Cocaine Flashback

As the peyote flashback ends, Josh is caught up in another memory.

He'd been fourteen, and on the red-eye to New York to visit his grandparents.

He'd been bored and jittery as ever, and he hadn't wanted to go on the trip anyway, wanted to be literally anywhere else for that matter, but his parents had insisted, especially as the grands were both completely loaded and not in the best of health. He was seated across from an older, balding man with glasses with a serious case of his own red-eye brewing.

Two hours into the trip and the guy had struck up a conversation. "Goin' to find the American dream, huh, kid?" He squinted at him. Josh saw his eyes were pinpricks.

"Something like that," Josh had replied. He'd always been cautioned about speaking to strangers, but it wasn't as if there was anything else to do.

"An' you don't wanna chase it. I can tell that, too. You ain't here because you wanna be here. You're here because someone else made you come. And I'm bettin' that someone else was the folks." He peered at Josh, squinting as if he were looking off into deep some great distance. The boy wondered just what

Josh flipped a mental coin. What the hell. Not like this guy would ever talk to anyone he knew. He'd never even see him again, most likely. "The grandparents are richer than God, see.?"

"Figures. Lemme guess--there's a will involved, right?"

"Got it in one. And my folks want to be in that will."

"Figures."

"And they're not the only ones. The rest of the family fucks themselves and each other over at every turn trying to prove they're the Best Children Ever, and I'm being sent to spend a week wearing a suit and staring at a wall while the old bastards golf and talk about how much they hate their spawn. When they're not golfing, of course, Gramps will be looking at me like I'm a piece of meat and trying to make up any excuse he can to get a little closer to me."

The man looked at him for a moment and nodded. "Kinda had a hunch it was something along those lines."

He nodded again as if he'd come to some sort of decision. After a moment, he dug into a pocket and pulled out a small brown glass vial. "Better living through chemistry."

He opened the vial and poured a small amount of a white powdery substance into the hollow between thumb and forefinger. He put his nose to it and snorted deeply , and the powder vanished. He leaned back, grimacing slightly, and then he licked the hollow clean of any trace. "Better living through chemistry," the stranger gasped.

Then he'd passed the vial to Josh. "Take a hit, just like I did. A little bit, not too much. Maybe a fourth what I just did. I don't think you can handle anywhere near as much as I got. I think you need it more than any man on earth right now."

Josh had poured a small amount of it into the hollow of thumb and forefinger, as the stranger did, and lifted it to his nose. The stuff burned as it hit his nasal passage, freezing suberzero cold and scorching hot at the same time, with a smell something like gasoline and something like nothing he'd ever smelled in his life. Four of his top teeth lost feeling immediately; the half of his face followed a minute later. He gasped and whooped at the icy burn. And then the coke his his bloodstream like liquid electricity, and a wind made of high-octane sex blew right through his brain, dispelling the sick blue funk of the last week in one orgasmic instant. "Holy FUCK," he gasped.

"Fuckin' A," the man laughed, and shook his hand. "Welcome to manhood. It only gets freakier from here. How's it feel?"

"Holy Shit," said Josh again, as the buzz ratcheted up. He licked the rest of the coke off his hand."

The stranger laughed again. "Careful, buddy. Not too much, not too often. With great power comes great responsibility and all that happy crappy." And he proceeded to hand Josh another vial, solemnly giving him directions to follow when toking, "in the spirit of Timothy Leary."

The vial the stranger gave him when he left the train got him through the rest of the week.

1. Thus begins Josh's long friendship with Hunter S. Thompson.
2. Josh next reminisces about the first time he tried Jenkem.
3. Josh asks Barbara Walters if she's ever tried cocaine.
4. Josh writes about his drug experiences in a bestselling novel.
5. Suddenly, bears explode through the walls of the train car and eat the man.
6. So what about the 'beating up 15 people and eating the monkey head' bit, doofus?

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