless and hangout, whether due to rebellion against parents or just to pretend to be something they were not.  This made sense; how many homeless people had the money to spare or the facilities to dye their hair red and purple without getting their neck and body covered with it?  How many would prefer a shiny piercing compared to a hot meal or something to drink?  The hobos I had known would be mortified if they knew this was going on.

We stopped among the Drag Rats.  Since he sold drugs, Basquiat seemed to know someone wherever we went.  I’m not sure if he was gregarious because he was a drug dealer or a drug dealer because he was gregarious, but he was always chatty, always making friends, even if he wasn’t selling now.  Maybe that person would remember the friendship and buy later.  So we paused as he sat down with the Drag Rats for a while.  They were talking about friends who had gone missing recently or something like that.

Other Mike and I had no connection to the Drag Rats nor any interest in developing one, so we stood by Basquiat awkwardly, looking off to either direction.  I took a step or two back from a mottled mutt of a dog that one Rat had.  It didn’t appear to be the one I had seen downtown (it wasn’t quite so ugly), but it seemed cut from the same mold (it was still fucking ugly) so I kept my distance.

It felt like fifteen minutes that we stood there, but because of drugs, I know it was probably much less.  Eventually Other Mike and I were impatient.

“We want to go,” I said to Basquiat, patting him on the shoulder.  And then I kept patting for a full minute before he finally turned around.

He looked at me then blinked in surprise, as if seeing me for the first time.  I’m pretty sure he had forgotten we were there.

“Oh, hi,” he said with a smile and a hyena laugh.

“Look,” I said, turning to take a quick look at Other Mike, who seemed to have discovered that his face was really interesting and so was rubbing his hand up and down it, exploring the contours.  “We’re bored here.  We have a place to go.  A quest.  We can go on without you if you’re enjoying yourself here.”

“No, no, no, I’m with you,” he said, putting out his hand as if that would calm me.  He smiled to his Rat friends and stood up.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have to depart.  We are due somewhere else.  We have a quest.”

“A quest?” said a blue haired girl who seemed to have more metal on her face than flesh.  “Where are you going?”

Fully standing, Basquiat pumped his fist in the air and shouted.  “We’re going to Toy Joy!”

I rolled my eyes, Other Mike explored his face.  A few laughs went up among the Drag Rats.  A few actually responded with huzzahs.  But now we were at least on track.

I grabbed Other Mike and dragged Basquait with me.  As I pulled him away, he turned back to the Drag Rats.  He pumped his fist in the air again as I pulled him away.

“Toy Joy!” he shouted to the Drag Rats.

Basquiat typically received his drugs by mail.  This sounds stupid, but it was true.  He’d receive Fedex deliveries of a sheet or two of paper with some art on it.  Each sheet was already dipped in acid, so he’d simply cut up the sheets and sell each small square as a single hit of acid.  I don’t know who sent them or how that relationship was set up; sometimes it was better not to ask.

During the height of my brief drug career, he got something a little different.  Instead of sending a sheet, he had gotten them to send the liquid itself.  Why they changed it up, I was never sure – I think he just was curious and wanted to try the liquid himself.  We weren’t bold enough to actually drink the liquid – the amount of liquid needed for a typical hit was miniscule.  Besides a mere overdose, there were other dangers: acid can be absorbed through any mucous membrane.  So spill it on your hand and touch your nose, mouth, etc and you could get more than you bargained for.  No, he took the liquid and dipped his own sheets.  But I was part of the experiment he was conducting – what was freshly dipped acid like?  Acid sheets lost their potency over time, so the question was, how powerful was a sheet that was freshly dipped?

Three of us took part of the experiment:  Basquiat, Other Mike, and myself.  Other Mike had his nickname precisely because he wasn’t Mike.  We met the tall, long haired Mike first, so we needed a new designation for Other Mike.  One day someone needed to clarify in conversation: “Mike?” “No, other Mike”, and the name just stuck.  We called him that even when Actual Mike wasn’t around.  It infuriated him to no end, but our little community had spoken.  He begrudgingly accepted his title.  Physically, he was quite different from Original Mike.  Other Mike was average height compared to Classic Mike’s extreme height.  Other Mike had short red hair and muttonchops.  He generally had a sour expression.  I have no idea if he was just a sour person or he was always bitter about the loss of his name.

It was in Basquiat’s dorm room that we each took a hit of acid.  I was used to acid being tasteless: it had the same taste as if someone took a small piece of thick stock paper and put it in your mouth.  You put a piece of paper in your mouth and let it sit there until it dissolved or you forgot about it.  Eventually you might swallow it, just to make sure you didn’t miss any of it by spitting it out.  This freshly dipped hit was different.  There was a taste to it, but nothing I could easily classify.  It was a vague taste like alcohol mixed with a hint of citrus, though I’m sure neither of those things were actually in it.  I could feel it more consciously on my tongue than a normal hit.

Basquiat’s roommate came back and we cleared out.  Basquiat had noted previously that his roommate was too “straight” to understand the drug thing, and so kept it out of his view.  Even I knew that the roommate was pretty sure Basquiat was involved in drugs, but I saw the wisdom of not putting it in front of him.  Suspicion is different from knowledge.

Since we were in the Jester dorm, clearing out just meant we walked down one flight of stairs and hung out in Becky’s room.  She knew exactly what we were doing.  She had no interest in it herself.  She had tried acid once, maybe twice, but decided it was just not for her.  I could muse about her personality was too hardline for such a loss of control, but I’ll admit that acid just isn’t for everyone.  Fortunately, she didn’t mind if others did it.  In fact, she often felt drugs users, like really drunk people, were hilarious.  She always carried around her camera for just such occasions.  I’m sure she has a scrapbook somewhere of me in my most shitfaced moments over the years.

We sat in her room, all three of us sitting on Becky’s roommate’s bed across from Becky in her own bed.  The acid hadn’t quite kicked in yet.  Once you take a hit, there’s a fifteen to twenty minute period before it really starts.  Without fail, no matter how trusted the source, some idiot will wonder out loud if the acid was bunk, low quality, or some other thing.  Ten minutes later, that same person is laughing giddly about trails.  Other Mike was today’s idiot.  However, that was just a passing thought.  .  Other Mike had a crush on the roommate and kept looking at the door expectantly, wondering if she might stop home while we were there.

We were talking about stupid shit while we waited for the acid to kick in and Becky waited for dinner.  For a while, it was just normal fun and idiocy that college freshmen talk about.  But then when I laughed at something I didn’t just laugh.  I let out a hyena laugh.  It was loud, high pitched, and went on far longer than a normal laugh.  I noticed it as soon as I made it.  I felt giddy, but I must have made an expression like someone who accidentally burped in the middle of a sentence, because Becky began laughing at me.  This unfortunately set off hyena laughs in Basquiat and Other Mike, which had us rolling around on the bed in laughter.  The drugs had begun to kick in.

We followed Becky down to the cafeteria for dinner.  We had no interest in eating, but the drugs weren’t in full effect yet.  Sure we were giddy and stupid, but if that’s all you wanted, there are better drugs than acid.  For now, we were just killing time.  We followed Becky down to the cafeteria, even following her as she got a tray and moved through the cafeteria line.  Other Mike argued with cafeteria staff about whether they should have orange juice for dinner; they were adamant they did not have it.  Eventually we sat down with Becky at a table with other friends.  Classic Mike, Zero, and Trent all were there to see our idiocy, but they are unimportant to this story.

What followed was more hyena laughter and amused friends who were enjoying seeing us like this.  It was the typical bullshit banter of the time, as we just waited for it to kick in.  Other Mike was the first to note it was starting.

“Oh god, your beef stroganoff is scary!”

I turned and looked at the special of the day and knew exactly what he was talking about.  There was something unnerving about those yellow noodles sprawled across the plate in twisting turns, ever turning back upon themselves like some dreamlike Moebius strip.  But worse was the sauce.  That brown semi-liquid substance was perched on top of the noodles as if it were some alien intelligence attempting to suck the mind out of those poor, defenseless noodles.  The small pieces of beef embedded in that evil sauce only served to show the sadism, clearly the carcasses of previous victims of their horrible mind devouring.

I’m not sure how long we three were stuck in the vices of the stroganoff, staring because we couldn’t look away, staring because the mind devouring properties of the stroganoff’s diabolical sauce were overwhelming us.  Our friends eventually interrupted, breaking the spell and allowing us to turn our gaze away.  Then they laughed at us.  Someone actually took a bite of their stroganoff.  That’s when I knew my friends were lost.

“Listen,” I said in a conspiratorial whisper to my two drugged-up friends that was actually quite loud and not at all secret, “We should get out of here.  I fear all will be lost if we remain here with this… this… noodly horror.”

Basquiat and Other Mike nodded solemnly.

“Look, we… have to go,” I said to our other friends.  “Something came up.”

“You don’t want any dinner?” said Becky with an amused smile.

This prompted us to glance back at the stroganoff.  Even in that quick look, I could feel it clawing at my mind, trying to enter and take over me.  We quickly shook our heads and got up from the table.

We walked outside where the sun was going down.  Bright sun pierced our eyes.  All our previous experiences with acid were at night.  That’s when college students have their time for revelry.  We slept too late to do much of use during the weekends.  So this sunlight was a rude awakening.  Because your eyes dilate when you are on acid, it was the sundown of a thousand suns, bright and harsh.  We covered our eyes and quickly found shade.

“So what are we doing?” I asked.

“Doing…?” asked Basquiat, chewing on the question in his mind, as if it were a question he had never been asked, an option that had never occurred to him, even though he was clearly taking it quite seriously.

“We should go to a rave,” said Other Mike.

“First off,” I said, “I hate fucking raves.  Second, it’s like six o’clock at night, there will be no raves for a while.  Third, we’d have to find transportation, and hello? Tripping balls here.  We’d need someone to take us.  That takes convincing.  Could you convince someone right now?”

Other Mike frowned and shook his head.

This may seem like I had a certain cognizance, a certain immunity to the acid effects and a wholeness the others lacked on the trip.  Don’t let that confuse you.  While on acid, I have always been good at organizing, grouping, and leading.  Unfortunately, at the same time I was also terrible about thinking of ideas or ferreting out what the group wanted to do.  Pick an activity or destination and I could get you there, but hand me a blank check for the group and I’d spin my wheels.

I looked to my two companions.  Basquiat was rubbing his chain pensively, every so often murmuring “doing?”, as if he had still not gleaned the meaning of such a question.  Other Mike was still frowning, but clearly still thinking of ideas.  He was the best bet.

“Toy Joy,” said Other Mike suddenly.  He seemed surprised to hear himself say it, as if it was an involuntary action.  Like a leg jerking when hit by a rubber hammer, his blurting out “Toy Joy” was as unexpected to him as it was for us.

Toy Joy was a quirky toy store close to the UT Austin campus.  This wasn’t some kids’ toy store – not really.  Sure there were things that kids would enjoy, but that was clearly not its audience.  Toy Joy specialized in the quirky, the knicknacky, the tchotchkeish.  For example, if you wanted a boxing nun, Toy Joy was the place.  Elvisopoly?  Done.  Strange alarm clocks? Easy.  Action figures of Houdini, Darwin, and William Shakespeare?  Absolutely.  A pocket soundboard of all of Mr. T’s favorite phrases? I pity the fool who can’t find that at Toy Joy.  In addition to the strangeness, it also carried a fair amount of Japanese imported toys.  These all fell into the above category, but the largest Hello Kitty toy collection in Texas and as many figures of Ultraman that you’d ever want deserve their own mention.

It should not surprise anyone that such a marvelous place seemed like heaven to three college freshmen tripping the light fantastic.  Such a world of strangeness and childlike marvel would be perfect.  We three all smiled and nodded.

I’m sure psychologists already researching crowd behavior and groupthink would have a field day with the habits of LSD-affected individuals within social sessions if such research would be illegal.  Individuals on acid, particularly early in the trip, are rather malleable and suggestible.  One idea could spread like a virus across a group.  Solid thoughts are welcome in the chaos of an acid mind, so when one gets inserted, it often can stick.  This can have dire or hysterical effects when done maliciously (“Hey, don’t you hate it when you can feel the plaque on your teeth?), but even normally, ideas are pervasive.  Suggest one innocent thing to a group of trippers and you can watch the idea spread across them like wildfire.  By the time it reaches the far end of the group, they will adamantly declare that they thought of it themselves.

It was this effect that Toy Joy had on us.  From a single surprised exclamation, our group of three was completely and unbreakably hooked on the idea.  It became an obsession.  It was because of this obsession that we began our odyssey of fifteen blocks.  Three young college freshman, increasingly disoriented and under the effects of acid with every minute, embarking on a fifteen block trip to the most fabulous toy store in existence.

This is our story.

It was in college that I experimented with drugs.  College is the typical time for this stuff.  I have a certain distrust of someone who doesn’t admit to experimenting with something during college.  Surely they tried something, they just won’t admit it, which is provokes the distrust.  Come on, just be forthright and admit you experimented with girl drinks until your banana daiquiri habit got out of control and you had the Great Girl Drink Detox of ’97.

This is not to say that I was using hard drugs.  I was no Burroughsian junky staring at their shoes for hours on end before riding around for a fix.  I put as many hats on the bed as I wanted, I wasn’t so poor I had to do anything for a fix, my classes did not suffer, and I had a life outside drug use.  It was just something to make the weekends interesting.

Primarily, I tried acid, aka LSD.  Oh yeah, I tried marijuana like every other college student who didn’t have a stick up their ass the size of Gibraltar, but I didn’t like it.  It gave me a headache and made me tired.  Phish fans who got excited at the title of this post – suck it, we’re not serving your kind here.  King Crimson fans – thanks for stopping by, please stay awhile.

I picked acid because I wanted something mind expanding, something different.  You hear about all the hallucinations and that seemed interesting – much more than my every day experience or drugs that professed to only enhance the every day.  In addition, there are a fair amount of modern philosophers espousing the significance of acid for mind-expansion.  Those claims could have been bullshit, but they made a convenient excuse for a college student flirting with hedonism.  In addition, acid isn’t quite “habit forming”.  When you do acid, you have almost a built in tolerance.  For about a week afterwards, if you take acid, the effects are severely diminished.  So unless you became a crazed acid freak, you really couldn’t do it more than once a week.  This made me an acid weekender for a time.

The first time I tried it was in a group, which was always the best way to do it.  They had done it before, so they knew what to look for, what to avoid, what to do.  They tell you about vitamin C, Pink Floyd albums, Skittles (taste the rainbow!), and more.  If you’re lucky, you have the guy who has done a bunch of acid and the biggest Terrence McKenna library this side of the Mississippi (an amazing feat in Austin, by the way).  Even if he’s not partaking, he’s the guy you want around to calm people down and talk people about if bad trips.

On my first trip, I was with friends rolling down the hill near the LBJ fountain late at night, feeling giddy as I rolled to a halt, covered it grass and surrounded by giggles.  Then I stood up dizzily, climbed the hill, and did it again.  While I’m sure there would have been a childlike enjoyment to doing this, doing it while tripping balls was amazing.  I’m thankful for the experience.  I’m also thankful that I did not find out until much later that on the other side of that hill is the campus police station who don’t take kindly to hooliganism and drug use.

There’s one thing more decadent than continued drug use: regular drug use.  Since you could only use acid effectively on a weekly basis, for some of us it translated to meaning we should use it every weekend.  That alone was decadent.  But moreso, we decided to plan activities around it.  I’m not talking the activities everyone does:  Laser Floyd, concerts, movies.  No, we had a full schedule of ideas, some we did, some we didn’t.  For example:  we decided to wear costumes.  It wasn’t Halloween, we just figured that costumes would enhance the experience.  Rather than be ourselves, we would be whoever our costume was on acid.

It had been said that when you are on acid, besides all the other symptoms, people become more of themselves.  A given person’s personality exaggerates itself.  They become their own caricature.  They are themselves to the Nth degree.  And this is interesting and fun, but you get to know people too well.  But when someone is wearing a costume, they tend to find themselves taking their cues from what they were wearing, rather than from themselves.  So they become their costume to a magnified and exaggerated case.

Unfortunately, my love affair with acid died before we moved to the next level we planned: scripts.  Not a full on movie script.  More just the typical character setup you might have with one of those old Host Your Own Murder Party games.  Beforehand everyone is briefed on their roles: “Okay, you’re the young, careless heir to the fortune,” “you’re a rodeo cowboy who almost became the best bull rider ever but choked at the last moment because of the unresolved murder of your mother and you’re always wondering who killed her,” “okay, Mike, you’re a secret agent who has infiltrated our costume party; through some amazing luck, you look just like Mike, who you were sent to impersonate.  You’re someone else, but you’re pretending to be Mike and doing the best job you can… but tonight Mike is in this costume of a vampire”, etc.  So everyone got their roles, then everyone took acid so they were tripping balls.  If we were smart, we would’ve put out a hat for donations and called this performance art.  Artaud would be proud.

Why did I stop doing drugs?  I’d start some bullshit about how there is a season and there is a time (turn turn turn), and that was mine, but that’s not true.  You might suggest I grew older and with that maturity I stopped.  That is actually true too, but not the real reason.  The reason was the drug itself.  For all the good about it, there’s bad.  For me it was a wicked form of insomnia.

When you take acid, you must assume that you’re going to be affected by it for at least eight to ten hours.  Pause for a second there and think about it.  Think of the fun activities you do on a weekend or an evening.  How long do they take?  Are they close to eight to ten hours?  If you did then for eight to ten hours, what would you feel like?  Acid has a rise and fall, but it’s about that time.  Worse, due to the nature of acid and what it was mixed with, you would not sleep until that time is up.  So even hours later when your peak has come and gone and you’re feeling mostly okay, you can’t sleep.  Instead you have the worst insomnia of your life coupled with a semi-malleable reality.  You’re in your bed staring at the ceiling, your mind ratcheted to overdrive no matter much you want to relax.  If you are by chance an insomniac, imagine your worst insomnia ever – this is almost always how you feel at the end of a trip.

This is discounting bad trips, which I thankfully had few.  Those who are not strong of mind should not take acid.  Yes, if you have issues with depression, OCD, emotional craziness, mental instability, delusions, etc, you should not take acid.  After trying it and living years beyond, this is something I am adamant about.  Acid is not for everyone.  When I cared as much, I even mused that it should be regulated.  Acid is available, but you have to pass a psychological exam before you are permitted to try it.  Those who were likely to have bad trips would not be allowed to take it.  I won’t go over all the horrible symptoms.  Just know that when things get bad on acid, they get really bad.  And once you feel bad, then your perceptions change to bad ones, then you are more freaked out, then you feel worse, then your perceptions get worse… It’s a bad set of feedback.

And that is why I stopped doing acid just scant months after I did it for the first time.  I don’t recommend it to anyone really, just college students who should know better but are going to do it anyway.  So while I don’t recommend it, sometimes the stories from experiences are awesome – though typically only to others who have tried it.

Next week – drug stories!

Ohms was a bigger club than Proteus.  Of course, club size was relative in the Sixth Street area; space was a premium, so no club was really huge.  But Ohms had a big dance floor, a few times the size of Proteus’s.  The club on a whole was darker, leaving more illusion to the actual size of the club and the actual attractiveness of the other club goers.  Add into that the requisite dance club dynamic lighting and copious amounts of alcohol, I was surprised people actually knew if they were going home with someone of the same species.

Our stomachs full of greasy but still unappetizing pizza (“Dude, chill.  Let the pizza go,” said Trent), we resumed our drinking in debauch in this new club.  There were three bars in Ohms.  A long one that stretched the length of the dance floor, an outdoor bar for their tables out back, and a shorter one near the random arrangements of old couches where we found ourselves.  I remember looking at the couches, trying to peer through the darkness, colored dance lighting, and smoke, wondering if I’d ever sit in these couches if I saw them in the light of day.  Trent suggested the same might be said of some of the girls at these clubs.

I flopped down in one of the couches reluctantly while Trent greeted one of our mutual friends who was already at this club, Basquiat.  He spent more time at these clubs, which made sense, because he dealt drugs.  Not the hard stuff like heroin, coke, or meth.  We’re talking weed, LSD, and ecstasy.  And he was not a big drug kingpin.  He was more the man on the street who did it because he could make a couple bucks and it made him feel more important.  But he was an unessential cog in the drug cartel’s machine; if he suddenly stopped dealing one day (out of boredom, most likely), few would notice and even fewer would care.

Because he was a drug dealer, he always had at least two girls sitting with him at clubs.  The girls changed, but he always seemed to attract two.  He always sat sunken into whatever couch he sat on, as if the greatest effort would be needed to remove him from said couch.  His skinny body seemed to become one with the couch.  He had long dark brown hair, slightly curly and always had a beard.  He looked sort of like Jesus, if Jesus was the one you went to for your next drug fix.  I wondered if the girls were Christian.

Trent made his greetings while Mike and I just waved and sunk down into the couch, staring at the dance floor.  After a few minutes Trent sat down in the chair next to us.

“What did I tell you?  Prettier girls here,” he said.

While it was too dark to tell if they were prettier, there were definitely more of them.  Girl density has always been a problem for the downtown area.  While the amount of clubs and bars were many, seeming to increase all the time, the population size of the town remained static.  And not everyone enjoyed going downtown.  So at times, a given club might be sort of empty.  That had been Proteus’s problem.  Dance clubs at least enjoyed a late night status.  At 2am, all venues had to stop serving alcohol by law.  Once the booze was dry, bars lost their draw.  But dance clubs still had an allure for those who didn’t want to go home or enjoyed dancing their way to sobriety or unconsciousness.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe?  There’s a veritable sea of flesh out there,” said Trent, waving his arm at the dance floor, “I’m sure you will be able to find one girl you might like.”

“I see a few that are hot,” said Mike.

“See? Even Michael here is finding something interesting,” said Trent.  He grabbed Mike’s face and turned it towards me.  “Look at this face.  This is the face of innocence.  Hear it directly from the mouth of babes, there are some serious hot bitches here tonight.”

I sighed while simultaneously rolling my eyes.  It is disappointing that the English language has no word that encapsulates that act or the emotion involved.  I should create such a word.

“Whatever, man,” said Trent.  “Mike, you read to go mack on some hot bitches?”

“Hell yeah,” said Mike.

“Keep that enthusiasm, my friend, and we might just get you laid tonight,” said Trent.

The two of them got up and trudged out into the sea of people on the dance floor, Mike at least pausing to pat me on the should in apology.

I sat on the couch, idling staring at the crowd.  It had been a while since I had drank anything and with the pizza acting as an alcohol buffer in my stomach, I was starting to sober up, which meant I was also feeling tired, since it was getting late.  I scanned the club, watching the sea of extremities, faces, breasts and stupidity on the dance floor.  My gaze passed over Basquiat, who upon noticing my look made some hand signal he decided meant drugs.  I shook my head and he nodded, his face conveying, “It’s cool, bro.”

I decided to get up and do something.  I eschewed the dance floor where Trent and Mike were trying to insinuate themselves into the dance area of two girls.  Mike’s awkward height and even more awkward dancing were working against him, which was a shame, because he was at least far more sincere than Trent.  I shook my head and decided I needed to resume drinking.  I walked over to the long bar, miraculously gaining the bartender’s attention in less than a minute and ordered a drink.  I stuffed a dollar in the tip jar very obviously in front of the bartender to make sure he didn’t water it down.  Once he completed it, I turned around and leaned against the bar to sip my drink.

I happened to turn to my right and look down the bar and was struck by what I saw.  A cute girl on her own, just hanging out at the bar.  That alone was some strange sight worth of cryptozoological note.  She had dark hair flipped over one side half-concealing her face.  Short skirt and thigh highs.  An ankh tattoo on her pale skin just above her elbow.  She was sipping her drink though a thin, bent straw and watching the dance floor.  This was one of the prettiest girls I had seen in Austin by far.  There were girls who qualified as “more gorgeous” but they were all overdone, covered in glam and edifice, looking more like a magazine ad come to life.  This girl was pretty and real, which made her far more attractive to me.

I smoothed out my hair, realizing afterward that I just wet it with the perspiration my hand picked up from my drink.  “Alright, Me, let’s not fuck this one up,” I said.

I walked down the bar to her, causing her to take a quick look at me.  There was a smile, but I couldn’t tell if it was a strained smile or a wan smile in the light.  I noticed she had a fair amount of makeup around her eyes and her lashes were very long, but it worked very well on her.

I stood next to her for a full minute, mustering my courage and trying to think of something that wouldn’t fuck things up.

“Hi, this is some great club, isn’t it?  It’s surprising I haven’t been to this place before,” I said to her.

She turned to me.  “What?” she shouted over the music.

“I said this is a good club and I haven’t been here before,” I said louder.

“What?”

“GOOD CLUB,” I practically shouted in her ear.

She nodded, “Oh yeah,” she shouted, then turned back to watching the dance floor.

Another minute passed while I thought of something that was both witty and easily shoutable.

She turned to me and said something.  I saw her lips move, but didn’t get a single word.

“What?” I shouted.

She tried to tell me again, failing a second time.

“What?”

Finally she did some pointing.  She pointed across the dance floor, then at the bar, then somewhere else.  She handed me the remnants of her drink and the paper napkin she had beneath it.  She then smiled and stared at me, looking for some recognition.

“What?”  I said as I stared dumbfoundedly back at her.

She rolled her eyes and walked off.

“Bye?” I said at her trailing form, but I didn’t both saying it loud enough than anyone else besides myself could hear.  I put the drink and the napkin on the bar.  Dejected, I wandered back to the couches.  Basquiat had two different girls sitting next to him, both hot as always.  Trent was back in his chair but Mike was missing.  I sat down on the couch and motioned with my head towards Mike’s empty spot.  Trent nodded to the dance floor.  Mike was still out there and he had one girl dancing very, very close to him and it was obviously no accident.

“What happened with the girl at the bar you were macking on?” said Trent.

“She just walked off,” I said.

“Bitches,” he said.

I shrugged.  “I… guess?”

We both enviously watched as Mike’s dance partner ground her rear against his crotch.  Mike noticed us looking long enough to give us a thumbs up.

“I think I hate going downtown,” said Trent.

“Me too,” I said.

“You gentlemen want any… refreshments?” suggested Basquiat, leaning forward from his position.

“No,” I said.  “I think I’m ready to just call tonight a wash.”

He nodded stoically and looked at Trent.  “Nah,” said Trent and Basquiat sunk back to his couch next to the two girls.

My gaze wandered the club idly and it crossed the door.  I saw the cute girl from the bar at the door.  She caught my eye and smiled at me.  She put her hand to her head in the “call me” motion, then disappeared out the door with her friends.

Call her?  How could I call her?  I didn’t have her number.  She didn’t give me anything.  Except…  the drink!

I looked back to the bar where just now the bartender was picking up her near empty drink and the napkin.  I jumped out of my seat and ran towards the bar in slow motion, my mouth forming a cinematic “Noooo” which no one could hear.

The drink and napkin were gone by the time I arrived.  I flagged down that particular bartender.

“I need my napkin,” I said, panting for breath.

“Your napkin?” he said with a raised eyebrow.

“You just threw out a napkin, it was mine,” I said insistently.

“Oookay,” he said.  He pulled another cocktail napkin off the stack and handed it to me.  “Here, I got you another.”

“No, I need that napkin.”

“It’s in the trash, man, use this napkin.  You want two?  I’ll give you two.”  He handed me a second napkin.

“No, I need that napkin.  It’s important,” I stressed to him.

“Look, kid, I’m not digging in the trash for a napkin.  There’s broken glass in there.  I’m not sure what weird OCD you have, but you’re going to have to make due with these napkins.”

“I need that napkin!” I said, pounding my fist down on the bar.

The bartender made eye contact with someone over my shoulder, inclined his head to me and then pointed towards the door.  I turned quickly, but only quick enough to see two massive arms grab at me.  I’m sure that those massive slabs of meat could not have belonged to a human being, not with how easily they picked me up and carried me to the door.  It must have been some sort of troll or ogre which then thankfully put me down and pushed me out the door to the club where I stumbled, barely maintaining my balance.

I looked around to see if I could see the cute girl with the ankh, but she was gone already.  Depressed, I slunk down on the ground, leaning on the wall of the club.  In a little while Trent came out of the club.  He paused next to my depressed form for a few moments lighting a cigarette before speaking.

“Mike says he won’t be able to give us a ride back to the dorm, because he’s not going there,” said Trent, stoically taking a drag of his cigarette and peering down the street.  “We’ll need to walk back.”

The dorm was over fifteen blocks back, some of it uphill, some of it through bad neighborhoods.  We were drunk and tired; I was now kind of bummed out too.  I didn’t look forward to the forced march to just get back to an uncomfortable bed I could collapse in.

“I hate going downtown,” I said.

Someone has stolen Croggon’s airship.  He has an idea of who, but he doesn’t know why.  As he pursues the ship east across the United States, he finds that his beloved Free Crow has been renamed the Clementine.  He has no clue what cargo they stole his ship to transport, but he knows that they keep moving east towards the Civil War still waging between North and South.  He would be unwelcome with either side, but the South has a death warrant since he escaped his slavery in a bloody way all those years ago.

As if the pursuit of his ship were not enough, he is also being pursued by the newest member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Maria Isabella Boyd is an actress and former spy that has been marginalized and pushed out of employment by her beloved Confederacy.  She is given orders to make sure that the Clementine’s cargo arrive at its destination no matter the cost.

What follows is the plot of Clementine, Cherie Priest’s second book of the Clockwork Century and the side-story sequel to Boneshaker.  This is again American Civil War era steampunk, this time centering on airships, gatling guns, Civil War politics, and a possible death ray.  The beginning of this story truly started in Boneshaker, but even if readers don’t have that context, they should catch up to Clementine just fine.

The story is enjoyable and fast paced.  Compared to Boneshaker, this book is shorter and a more condensed story, but this story focuses almost entirely on action.  Airships crash, fire upon each other, and explode.  Croggon himself carries around a huge gatling gun called the Rattler only he can carry and only sometimes can control.  There are shootouts and daring moments where someone dangles by an arm a mile above the ground.

For a quick read, I highly recommend this.  Anyone who needs to get a quick fix of steampunk or airships will find what they’re looking for.  It’s a fun ride, but it ends soon.  While there is a mystery or two in the book, it doesn’t go too deep, instead focusing on the story it needs to tell instead of spending too much time on unrelated backstory.  This book reads like a movie: we jump in to the story, follow it, and get an explosive conclusion.  Details aren’t fully explored, but they are unnecessary.  This story does exactly what it needs, and that is a very enjoyable thing.

I admit that I’m a pizza snob.

No defenses, no conditions or suppositions, no backpeddling to make you think I’m even handed.  Nope.  I grew up in New York eating pizza nearly once a week for eighteen years.  There’s just a way pizza needs to be done.  It needs to be handed to you on a paper plate that has ruffled fringes on the ends for no more than a buck or two, often paired with a soft drink special.  You carry a single slice (because that’s enough for lunch) back to booth-style seating where they have a salt shaker full of powdered garlic, another shaker filled with red pepper flakes, and a metal napkin dispenser at the table.

Don’t get me started about Chicago style deep dish pizza.  I acknowledge that it is also called pizza, but I think of it as some other type of pizzeria culinary cuisine, like it’s some sort of tomato-covered calzone.  I sleep better at night that way.

Moving down to Austin was a rude awakening for my inner pizza critic.  My first observation was that the pizza shrunk in the wash.  It wasn’t just thinner or smaller on a single dimension, the entire pie was shrunken and pieces carved off of that.  Where in New York the expectation is that a slice or two would satisfy you (unless you were binging), in Austin a single person was expected to consume three to four of these mini slices for something resembling satisfaction.  I guess you could consider Texas pizza the sliders of the pizza genre.  I just considered it bad.

Also, don’t call it a “pie”.  Though perfectly appropriate word choice in New York, not so in Austin.  The entire pie in Texas is just called “a pizza”.  If you call up a delivery place and ask for a single pie, they are either confused or give you the typical line.  “Oh, I bet you’re from New York.  Nobody calls it a pie down here.”

While I enjoyed Austin for many other reasons, the lack of good pizza had always been a thorn in my side.  But even more irksome was the fact that no one around ever acknowledged that the pizza was bad.  They’d acknowledge some restaurants were better at it than others, but not that the pizza in the entire geographic area was one gigantic exercise in culinary failure.  Everyone seemed comfortable and satisfied with their entire state’s poor attempt at pizza.  I felt the only sighted person in the land of the blind… a blind land where the pizza also sucked.

So it was with the wan begrudgingness mixed with hunger that is the license of the drunk that I ordered a slice of pizza on the north end of Sixth Street with Trent and Mike.  The place was simply a window and counter on the side of a building.  I got the feeling that the building was typically another restaurant during the daytime: at night everything except the window, a tiny room, and the big oven were shutdown.  The place had some inane name, but the “pizza” in it was the only thing that stood out.  They were selling what they called Brooklyn Style Pizza, which I decided meant that at some point they had once seen a picture of Brooklyn.

Trent and Mike were online in front of me, receiving their slices and stepping aside to happily devour them.  I stepped up to the counter and stared at the gigantic metal oven in the back.  That looked about right for a pizzeria.  Then I looked at the pizza on the wooden pizza trays below the counter beyond the window.  They had gotten the size right at least.

“Not used to Brooklyn Style pizza?” asked the guy at the counter.  He was a weird mix of hippie and metalhead dirtbag that Austin specialized in.

“No, I’m actually from New York,” I said, eyeing the pizza under glass warily.

“Awesome.  Pike here is from New Jersey,” he said, cocking his thumb back to point at the shaved head guy actually working the oven, “so you know you’ll love the pizza.”

I glared at the unsuspecting Pike with a mixture of hatred and suspicion.  It’s possible someone from New Jersey could make good pizza, but that didn’t necessarily mean he would.  Plus, ask any New Yorker about something of quality coming out of Jersey, especially something New York is known for, and you’ll receive a tremendous amount of doubt, if not outright derision.

Somewhere in my cloud of geographically-inspired hatred and prejudice, I must have ordered a cheese slice, as the counter guy passed it to me and I handed him two dollars.  One of the best measures of New York style pizza is a cheese slice.  You rarely see cheese-only pizza in Texas.  It always has something on it.  But New York style pizza should taste great even as just a cheese slice.  In some cases, the cheese slices were the best, as too many ingredients often meant the cheese came out a little undercooked to keep the other things from burning.  So if this were real New York pizza, cheese would be a good, safe bet.

I stepped aside from the counter, reluctantly breaking my still-smoldering gaze from the largely oblivious and hardworking Pike.  I looked down at my slice.  They had gotten the paper plate right.  You’d think this was an easy part, but it’s not.  Especially with New York style pizza, the right plate is important.  The slice is often somewhat heavy.  I can’t tell you the pizza experiences I’ve had ruined by a flimsy plate.  The plate should be strong enough to withstand the weight of a single slice of pizza held with one hand at the edge.  If the plate threatens to bow in the center, it is not a good plate and your yummy pizza will soon transform into dusty floor pizza.

The crust was thick, which was a good sign.  To all you inexperienced pizza naysayers who find crust a useless and vestigial part of a slice like an appendix or buffet sneezeguards: fuck you.  I hate you guys.  In my time in Austin, among all the various pizza sins I observed, I met one guy who would not eat his crusts.  So we ordered a pizza (pie) and started eating.  Because he skipped on the crust, he ate more and faster than everyone else, often leaving us hungry for more slices that didn’t exist while a pile of uneaten pizza crust sat smugly in front of him.

Crust has a very important duty with the right slice on the right plate.  I knew that the crust would be needed as I picked up my slice and squeezed the crust, lightly folding my slice.  This is another measure of a good slice.  A good light fold should mean the tip of the slice is still stiff, with only slight sagging.  If you fold a slice and the whole front end immediately tries to make a run for your shoes or point at it, it was a poor slice.  This slice didn’t bend much, which was good.  But I knew the crust would be important by the other signifier: the grease.

As I folded the slice and angled the slice upwards, I held the plate under the back of the slice, where I grasped it.  This is very important.  Some hold the plate under the tip of the pizza.  If your plate is big enough for both, sure.  But typically that’s only important if you have saggy pizza, the slice is held wrong, or you’re a messy eater.  Instead you hold the slice angled up and the plate under the crust.  As you hold it, you will see orange grease run out the back which will successfully drip onto the plate.  Hold the slice wrong, and the grease will either drip forward out the front, sometimes onto your lips where it will burn you.  Hold it a different sort of wrong and the grease will run back onto your hand and burn that.  No, hold it right and the grease will drip back onto the plate as you take a bite.

Don’t get rid of the grease, it’s important.  Once you have eaten all of the main event, the cheese and tomato covered section of the slice, you will hold in your hand a folded piece of crust.  The crust is good, simply dry and often unappetizing to eat on its own.  Here is where the grease comes into play.  Using the crust, wipe up the orange grease.  You have just turned dry crust into an oil-covered post-slice appetizer.  It makes a nice transition to anything you might eat afterwards.  In addition, this both cleans your plate and disposes of anything food-related other than the plate.  You can throw out the plate and wipe your hands knowing you don’t have to feel guilty if those starving kids in Africa asked you if you wasted any food today.

The orange greased ran out the back of this particular slice onto the plate, which was a good sign.  The moment of truth came and I bit into the slice.

It was terrible.

It was bland and tasteless.  It tasted like dough covered with tomato and cheese.  While that was essentially what a slice is, any culinary artist will tell you that food should always taste like more than the simple sum of its ingredients or you have just wasted those ingredients and the time spent cooking them.  The dough was subpar and the tomato sauce seemed missing.  It wasn’t, as I saw its redness poke out from the slice where I had taken a bite, but I couldn’t taste it at all.  The cheese itself was the most bland.  Cooked, oily mozzarella should be on its own a delicious thing, but they somehow transformed it to something lacking in anything besides the most base taste of mozzarella.  If I couldn’t see and feel that it was clearly cooked, I would wonder if they undercooked it.

I chewed my slice reluctantly, my eyes full of hatred, the chewing that of the vengeful who wish that they were instead chewing the bones of their oppressors.  My eyes were narrowed, my face sour as I made it through the slice, the only benefit from my hungry stomach, who appreciated something other than the slosh of alcohol it had been working with for the past few hours.

The final straw came moments later, derived entirely from the obliviousness of friends.

“Wow,” said Mike next to me.  “This is the best pizza I’ve ever had.”

Those with some passing familiarity with Austin have heard of Sixth Street.  Not the street itself, but all it encompasses.  Even if you had not heard of it, when you move to Austin as a college student, you hear about it pretty quickly.

“So there’s an area downtown where there are like a hundred bars and clubs in a few block area.  Literally bars next door to other bars.  And most of them are playing live music or have dance music.  So you can just walk from one bar to the next as you like.  And there are girls all over, hopping from bar to bar, typically dressed for clubbing.”

“Where is this mystical paradise that you speak of?  How soon can I go there and how much of my soul will it cost me?”

This is all true about the downtown area.  The most bars are on Sixth, but some are a few blocks away.  Sixth itself is often closed off to car traffic around 10pm and there’s just crowds of people walking back and forth down and across the street.  Some stand outside clubs watching, some follow crowds on their parade-like march from bar to bar.  There are tarot readers, quick-painting demonstrations and crazy people standing around trying to make a buck.  It is a perfect place to see scantily clad women and leer at them in the right way to make them feel creeped out if that’s what you’re into.

Many of the bars are themed to differentiate themselves.  There’s a dueling piano bar, comedy clubs, various karaoke bars, dress-code bound clubs, hardcore punk rock bars, dance clubs filled to the brim with drug dealers and drugged out dancers, country bars, trivia bars, pubs, saloons, wine bars, absinthe bars, smoky rock clubs, and small empty bars that would be closed in weeks.

Adjacent to that area are two additional districts with bars and restaurants, usually less hectic but still quite full.  The Red River district to the east of downtown (by a few blocks) and the Warehouse District to the west (also by a few blocks).  Going to a bar next door is never a problem, but wandering from district to district or from bar to the remote place you were actually able to park can be a challenge, particularly once completely and totally drunk.

We were at a club just off Sixth Street on 4^th Street named Proteus.  It was me, Mike, Trent, and Zero.  We had left Becky back at the dorms to make this a guy’s night out.  This wasn’t actually messaged to her.  Instead of actually telling her, we all disappeared after dinner and laid low while she wandered around wondering where all her friends were.  We all liked her, but the argument “we want a guy’s night out” never convinced her why she couldn’t hang out as one of the guys.

Proteus was a small club with a smaller dance floor.  Though the dance floor was maybe twenty feet by twenty, it was rigged out with laser lights, strobes, black light, and a sometimes-functioning smoke machine.  The rest of the space of Proteus’s rectangular space was cocktail tables, couches, and one blackjack table which was never used; the cute blackjack dealer looked bored, but not cute and bored enough for any of us to want to pay the twenty dollar buy-in for blackjack.  The walls of the whole place were painted a light blue which at first seemed incongruous with the club but later seemed appropriate to the weird crammed-together nature of the club.

“This place is beat, we should go somewhere else,” said Trent.  He had reluctantly left his guitar at the dorms.  We were able to convince him that nobody could hear him play it downtown and he didn’t need to look that douchey.

I nodded from my place on the couch where I stared at the dance floor.  There were only three or four people on it, but I still was enjoying watching a girl dance in a white skin tight shirt.  The outline of her breasts glowed in the black light as they bounced back and forth to the beat of the music.

“Mike, go get Zero,” said Trent.

Mike nodded and got up, never questioning Trent’s authority.  For his size, Mike was a rather passive and easy going individual.  He was six foot five, broad shoulders, but otherwise thin and lanky.  His dirty blonde hair was shoulder length and he had a blonde beard that he kept perfectly balanced between scraggily and too full to be hip.  He was a nice guy, to the point of not contradicting anyone. He also had the only car among us, which made him more valuable for this outing.

Mike’s massive frame walked over to a loveseat couch where Zero had been talking to a dark haired girl a few years older than us for forty-five minutes.  Zero was the most handsome of us, something Trent and I admitted begrudgingly.  With his light brown hair perfectly moussed to whatever the daily cutting edge fashion, his clothes impeccably perfect on him, and his winning James Dean façade, girls obviously noticed him out of all four of us.  We figured that would have helped the rest of us, as we would be wingmen for a group of girls, but since we had gotten to the club Zero had honed in on this one girl and ignored the rest of us.

After a moment of talking to Zero, in which Zero’s body language seemed to indicate he was talking to a waiter rather than a friend, Mike trudged back to us.

“He’s not coming.  He’s going to get a ride home from her.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I think we know which one of them is actually going to get the ride,” said Trent, which just caused me to roll my eyes again.

We stood up and walked past the girl who had stamped our hands on the way in.  The night air outside hit us like a cool wash of water.  I hadn’t realized until that moment how stuffy the club was.  Nor how loud it was, as I realized I could now hear things that were more than three feet away from me.  The street was full of people walking here and there, though being on 4^th Street, the crowds weren’t terrible.

“Okay, where are we going?” I asked.

“There’s this club called Ohms on the north end of Sixth,” said Trent.

“What’s it like?” I asked.

“It’s a dance club, strobe lights, pretty girls,” he said.

“We just left a club like that,” I said.

“Different girls at this club,” he said.

“So you wanted us to leave and walk several blocks to go to a different club because it might have different girls?”

“It wasn’t working with any of these girls,” he said, “So yeah.”

I shook my head dismissively.

“I’m actually somewhat hungry,” said Mike.

My stomach agreed with him.  I always get hungry when I drink.  Especially for late night breakfast food.  For some reason eggs, sausage, and hash browns taste fifty times better when you’re drunk.

“Yeah, let’s get food,” I said.  “What’s around?”

Because drunk hunger was not exclusive to me, the downtown nightlife had adapted.  There were a number of carts that come around just for nighttime, as well as trailers that sold such delicacies as corndogs, pizza, bratwurst, Korean bbq taco, and funnel cakes.  Some nights if the right carts had setup that night, it was like going to a childhood carnival, just with tons of alcohol and girls dressed like hookers.

“There’s a place that sells New York style pizza on the north end of Sixth,” said Trent.

“Coincidentally right by the club you want to go to?” I said.

“Yeah, how about that?” said Trent.

I sighed.

“Pizza sounds awesome,” said Mike.

I admit that pizza sounded great to me, even if I didn’t have high hopes for it, so I acquiesced and we made our march towards Sixth.  We passed through a bad part of downtown.  Technically at night that whole area is a bad part of town and at least one drunken fight starts each weekend night.  But this was a worse part of town where a homeless shelter and a drug clinic took up space.  And efficient drunkards that we were, walking down the back alleys were the best shortcut.

Along the way, there were some sights to be seen.

“Holy shit, it’s a vampire!” said Mike.

I whipped my head around, trying to find what Mike was talking about.  I saw a guy in black clothing and eye makeup, his face buried in a girl’s neck.

“That’s just a goth kid,” said Trent.

“And a somewhat kinky girl,” I added.

A few minutes passed as we walked.

“A werewolf!” said Mike.

I looked around and saw a homeless person at the mouth of the alley we were about to go down.  He had an enormous brown and gray mottled dog.  Its skin was patchy, in some places showing a twisted fur.  It teeth were sharp and slightly off, which we could tell easily since it had its teeth exposed as it growled at Trent.

“That’s not a werewolf,” said Trent, “that’s just… one seriously ugly dog.”

The homeless man sneered at Trent and gave some slack on the leash.  The dog lunged forward a little, causing Trent to jump backwards.

“Nice doggie,” I said, as we gave it a wide berth as we went down the alley.  “Good doggie, clearly it has been well rewarded with… Scooby snacks or some serious growth hormones.”

The homeless man raised an eyebrow, but otherwise kept hold of the dog and we continued down the alley.

Down the alley, Mike once again cried wolf.

“It’s a –“

Trent cut him off.  “It’s not what you think it is, no matter what it is.”

“But it’s a zombie,” he said more weakly.

“It’s not a zombie,” I said, looking over to the heap of patchwork clothes he had indicated.  “It’s just a homeless guy, who is…. Just eating…”

The homeless man was hunched over eating something in his hands.  I could say that he was gnawing on a turkey leg, and I’d like to be able to say that.  But something in me wants to say that’s wrong.  He was eating voraciously, way more vigorously than any turkey leg I had ever eaten.  The sounds come from him were loud slurping and biting noises.  He wore a hat and a high collar, so I couldn’t see his face.  His hands were covered with threadbare gloves.  I couldn’t actually see what was in his hands.

“… just eating a turkey leg, I guess,” I said with less confidence, as ice went through my veins.  We kept walking past him, but all of us a little more quietly.  “He just happens to be… a very enthusiastic eater…”

Trent and I shared a look.  Our pace quickened without any verbal signal.  There was a pressure on us until we left the alleyway.  Every few steps we looked back, just to make sure the homeless man hadn’t gotten up and ran after us.  When we finally made it out of the alley, we immediately turned and walked quickly to the nearest crowd of people, blending into the sound and the life.

I never found out just what was going on in that alley.  In the light of all that has happened since then, I have theories.  But they’re just theories and do nothing to remove the cold chill I have whenever I think of that event.  I’ll always wonder if that was the true start of things, or if this whole mess started from the events I was involved in.