Short Story: Meatwagon

This is a short story I wrote shortly after reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Does it show?

Speeding in the Meatwagon was something else. I imagine that an electric eel on a slip n’ slide would feel much the same way that I did shooting down Oyster Hollow Road, low to the ground, feeling the the bald tires hydroplaning in the rain every time I cranked the steering wheel around a curve, praying that I didn’t roll on up and over the curb into martyrdom. 

I was high, of course. Not terribly, I’d only had a whiff of Satan’s spinach, but it smoothed out my frontal lobe enough to make the drive seem unreal. The water screamed down above me. The trees closed in all around me. My head stuck out the window on the straightaways and my mouth gaped, trying to catch some water on its lengua seca. Then, suddenly, the signal finally made its way from my eyes to my medulla that the road ahead was ending, and in a moment I’d smash through the chain separating the pavement from the sand. Not wanting to careen into the ocean, I whipped into my destination, narrowly missing a cannon sticking out from the ground. Swords to plowshares, guns to bollards.

I opened the door and let the rain wash over me.  The epinephrine in my veins mixed with the cannabinoids in my brain, making me extra wired. My adrenal glands twisting my mind, I walked towards the building that sat ensconced in the center of the parking lot. Remember the mission, I said to myself, remember what you’re here for. 

     How do the drugs of an era define an era? In the sixties, it was the psychedelics. Expand the mind. New horizons, new technologies, new possibilities. The babies had been boomed, and the biggest boom brought a brand new world to bare. Nukes, man. Crazy stuff 

     Then you get Nixon times. Downers, crushers, reds, smack. Keep your head down, the man is watching. Keep low and slow, like the Meatwagon. Meaty. Wagonesque. As the economy slumps, so does the populace. 

     Then coke zips in! Jump around, baby, fly! Reagan! Pretend things are okay! Ignore the sadness, the poverty, the walking corpses in every city being eaten away from within! Powder on your nose, powder in your head, gold dust in your palm! Just soar! 

     And then crash. Hard. And it doesn’t seem like we’ve come back from then. Oxy. Fentanyl. Back to the downers. Biden like Carter, both trying to claw back some fragment of the American Dream that the elephants smashed to pieces under a golden toilet in a New York apartment. 

   But that’s why I’m here at this dingy little shack. Right. Okay. Let’s blow these little fuckers’ MINDS!  

      This is the cold spring that gives Cold Spring Hills it’s name. A violent thing that, if I remember correctly, killed the man who discovered it. A fisherman, I think, John something or other, heard a gurgling under a bunch of rocks. He started poking around then BAM! Head popped off like a bottle cap, a huge, icy, delicious jet of water spraying his blood 50 feet up. 

      But by the time I was there, the spring has been conquered. It sat in a little boxy building full of pipes and pumps and provided fresh water to all the people in Cold Spring Hills. The security here amounted to two cameras, one facing the parking lot, the other facing the door. But those didn’t worry me: the Meatwagon had no plates, and my face was covered with a psychedelic ski mask, spotted and swiped with orange and green and blue and purple. I was both fabulous and unidentifiable. 

      I was about to try the door when I realized I’d left the key ingredient in my trunk: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. I skipped back to the car, popped the trunk, pulled out a gallon milk jug full of the stuff, and came back to the door. A good hard kick did the trick, knocking the door off it’s hinges like John Somethingorothers head off his neck. Now it was just a matter of turning off the water for a spell, dumping the bottle into the main potable water pipe, then turning the whole thing back on again. Deliver joy and revelation and understanding, for free, to a whole town of rich, lazy punks. For free, mind you. I ought to be charging for this, but I’m just such a damn nice guy, I guess. 

     There were so many pipes in the goddamn room, I had no idea what to do. Everything was labeled in some strange, alien hieroglyphics, twisting like snakes along the length of white label tags. The pipes heaved and breathed like the arteries of a living creature. The walls seemed to pulsate around me. I turned the crank on the big blue pipe in the center of the room clockwise, with all my zooted might (which, of course, wasn’t much). When I thought I shut the thing off, I took out a wrench from my pocket and used it to open a maintenance port in the mess of pipes. I then proceeded to dump in my bottle of LSD. 

     Down the hatch! I shut the pipe up, and turned the water back on. Mission: Complete. 

     Or so I thought. You see, the pipe I put the Lucy into was a drainage tube. It went right into the ocean— some fish had a wacky weekend, and I think I heard about one fishing charter going slinky a week later, but that’s about it. Heck, I’m not even sure that was Lucy. The guy I bought it from was skeeze central, and I remember thinking it was very cheap for a gallon of one of the strongest hallucinogens known to mankind. But what the heck. No harm, no foul. Next time, I’ll start small. The water fountains at the high school, maybe, or the country club’s private reservoir in Daisy Hill. 

     Next time.