Incense and Peppermints

Tommy remained in bed, determined to enjoy the morning. Incense and Peppermints played on the radio again. Tommy liked the song okay but they played it way too much. He preferred stuff with a darker, harder edge. Purple Haze was a way better song. Light My Fire too. But at least The Strawberry Alarm Clock were better than the fucking Monkees.

Tommy had opinions. He always felt correct. His confidence was an immaculate engine powering his mind. He prided himself on his control and self-restraint. He was constantly throwing himself chemical curveballs and he always hit `em out of the park. 

Every damn time.

He remained locked into reality like a soldier on an active battlefield.

He gazed at the ceiling and concentrated on the song. He would turn eighteen in six months. Thoughts of battlefields were to be avoided until then.

Especially at this moment.

He felt his bedsheets melting over him in a weightless embrace. It was like being smothered under warm neutral amniotic fluid.   

The acid he’d dropped was taking effect and he felt the telltale nervous tingling in his bowels. Why did good acid always make him have to shit? It was an unfortunate side effect of a beautiful experience. While his mind was bursting with vivid impossible colors and assembling detailed geometric architecture, all his lower half wanted to do was poop.   

Herman Bardum tapped on the window, startling Tommy from his psychedelic reverie. Tommy reached for the window from his bed, lifted it open.

“Hey man,” Herman said. “You score yet?”

“Yeah. What d’you need?”

“Can you spare me six?”

“I can do that.” 

Tommy had journeyed through school with Herman from first grade onward. They’d both graduated from Eli Whitney High School two months ago.

 Tommy sold Herman six tabs of Red Firefly acid.

Herman studied the tiny illustrations on the paper squares.“Where’d you get it?”

“New guy. He’s a traveling chemist. Calls himself Doctor Robert.”

“Like the Beatles song.”

“Yeah, pretty lame. But he’s old. Damn near thirty. Drives a purple hearse around the whole country selling his home-brewed psychedelic medicine.”

“Kooky. You sample his wares yet?” Herman asked.

“Just started coming on now as a matter of fact.”

“Anything to write home about?”

“Too soon to tell, man. Feels like it might turn out to be a real volcano peak. Eruption incoming.”

“Yeah? Wow. That’s cool. How many mics?”

“Hell if I know. I didn’t ask. A lot, probably.”

“Yeah, we can always dream. Guess I’ll catch you later then, man. Thanks a lot.”

“Yeah, okay my man. Keep it real.”

Later…

Tommy navigated his ass to the bathroom, seated himself and crapped a squirming school of purple polliwogs into the cold, churning sea beneath him. He felt like chanting a mantra to protect his sanity but was suddenly afraid to utter utterances. Utterly.

Control. That’s what’s needed now. That’s the key, Pilgrim. 

The toilet paper was melting like hot putty and hard to handle but he managed to wipe himself and flush the toilet. Screaming faces from Hell gurgled and swirled back to the watery underworld where they belonged. 

Volcano peak. Goddamn right. Woo-eee.

He went back to his bed as if it were a liferaft. 

The radio was playing Incense and Peppermints again. What the Christ. Did he miss the death of time? The thought that Herman might be about to tap on his window looking to score occurred to him. He dismissed the idea as paranoid trip silliness. 

And then there was a tap at the window.

Keep cool, Pilgrim. Time simply DOES NOT repeat itself. That whole episode with Herman is gone, man. Long gone. It ain’t never coming back. A melting backwards Dali watch doesn’t exist just because there are chemicals dancing in your brain. Time doesn’t feed back or loop itself.

Again: Tap tap tap. 

He looked at the window, bracing himself for Herman’s pimple-pebbled face and red mutton chops again.

He relaxed (sort of) when he saw Sandy Wilkins’ young round face at the window.

Oh shit, man. Too mucking fuch.  

That was as close to panic as he ever wanted to get. 

“Hey there, kemosabe,” Sandy said, flashing her bright smile. 

She had a gap between her two front teeth that reminded Tommy of a porcelain clamp or vise spilling silver everywhere and he caught himself drifting into hallucination and tried to anchor his thoughts back to the original thought—something about a porcelain clamp but he didn’t know what that was anymore. What had he meant by that?

“You okay, Tommy?”

“Uh, yeah. Hey, baby. What’s happening?”

She shrugged. “Um, Herman said you were holding blotters.”

“Herman has a big mouth.”

“Yeah, I know. Huge. Anyway, is it true?”

“That he has a big mouth?”

She giggled. “No, dummy. Is it true you’re selling acid?” 

“It just happens to be.”

“Mind if I buy some?” She giggled again in an awkward, self-conscious way.

Tommy looked at her. Her bright green eyes were leaking multi-colored droplets down her pulsating cheeks. It made him recall a lake under a dome outside a supermarket he visited in a dream once. The neighborhood behind her had become a gently rustling tissue-paper backdrop, shivering in a breeze stirred by invisible pulsating breaths in his peripheral vision.

“How old are you again?” he asked her. Sandy was a small slip of a girl. She was part of a big family (six siblings) that lived behind the neighborhood.

“Sixteen last October,” she informed him.

“Ever tripped before?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m not a fucken baby.”

“You are to me,” he said and suddenly she was. She was an infant in a playpen, holding a rattle made of jangling bones, gnawing on a purple pacifier and drooling tropical dewdrops that glittered like diamonds in the dirt. 

“Oh Christ sake shit,” he murmured through gritted teeth. 

Ground yourself, Bucko. And stay that way. Stay sane. Please.

“What’s wrong?” the big baby said. Her words hit the thickening atmosphere like the sighing aroma of hot cerulean cereal falling from Heaven. Like warm radioactive snow. Hiroshima in a cloudy bowl of cooling soup. 

“Nothing. Just happen to be tripping my balls off at the moment,” he confessed. “Pardon my French.”

“I can dig it,” Sandy said. “So, could I get a couple of hits?”

“I, uh. I don’t know. I’m really very, y’know, verily—I mean very, uh…”

“Aw come on, Tommy. Pleeease?”

Sandy’s mouth drooped until it oozed straight off her face and dribbled onto the windowsill in thin rivulets and small spatters that were the same pinkish color as her tongue and gums. Crimson fireflies ignited in the glittering gloom, orbiting her head like a halo. The trees behind her bent and waved, swaying like tentacles. 

“Uh…” Tommy said as small squids plopped from his nostrils and swam away into shimmering shafts of daylight, emitting Technicolor ink in their vaporous wake.

Herman sidled up beside Sandy, his eyes like saucers. “Hey man,” he said in a muffled, monotone voice as if his throat were clogged with cotton. “What did you do to me?”  

“Whaddaya mean?” Tommy asked, surprised he still understood English. Could form words. Articulate and convey meaning under the tangled weight of sheer incomprehensibility.   

“What did you do to me?” Herman repeated.

“Nothing,” Tommy said.

“This ain’t normal,” Herman told him. “Everything’s different now.”

“Yeah, no shit, man. It’s fucking LSD, Herman. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

“No. Not like this. This’s different.”

Sandy giggled and took a step back. “Wow. That must be some good shit. You’ve gone tutti-frutti, Herman.”

“It’s powerful stuff,” Tommy admitted. “I’m barely hanging on myself.”

“This is wrong,” Herman said. “What you did to me.”

“Did you take all six hits at once or something?” Tommy wondered. 

Herman looked through Tommy, staring into a secondary universe. Then he wandered away from the window, muttering. “You did this to me…”

Sandy watched him walk off and then turned to Tommy. “Two tabs of what Herman took, please.”

“Yeah, okay. Gimme a minute.” He leaned away from the window and rolled over. He kept his sheets of acid in a tinfoil folder on the little table beside his bed. He closed the folder by squeezing it shut with clamping hands. Now he needed all his powers of concentration and restraint to peel it open again. It was like performing open-heart surgery on a living thing. Unclenching the folder had to be handled with delicate precision. The foil was breathing. Pulsing. Tommy got lost in the silvery valves and veins and membranes. His fingers worked the wound, trying to pry it open. What would he see when he parted the metallic walls of the incision? An eye peering out at him? Or another tinfoil heart? Maybe there was another heart within this heart and another heart within that and it repeated into infinity. Like a recursive reflection tumbling downward into a microscopic world. A tower imploding and dragging the whole buckling structure in on itself forever.

Tommy tried to shake off these impossible thoughts so he could open the goddamn tinfoil. The fearsome realization that he may have flown too close to the collapsing sun clawed at him. The dark fact that he might not recover his sanity this time occurred to him with flashing canine teeth. Herman was right. This was wrong. Everything was different. There was no reference point to grasp. He was in uncharted territory. Something huge was siphoning his mind. A vacuum sucking up his thoughts like crumbs in a shag carpet.

And still his fingers worked at the flat of foil. 

Contain yourself. 

What else do you contain?

Primpisol vacuity in a blorquine splut. 

Brassslommmnux end fissures under a mollozat quass.

Blorp ug.

Sandy tapped the window behind him and Tommy turned to the sound, sure it was Morse code clicking across a telegraph line direct from the bowels of Hell. 

His window was a square porthole looking out on a vast churning sea.

“Blatch pomegranate,” he said.

“What?” Sandy giggled again. It sounded like Raisinets falling on the back of a weary, lumbering rhinoceros. “C’mon Tommy. I’ve been waiting like ten minutes while you fiddled with tinfoil. You gone loco or something?”

“Yeah. Something,” he said and the words tasted like orangutan arms reaching out from a rabbit’s asshole.

He handed Sandy the whole tinfoil bank of acid. 

“Here, take it. I don’t want it. Get it away from me.”

Sandy grabbed the flat of foil and peeled it open. There were two and a half sheets of Red Firefly inside. “I don’t need this much,” she said.

“Just take it. On the house. I never wanna see it again. Just go.”

“Um, okay I guess. But what do I—“

Tommy closed the window on her question and settled back in his bed.

Incense and Peppermints drizzled from a radio of melting wax.

Yet again.

There was a tap at the window and Tommy buried his head under his pillow, launching himself into outer space on a rocket made of puckered red molecules.

Dr. Robert was evil. A mad scientist creating monstrous thoughts in his patients. Tommy felt like a test subject on a sled to Hell.

This ain’t right, Pilgrim. 

His head was a raw broken egg. His native language had become the buzz of a thousand lawnmowers. 

Tommy clenched his teeth. He remembered he’d be eligible for the draft soon. 

That was the thought that attacked his racing brain with razors of surgical steel. 

The really bad trip had begun.

None of this was right. It was all wrong.

Incense and Peppermints started playing on the radio again.