Uncle Drew's Lysergic Backbrain Apocalypse (Slight Return)

Once again, Monday and Tuesday were my weekend. I sat alone in my little apartment and looked over my riches. I had amassed almost fifty hits of the flying cats and there would be no more forthcoming anytime soon----I would have to be conservative from here on in, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to have me one or two more good, hard acid blowouts.

I told myself I could handle five hits. I wanted to bend my damned cranium inside out.

Five hits. I blasted the Ramones in the headphones because they weren’t the Grateful Dead. It didn’t do anything for me but I let it go. I came on to the vision of punks with thick, yellow streams of snot streaming from their red noses, beating each other bloody. I was there, but it wasn’t enough. I switched over to the first Velvet Underground album and listened to the song, “European Son”, five or six times in a row. My brain felt like water running through a strainer. Across the room the TV was on…an anchorman was soundlessly delivering the news with a smile on his face. He looked like he might be part boar. I listened to the din of the Velvets and the news station logo behind him became iconic and eternal in my mind. I imagined the anchorman liked taking it up the ass and he was getting anally tickled by the youngish, Asian-American weatherman. Maybe H.G. Wells and the Grateful Dead were along for the ride.

As the record finally fought its way off the groove with the last howl of feedback, I heard a din from outside in the street. As I approached the front window, the night sky looked like a strobe light. Voices were coming through bullhorns. Cop cars were moving slowly and deliberately up and down the street.

“ATTENTION ASH STREET RESIDENTS! ROAD WORK WILL BEGIN ON ASH STREET AT FOUR O’CLOCK TOMORROW MORNING. YOU HAVE UNTIL THREE O’CLOCK TO MOVE YOUR CARS OR THEY WILL BE TOWED!!!”

I thought that was a dick move, but I was a pedestrian and it really didn’t affect me. They came for the Jews, but I didn’t say anything---after all, I wasn’t Jewish.

I know the analogy may be lost on you. I’m not sure if anyone knows what a Jew is anymore.

The whole tableau became increasingly disconcerting. Lights were all over the skies---I could hear the beating blades of helicopters, searching, searching. Army tanks joined the cruisers in the street and eventually, massive configurations of shimmering, smiling fuscia cats began cascading past the windows in titanic formations resembling swastikas. They were all smiling at me.

I couldn’t take anymore. I shut off all the lights. I imagined all would be fine if they

couldn’t see me. I ran into my bedroom and pulled all the shades. I buried myself under the covers but the speeding effect was rattling me to my core. I couldn’t shut out the flickering pink and lavender light outside my window.

Soon everything in my mind collapsed like a rusty hamster wheel from hell…and I mean that literally---I could hear the iron spokes screeching and bending and the whole damn thing fell over and crashed in a cacophony of scrapes, pops and syllables. Language fell apart in my head. Reason fell apart. History fell apart. I know there’s no way you can understand this.

My mind went back to jabbering, apelike ancestors shambling around like hunters and gatherers…but they were monkeying around 1950s TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver suburbs…screeching simian June Cleavers in pretty, floral print yellow aprons sat in spiffy, futuristic kitchens flinging poop at their ape children. The whitest whites melted into the brownest browns. Knots of mold and mildew did extraordinary dances like hungry boa constrictors across wallpaper. Antiquated, sepia pictures of old, beloved relatives warped and bent---they turned piss yellow and the faces went all Frankenstein.

Rumors of war, gas chambers and pogroms…a mass exodus into the wilderness under the brute fist of Cro-Magnon technology. Dirt over mass graves….mushroom clouds….yammering apefolk with naught but the shirts on their backs leaving mouldering homes, gibbering at errant children, picking shit out their asses and running for refuge in the foothills…..

I imagined I slept and maybe I did….slackjawed ancestors yammered primordial codes in my ear…we knew so little about that, then….before our ancestors returned.

At some indeterminate time Tuesday I got up…I may have slept at one point or another---I couldn’t tell you for sure...I was sure all that nonsense about Neanderthal Leave it to Beaver families and Mushroom Clouds was just flying cat fancy---but you could never be too sure.

Road work was going on in the street below, but it was negotiable…I had to get out of there.

Back at that time there was a two-dollar theater downtown where you could go see movies---they were movies that had stopped playing everywhere else. I spent the whole day there----I watched three different movies. I couldn’t tell you which movies I saw. By the end of the day I was convinced everything was alright and I went back home. I slept the sleep of dead simian forbears.

My work week blasted by…Candi wouldn’t talk to me---not that I blame her at this point. Not a lot of people would….David talked music with me….David and the guys. I tried telling Protein Bob and Terry about what I’d been through.

Terry shook his head. “You don’t wanna do that much acid,” he told me. “You know, after ten hits you’re legally insane. That’s the Law.”

“The Law?”

“That’s state law….look it up.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Look it up.”

“Naw,” I said, “fuck that shit---it’s an old wives’ tale. If that’s so they can put me on disability.”

“They will,” said Bob, “but they’ll give you electroshock ’til you can’t function anymore, first.”

“Bull fuckin’ shit…”

“It’s true, “said Terry. “Look it up!”

“Bull fuckin’ shit,” I said. This was somewhere along the lines of Drew telling me I shouldn’t look in a mirror for fear of getting stuck there. It was goofy, spooky shit acid heads told other acid heads in order to freak them out.

“I’m not shitting you,” said Terry, his laconic smile breaking across his face. “Look it up.”

Typical acid freak head game…I wasn’t buying it, ever. Never trust an acid head. Never trust an acid head.