Mike & Pete & Tanya

This is only what was told to me.

When Mike Sturm learned that Petey Magritte had passed away, he told his wife, Diane, “The ranks are thinning,” and she nodded and went back to her scandal magazine.

Mike had known Petey Magritte since they attended second grade together in 1975. Mrs. Gallini’s class. In the Open Space. Pinetree Elementary was built without walls separating the classrooms. The floors were carpeted. It was a noisy, chaotic learning environment. The students sat at long tables and were overstimulated and usually out of control.  

Mike didn’t have very vivid memories from that particular grade but he remembered there was something called “phonics” which involved headphones and once in a while they’d get a boring Scholastic News magazine. Mrs. Gallini chewed her fingernails. Mostly Mike remembered boisterous kids and teachers yelling over each other. Schools need walls. The carpets and the phonics were bad ideas too.

Mike had genuinely liked Petey until they got to middle school and developed new interests. By the time they got to high school (1981) they hardly knew each other anymore and that was just fine with Mike who had arrived at the conclusion that Petey Magritte was kind of lame. There was some resentment there. Mike had to repeat the 9th grade while Pete (he’d discarded his nickname at this point) became an academic and athletic big shot. Their paths had diverged to opposite spheres of experience. While Pete concentrated on raising his GPA into the stratosphere and sucking up to anyone who could help strengthen his college applications, Mike discovered the wonders of weed and The Grateful Dead. He also discovered his girlfriend, Tanya. Tanya was a trip. 

She taught him how to find his soul with a flashlight (which he eventually realized, like the soul itself, was merely an illusion). She had deep, obsidian eyes and knew how to program her dreams. She could dream Mike under the table (he rarely remembered his dreams). Sometimes, when they were high, she would do her scary mind-reading routine. Mike hated the mind-reading routine. He was protective of his thoughts. He believed some things were meant to remain private. 

But otherwise they had an enthusiastic relationship. They gave their virginities to each other. That was how she described it. An exchange of precious gifts.

Naturally, Mike’s grades plummeted even further. There was too much on his plate. He couldn’t manage it all. Luckily, he decided to quit caring. Quitting and not caring would become a motif in his life. He had it all figured out. He planned to drop out of school, get his GED and follow the Dead for a year or two, selling the bead necklaces that Tanya made and tabs of quality acid. 

Mike had made the friendly acquaintance of a narrow-eyed hippie chemist who went by the alias Norman DiPlume and manufactured boffo LSD. Sheets and sheets of gorgeous mind-altering blotter acid. Norm was a sorcerer. It was rumored his product was even better than the pure pharmaceutical stuff Sandoz released in the 60s but Mike was too young to verify the claim. 

The acid was called Krazy Kat and the tabs had a little cartoon of the George Herriman character printed on them—the Ignatz brick hurtling toward his head—which was perfect because the acid itself was like a brick to the head. The stuff really boogied on the brain. It was like staying awake during a dream. 

The first time he and Tanya dropped it, she felt the presence of her deceased grandmother and she said she could smell Heaven. She also gained the temporary ability to shoot molten silver droplets from her fingertips. She called them “moondrops” and flicked them around the kitchen. Pools of silvery moonlight all over the linoleum. She warned Mike to be careful and not slip and fall. Everything was shiny, even their laughter and they could see the immense TRUTH in previously ordinary objects. Mike spent a long time staring at the Hoover vacuum cleaner. He could see it for the first time. REALLY see it with all its endless ramifications. He finally understood the vacuum cleaner. The shimmering perfection of it. It was remarkable how it dovetailed perfectly with the rest of the universe.

“It sucks up stars,” he announced in a breathless voice.

And then Tanya’s mom came home and the glittery awe they felt turned into something else and they moved outside and sat at the picnic table to finish the trip. The night seemed impossible. The darkness swirled around them like The Milky Way circling a storm drain.

“Do you feel as beautiful as I am?” Tanya asked him.

“I have no idea.”

After they came down (the trip lasted six hours), they both agreed that Krazy Kat opened more cosmic doors than anything else they’d experienced. It was a spiritual revelation on a tasteless scrap of paper and they wanted to play a part in its  dissemination. They thought they could get in on the ground floor of something profound. Acid was always a crapshoot. A lot of LSD was manufactured poorly or cut with poison. Some tabs of acid might be decorated with a rainbow or a pretty magnolia and then send you straight to Hell.

Mike remembered (with a shudder) the rancid Henry Kissinger acid they took on a school field trip to Olde Hampshire Village, a living museum depicting colonial life in the 1700s. It was the worst, most fucked-up nightmare of their young lives. They had to hold it together surrounded by psychotic actors in old-timey clothes, tending livestock. Women churning butter and using looms. Talking like Shakespeare. Everywhere they looked they saw something that freaked them out and threatened the illusion of reality. They became stranded on a wrathful planet.

The worst was watching a cow take a massive shit. Tanya actually screamed and covered her eyes. Something had swallowed her whole world and this was what it was reduced to. She could feel her cells evaporating like whispers. 

They held hands for the eternity it took them to make it through the village. It was the only thing keeping them tethered to an increasingly tenuous reality. Tanya was terrified that these unnatural, 18th century mutants were going to burn her like a witch.

“Get me away from these stupid fucking pilgrims.…” she pleaded.

But it was the horror of the cowshit that pushed her over the edge. The horror of how organic everything was. The whole history of disease was contained in the calm effortless excretion of the cow’s repulsive waste. Waste that would feed the egg-laying flies and nurture the larvae to life. And Tanya was connected to it all. One maggot among millions squirming on a big mysterious ball of shit. 

Mike considered it a minor miracle when they were finally delivered back to the bus without causing a scene.

Things didn’t work out with old Norm DiPlume. When Mike and Tanya brought up the idea of a partnership he became dangerously paranoid and asserted that the couple were undercover narcotics agents and he moved his lab to parts unknown. 

They never ate his acid again. 

Mike and Tanya hit on the idea of making acid themselves but they took one look at the chemistry in The Anarchist Cookbook and said, “Forget it.” The formula looked like Martian hieroglyphics to them.   

Mike, true to his word, dropped out of high school in his junior year and took a job at McDonald’s while he waited for Tanya to graduate. They were supposed to get married. Have babies. Grow geriatric together. When she finally graduated from high school he quit McDonald’s while Tanya fell in love with a guy named Greg MacIntosh. He was her physical therapist (Tanya had scoliosis) and they moved away to start a haphazard commune in Maine where they ran an apple stand (MacIntosh’s MacIntoshes) and Greg tried to make a living playing classical guitar on the streets of Portland. 

Nothing worked out for Tanya and Greg and they left the orchard after a year. 

Greg disappeared at some point. Tanya’s story got sketchy in the 90s but Mike eventually heard she’d ended up in Florida doing something that involved rotating brass fixtures.  

Mike never followed The Grateful Dead or got into the psychedelic-drug industry. 

Plans were made to be ruined. 

He never thought about Pete Magritte until he happened to see his obituary on his high school website. Petey had fallen into an acidic hot spring at Yellowstone Park.

“The ranks are thinning,” Mike said to his wife, Diane.

“Yeah, you already said that,” she told him, flipping another page.