"TRIPPIN'": A "Smokin'" Short Story

Is that guy in the Chips Aisle staring at me? Do I know him? Does he know me? Is he Froot Loopy?”

“Twelve seventy-nine, buddy”

The burly Qwik-Mart clerk’s request focused my wandering attention back to the matter at hand; buying a 24-ounce Bud Light, two King-Size Snickers and a four-pack of Double-A batteries, even though I only needed two of the damn things.

Dang it! I’m gonna have to default to my debit card. That’ll take longer now. And I just really wanna get the hell out of here and get back home.

I am so frickin’ stoned!

“Debit or credit?”

Man, this guy is talking really loud. Like Gilbert Godfried loud. Dude, we’re standing at point blank, counter-width range. Let’s bring it on down a decibel or three here, will ya?

“Um. Uh. Let’s go credit. No, debit. And can I get twenty dollars back in cash, too?”

“You can if the machine says you can, dude.”

All right, smart ass. How about let’s just wrap up this prolonged transaction and skip the witty repartee, huh? And a shower every week or so wouldn’t hurt either, Dane Cook. Geez. How can an apparent human smell like that, anyway?

The guy blathered on with his moronic monologue, “Look like you’re covered, “Mr. Money Bags”. Here’s your twenty. You want your stuff in a bag, bro?”

“Yeah. That’d be great.”

And just as I thought I was finally gonna get out of there scot-free without suffering anymore inane chit-chat, I feel an ominous tap on the shoulder.

I turn around and much to my unpleasant surprise it’s ol’ glaring guy from the chips aisle. And, horror of horrors, he wants to talk. To me.

“Hey. Were you at ‘Burger Bonanza’ last night? I think I saw you there, right?”

Really? A stalker? Are you stinkin’ kidding me?!

“Um. ‘Burger Bonanza’? Uh, yeah. Yeah. I was there last night. So have we met before, er…”

“Oh. No. No, we haven’t. My name’s Max. How ya doin’?” was the friendly yet creepy reply as he extended his hand for a shake, which I reluctantly accepted. ‘I wonder if this nut is packin’?’ was my only thought.

“And you are?”

I can’t believe I’m actually gonna engage this weirdo in conversation.

“So, I’m John. Yeah.”

And then we just kind of stared at each other. My bloodshot eyes into his decidedly unsettling wild glare.

Whoa. Are his eyes purple?

I tried to make a valiant break for the doors. Alas, not swiftly enough in my state of stonedness.

Damn it to hell!

“Hey. Did I see you eating one of those new ‘Burger-Brat Busters’ they just came out with? In fact, it looked like you may have been enjoying two of ‘em there, right? Quite the appetite, huh, Johnny?” he laughed. Again, most sinisterly.

Yeah. That’s ‘cuz I had the munchies out the bahonkas, buddy.

Wait? Did I just say that out loud?

Man, I am so stoned it’s just silly.

“Um. Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I had. A couple of the new ‘Burger-Brat Busters’, all right. OK. Well. See ya, Max.”

Confirmation. Salutations. And now an actual hand on the door. So close to a clean getaway. Damn it! Why am I so damn polite?!

“How are those ‘Burger-Brat Busters’, John? They look frickin’ awesome, man. But I’m just thinkin’ it might be too much to handle all at once, ya know? I just don’t want to invest in one, I mean they’re like eight stinkin’ bucks, man, and then…”

I had to cut him off. Immediately. My brain absolutely could not absorb any more useless data or it was destined to detonate.

“Hey. You know what? Try one. I really think you’re gonna dig it. But in my opinion, the ‘Double Meat, Double Cheese, Fried Portobello ‘Shroom Burger’ shall forever dominate, Max.”

The dude was just about to discharge even more verbal diarrhea when this guy suddenly walks in and, thank God, distracts him.

“Hey. Didn’t I see you at ‘Dairy Dream’ the other day? Yeah. You ordered one of those new ‘Hot Fudge Banana Barges’, did you not? Hey, ya know, I was really thinkin’ about getting one of those bad boys. But I’m like, whoa, it’s so mega-massive! And I don’t know if I…”

Thank you, “Ice Cream Boy”. You’re right on time, buddy. Welcome to hell.

Now watch John bolt (make that Hussein Bolt!) the Qwik-Mart and dash like a possessed madman to his waiting sled:

A semi-gleaming, sporadically dependable, sorta blue, sorta green, 1997 Toyota frickin’ Celica, baby!

Of course, I drop the keys to this sweet machine and kick ‘em under the damn thing first.

Instantly I crouch and do the blind hand reach and assault-the-asphalt thing in a sightless search for my “Sponge Bob” ring of keys.

And in the midst of my frantic frenzy, I suddenly hear a voice. No, not the Fast Food freak this time. These were the tones of a voice I half-way recognized. Most unfortunately.

“Hey John! Johnny Boy! Get over here you frickin' burnout, you!”

Pete. Pete Culbertson. What a tool. What in the hell does he want? Other than to further substantiate what a total jerk he is.

“Whoa, Johnny. Why the flagrant hostility, buddy?” you’re likely wondering.

Well, the origins of my deep-seated hatred go all the way back to the third grade. You see, that’s when the little punk decided it would be hysterical one afternoon to publicize the fact that “Johnny couldn’t hold it anymore!” And that that’s why the room reeked just like when you’re downwind from the mushroom farm after it rains. To this day, there are those who still call me “Pants”. That’s short for “Pants Load”. Gee. Pete. Thanks for the childhood scar that just keeps right on giving. Ya prick.

“Hold on, ya moron. I gotta find my frickin’ keys.”, I shot back as I continued to feel up the parking lot under my car.

“Well, hurry up about it, will ya! We don’t have all damn night. This is urgent, man!”

Yeah. So’s finding my keys so I can finally blow this dump, moron.

Clink, clink. Rattle, rattle.

Got ‘em! Now behave yourself there “Mr. Square Pants”. Or I’ll dump your little yellow hide for a “Squidward” model, pal.

Now, what in the hell is this blazing bug crawling up Culbertson’s caboose, anyway?

I sauntered up to his late-model jet black Mustang convertible. Pretty damn cool car, actually, I gotta admit.

With the top down on this warm and sticky summer night, I could see that he had two sidekicks with him. As high as I was, neither one of them looked familiar in the dim light of the Qwik-Mart parking lot. I’m pretty sure they were both dudes, though.

One of ‘em looked prissy to me. O.K. I don’t know why in the hell this is, but when I’m baked, my “Gaydar” seems to switch into super sensory mode. Hey, not that there’s anything wrong with that, though, right?

The figure in the back seat had really long hair and was wearing Ray-Bans, so it was pretty hard to determine gender status one way or another. Gee. I wonder it they’re stoned?

“Enter the ‘stang, Johnny boy. We need you to see something. Gonna blow your crap right away, man.”

“Well, before I join your little threesome here, Petey, what exactly is this thing I need to see, anyhow?

“Can’t tell ya now, John. Not here. But trust me. You gotta check this out for sure.”

‘Why me, man?”, I wanted to know, my curiosity naturally beginning to grow at this point.

“’Cuz you were Pre-Med, man. That is until you dropped out at State. And we need an expert medical opinion. Or at least as near as we can get. Now come on. Get your tail end in the car!”

O.K. First of all, I was a Marine Biology major. Yeah, that’s pretty close to Pre-Med there, bud. Still, the dude had definitely captured my interest just the same. Just what in the hell has he got up his sleeve here? I really wanted to know now.

“All right, Pete. I’ll come with you. But I’m driving my own car. I’ll follow you.”

“Oh, crap. O.K., man. But stick close and don’t lose us, wuss boy.”

So I headed back to my car, successfully negotiating the key in the lock this time. Small victories.

As I hopped behind the wheel, I saw that weirded-out fast food critic dude cornering the unfortunate fellow who’d just descended into his mind-numbing twenty-questions of hell. Wonder if that poor guy’s high? Actually, it might be an even more disturbing experience if you’re straight!

I pulled out of my stall (one-and-a-half stalls, actually. Hey. I’m toasted. Give a guy a frickin’ break), and followed Pete and his partners out of the Qwik-Mart lot and onto Grand Blanc Boulevard. I don’t know what’s so damn “grand” about it. Frickin’ things got more potholes than pavement.

Petey boy was really haulin’, man. Easy now, big boy. The cops camp out on this strip after sundown, Speed Racer.

All of the sudden, the streaking ‘stang swung a wicked hard left and slung gravel off the side road like a damn cyclone!

To my baked brain it looked like a big ol’ shower of moon rocks raining down hell from the late night skies. Damn, I wax eloquent when I’m wasted.

I negotiated the turn in a bit less spectacular fashion, then gunned it in like pursuit of Pete and his boys, or boy and girl, or whatever the hell they are.

We zipped along at quite the brisk clip for about a half-mile. And then like in a millisecond Pete stomps on the brakes.

I slammed on my stop pedal in kind, coming to a skidding, swerving sliding stop about a foot from the Mustang’s rear end.

“JESUS PETE!! What the HELL, man! What’s with the frickin’ Indy 500 deal here, dude?!”

Pete leaped out of his ride and hollered right back at me, “You’ll see here in a minute here, ya stoner slacker! You’ll see!”

Then he and Bert and Ernie started running toward a cluster of trees as they motioned for me to follow. So I did. But I don’t have any frickin’ clue why.

No sooner had I taken a step in Pete’s general direction then he starts making like a damn Tasmanian Devil, spinning on a dime and pointing emphatically and repeatedly to the ground near this giant old Oak tree.

“Look! Look at that guy! Lying right there! He’s dead! Dead as a frickin’ doornail, dead! And we found him! We were just hangin’ out chillin’, drinkin’ and tokin’, right? And Jeremy here (Pete nods his head toward “Sunglasses Boy”, who apparently now is a dude, and evidently can’t speak for himself) trips over somethin’. And it’s this frickin’ dead dude, maaaaaaaaaaaaaan!”

My cannabis-consumed cranium is struggling mightily to wrap its feeble cells around what it believes Pete is trying to tell it as I walked warily toward the source of all the agitation.

I approached the scene with abundant trepidation, a lump starting to clog up my already parched throat. Crap. I shoulda powered a serious swig of Bud on the damn drive over.

As I got over to where Pete was standing, the dude starts hopping back and forth on each leg like he has to take a whiz real bad or something.

“Look Johnny. Look man! This dude is dead! He’s frickin’ totally history, man! Check it out!”

And I was checking it out. Sure enough it was a dude. About thirty or so. Lyin’ right there in front of me. Stiff as a stick. And by the looks of it, pretty damn dead, all right.

I stared with my glassy-red eyeballs for a good, long while at the corpse, still trying to process what in the hell was happening at this moment in my otherwise mundane life. And then, just as I was about to open my mouth and utter words I’m sure were going to be most profound, I jumped back.

“DAMN! The mother just MOVED!”

All four of us yelled in unison so as to echo thunderously throughout the land:

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”

No sooner had that reverberation settled somewhere far off in the night, then we amped it up once again:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”

And then it was quiet. And we all just stood there. Four stoned stone statues. Frozen in a freaked-out fog. Unable to twitch a muscle or spit out a syllable.

Then it happened. The dead guy moved. Again. Twisting his torso in a rocking motion back and forth. And then he began to rise up. From the waist at first. And then to his knees. And finally he stood right up.

We were already four white boys. Only now we had all become an even white shade of white. Even our frickin’ tongues were white as they lay limp in our wide-agape mouths.

The dead dude just stood and stared at us staring right back at him. Nobody said a damn thing. And nobody moved.

Suddenly, and without warning, the vertical corpse took a slow but sure step toward us.

“Are you gonna frickin' kill us, dead dude?”

Hey. “Sun Glasses Guy” speaks. And his question was actually a damn good one!

However, none of us were interested in hanging around for a potential reply. But just as we were about to turn tail and get the hell outta Dodge, we hear this voice. It sounded pretty weak. But if sounded almost…alive.

And this is what it said:

“Hey! Guys! Hold on, man! I’m not dead! I’m ALIVE for crissakes! Very much ALIVE! Just take it easy now, will ya?!”

We all four stopped dead in our tracks. So to speak.

Slowly, warily, we turned around and gazed in the direction of this creepy cadaver's voice.

And again it spoke to us:

“I have this thing where sometimes I just fall asleep. Where ever I am. With no frickin’ warning at all.”

We kept right on gawking. Like stunned cows.

And then, now making his own speaking debut for the evening, “A Little Light in The Loafers” blurts out the following brilliant interrogative, “Oh, wow. So you’re like one if those dudes who has…uhhh…what’s it called again? Oh, yeah. Necrophilia?”

I had to jump in.

“No, idiot. That’s when you fornicate with dead people. He’s got narcolepsy. Right, man? Narcolepsy?”

That’s correct. I’m talking with a guy I’m still not convinced isn’t dead. Once again. Cut me some slack. I’m fried.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I’m narcoleptic. Have been since I was a kid.”

It’s finally starting to sink in to my mashed mind that this cat may not be quite as expired as first believed.

The fairy followed up:

“So what in the hell are you doin’ lyin’ out here under a tree?”

“You don’t wanna know.” came the sheepish reply.

I gotta press it now.

“Try us. You just scared the living crap out of us, man. Inquiring minds wanna know, ‘Dude formally known as Dead’. Heh-heh.”

Ol’ sleepy head looked down, kicking the ground in quiet contemplation a couple of times.

And then he began…

“All right. All right, what the hell, man. We don’t know each other, right? And I sure did scare you guys senseless, didn’t I?” he said with a wry laugh.

Even more senseless, as it happens.

“O.K. I guess I owe ya.”

And then he laughed again. A kind of embarrassed, kind of bemused sorta laugh. And then he proceeded to spin his yarn…

“So I had this date tonight with this really hot babe. Been hittin’ on her for weeks, man. Finally she says she’ll have dinner with me, right. I was stoked. So we go to this nice Italian place downtown. Cost me a frickin’ arm and a leg. A little pasta. A little wine. A little more wine. And she starts feelin’ good. Laughin’. ‘Oh, you’re so funny. I just love a guy with a sense of humor .’ Stuff like that. And all the while I’m getting’ real turned on, because I’m thinkin’ this chick is really diggin’ me, right? And where this night might ultimately end up goin’ here. Like me and her with a whole lot less of these cumbersome clothes weighing us down, man. Know what I’m sayin’, boys?”

The gradual rising between my hips indicated fully that I did. God, why do you always become so easily aroused at the mere suggestion of doin' it when you’re high. Come to think of it, same damn reason you do when you’re straight.

“Lazarus” continued…

“Finally, she’s like, ‘Hey. Can you take me home now? I think I’m ready, sugar’. And I’m like, ‘Check please’, right? So we split the restaurant and hop in my car. Which, by the way, did you guys happen to notice a light blue Camry in the vicinity by chance?”

“Yeah. It’s parked on the shoulder of the road about a half mile that way” I responded, my finger pointing to the east.

“Cool! Whew!It’s still there then. That would be mine. I better get back to it before I get my butt towed or some kinna crap.”

As he started to walk away in the direction of his car, I called out to him:

“Hey! Aren’t you gonna finish your story?! So did you attain mutual satisfaction or what?!”

He stopped and turned around to address his still-riveted audience:

“Oh. Crap. No, man. Turns out the chick shares a condo with her brother. The MMA fighter. And the damn dude was home. She asked to come in for a nightcap. But since I was now anticipating no pay-off, I declined. It was Good Night, Sayonara, Adios and no dice, pardner. Frickin’ total waste of a night, man!”

And just as he was about to turn and slip into the night to cruise away in his Camry, I called after him one more time, “But that still doesn’t tell us why in the hell you were lying out here in the frickin’ woods like this. What up with that, man?!”

“Yeah!” barked The Three Stooges in perfect unison.

Our mystery man then paused to complete his address:

“Oh. Man. So I pull over on my lonesome ride home, get out of the car and trek out into the woods. And then, just as I was about to unbuckle and stroke away my massive pent-up frustration, here comes my ol’ buddy ‘Mr. Sandman’. BAM!And the only thing I wind up slammin’ is the turf, baby. Now, aren’t you glad you asked? Ha-ha-ha!”

And with that little candid confession, the guy was gone.

“Not really.” I replied under my breath to “Dead Man Walking’s” rhetorical parting question.

“Man, I need a frickin' drink! This crap is messin’ all up with my head, yo. You boys wanna join me? I got a fresh pint of ‘Jack’ in the sled.”

“Nah. Think I’m gonna call it an evening here, Petey. That’s way more than enough excitement in one night for this kid. You youngsters go ahead and drink until such time as you are sufficiently drunk, though, OK? Later days, boys.”

As I bid goodnight to the Band of Brainless Brothers, I noticed that the “Fairy Princess” wasn’t looking so much like one now. And that’s a sure sign that I’m ramping down off my high. Well now. We’re just gonna have to do something about that then, aren’t we?

Man. One of these days I’m gonna have to give up the ganja. Ya know, clear my head. Get my crap all together. Make a life to be proud of. Blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Some day.

As I got back to my car and slowly slumped back into the driver’s seat of my trusty ‘yota, I instinctively leaned forward to rifle through the ashtray in pursuit of a “live” roach. Yet before I began scrounging for that last precious toke or two, I reached into the brown paper bag resting next to me on the passenger seat and popped the top of my now semi-tepid Bud at long last.

But before downing that much anticipated first throat-drenching swig, I released a bodacious breath of relief as I consoled myself out loud, “But this day would definitely not be that fricking day.”

Now, if I could just remember what the hell the damn batteries are for!