The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

everyone around me. “What is this? What’s happening? Somebody!”
    Nancy reaches out to me, and I push her away and find Teresa. She takes me into her car—dark, factory-scented and claustrophobic—and tries to soothe me, telling me that the other car is just painted red, and the red looks like blood because of the wet rain on it. But I’m completely paranoid: dead toads, cops, a bloody car. I see the connection. Everyone’s against me. I can hear myself screaming, but I don’t know what I’m saying. I try to get out of the car. I do it by punching the windshield, putting my fist through the supposedly shatter-proof glass. The cracks in the glass spiderweb around my hand, and my bleeding knuckles look like a row of open sewer pipes gushing waste.

    Then we sit, and Teresa whispers things in my ear and tells me she knows what I’m feeling. I believe her, and I think she believes herself too. We enter that acid mind-meld where we don’t have to talk anymore to know what each other is thinking, and I begin to calm down.
    We return to the party. People are still there, though there are less of them, and there’s no evidence that the cops have ever been there. Just as I’m beginning to cross the border from bad drug experience to tolerable one, someone—not realizing I’m tripping my balls off—tries to push me in the pool as a joke. It doesn’t take a math major to figure out that acid plus swimming pool equals certain death. So I panic and start flailing. Soon, we’re locked in a fistfight, and I’m tearing at him like he’s a doll I’m trying to mutilate. I punch him in the face with my raw, skinless knuckles and don’t even feel the pain.
    After he stumbles out of range, I notice everyone staring at me slack-jawed. “Listen, let’s just go over to my house,” I say to the people around me. We pile into the car—it’s me, my girlfriend, Nancy and her boyfriend—the exact four ingredients necessary in a recipe for personal misery. Back at my parents’ town house, we make our way to my room, where we find Stephen, my keyboardless keyboardist, lying on the bed like gasoline waiting for a match. He tries to interest us in the video he is watching, Slaughterhouse Five , the kind of strange, disconnected head-trip film you don’t want to think about when you’re on acid.
    Carl instantly gets engrossed in the movie, the television glow playing on his open, drooling jaw. Without saying a word, Nancy stands up hastily—annoyingly—and marches to the bathroom. I’m sitting on the bed with my girlfriend, my mind flashing in the same way the movie is flickering on Carl. Stephen is babbling about how the special effects in the movie were done. From the bathroom, I hear a spastic scratching sound, like the claws of dozens of rats skittering around the bathtub. In a rare moment of lucidity, I realize that the sound is of a pencil writing furiously on paper. The sound grows louder and louder, drowning out the TV, Stephen and everything else in the room, and I know that Nancy is writing something that is going to completely make me miserable and ruin my life. The louder the sound surges, the more crazy and twisted I imagine the words getting.
    Nancy emerges from the bathroom in a blaze of vindictive glory and hands me the note. No one else seems to notice. This is between us. I look into the television to gather my strength. I’m staring at it so hard that I can’t even focus on the picture anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even look like a TV. It looks like a strobe light. I turn away, and look at Nancy. But I don’t see Nancy. I see a beautiful, pouty woman with long, blow-dried blond hair and an Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt hiding her curves. It must be the woman from the telephone… Traci.

    Instead of pencil scratching, I hear David Bowie: “I. I will be king. And you. You will be queen.”
    I have Traci’s fingers in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. We’re standing on a balcony at a party, which seems to be in my honor. “I never knew you were all this,” she purrs, apologizing for something in the past I’m unaware of. “I thought you were something different.”
    There are lights and flashbulbs, Bowie is singing “We could be heroes just for one day,” and everybody is smiling ingratiatingly at us. She seems to be as