The Funhouse

took another turn on the Loop-de-Loop, and then suddenly they were all starving. It was a drug-induced hunger, the insatiable appetite familiar to all serious pot smokers. They ate hot dogs, ice cream, and candy apples.
        Eventually they found themselves in front of the funhouse.
        A big man in a Frankenstein costume capered on a low platform, threatening the people who were boarding the cars to go into the funhouse. He waved his arms and snarled and jumped up and down in a terrible imitation of Boris Karloff.
        “He's a real ham,” Richie said.
        They moved a few feet to the barker's plat form, where a tall, distinguished-looking man was ballying the passing crowd. He looked down at them as he talked, and he had the bluest eyes Amy had ever seen. After a few seconds, she realized that the giant clown's face atop the building had been painted in the barker's image.
        “Terror-fying! Terror-fying!” the barker shouted. “Goblins, ghosts, and ghouls! Spiders larger than men! Monsters from other worlds and from the darkest bowels of this one! Are all of the creatures that stalk the funhouse merely make i. believe… or is one of them real? See for yourself! Learn the truth at your own peril! Can you stand the test, the tension, the fear? Are you man enough? Ladies, are your men strong enough to comfort you inside… or will you have to comfort them? Terror-fying!”
        “I love to go through the funhouse when I'm high as a kite,” Liz said. “When you're really, truly wrecked, it's a gas. All those dumb plastic monsters jumping out at you.”
        , “So let's go,” Richie said.
        “No, no,” Liz said. “We've got to save it until ~ we're really high.”
        “I'm really high now,” Amy said.
        “Me too,” Buzz said.
        “Oh, we'll get more wasted than this ,” Liz said. “This is nothing.”
        “If I get more wasted than this,” Richie said, “I'll have to be institutionalized.”
        “Make it a cell for two,” Buzz said.
        “That's the idea,” Liz said excitedly. “You've got to be really wrecked to fully appreciate the funhouse.”
        Not me, Amy reminded herself. No more dope tonight. No more dope ever.
        They bought tickets for a ride called the Slithering Snake. The man at the controls was a dwarf, and while Liz waited for the ride to start, she teased the little man, made jokes about his height. He glared at Liz, and Amy wished her friend would shut up. When the Slithering Snake finally began to move, the dwarf got his revenge, he gave it much more speed than usual, and the chain of cars flashed around the looping, rising, falling track so fast that Amy was terrified it was going to fly off the rails. What should have been a thrilling ride became a knuckle-whitening, stomach-clenching ordeal, a sweat-popping torture that seemed like it would never end. Incredibly, even under those conditions, when the automatic canvas cover closed over the fast-moving train, Buzz took advantage of the darkness to take advantage of Amy, his hands were all over her.
        This whole night is like the Slithering Snake, Amy thought. It's out of control.
        After they rode the Octopus again, after they gleefully bashed each other around in the bumper cars once more, they returned to the cul-de-sac behind the carnival trucks, at the perimeter of the fairgrounds, and Liz stoked up another of her specially spiced joints. Darkness had come to the fairgrounds now, and they weren't able to see each other clearly as they passed the reefer around. They made jokes about some stranger stepping out of the darkness and taking a toke without anyone being the wiser, and they kidded each other about seeing freaks hiding under the trucks around them.
        Amy tried to fake it when the joint came to her. She took a drag on it, but she didn't inhale. She held the smoke in her mouth for a moment, then blew it out.
        Even in the darkness, with only the glowing tip of the cigarette and the sound of indrawn breath to judge by, Liz realized that Amy hadn't really taken a good pull on the weed. “Don't hold back on us, kid,” she said sharply. “Don't be a party pooper.”
        “I don't know what you mean,” Amy said.
        “Like hell you don't. Take another hit on that joint. When I'm wasted I like a lot of company in the same condition.”
        Rather than irritate Liz, Amy took another drag on the joint and sucked the smoke deep