My Weekend With Mike: The Whole Terrible Saga pt.3/4

 

 

(The story so far: Psykosity has been effectively kidnapped by his younger brother Mike, under the pretense of going to a “Biker” gathering on the spur of the moment. AGAINST HIS WILL, Psykosity has been force-fed copious amounts of alcohol and substances, both legal and illegal in most states. The truck that Mike is driving is little more than a rolling death machine: Nothing on the dash board works but the radio, the passenger door has fallen off, the exhaust is held onto the bottom of the vehicle by wires, and there is a constant smell of smoke, burnt wires and…sauerkraut??? We pick up the story as our intrepid adventurers arrive at the gathering. The event is being held in a gravel pit. Things look grim…)

Mike parked the truck and shut off the motor. For the first time in a little over an hour, I didn’t have to scream over the metal-on-metal screeching of the motor and the contemptible sounding radio turned up full blast. Mike opened up the vial and soaked a handkerchief with the contents and held it up to his nose. It was at this moment that everything I had drank, smoked, or otherwise ingested, had finally kicked in. That’s when Mike shoved the handkerchief under my nose…

Hunter S. Thompson called it “Demon Ether”. A straight body drug. Your mind is largely unaffected, but trying to operate your body is like trying to run a backhoe with no idea of what all the levers are for. Though Mike was now operating on the level of a dumb, drunken animal when he managed to get me into the wheelchair, my situation was far dire: I was little more than a breathing bag of body parts and serious weirdness. I was almost at the verge of having an out of body experience when we plunged into the maw of the fat, sweaty, writhing mass of leather clad humanity.

There was a makeshift stage where a band was playing fast, loud, and angry, and the singer was screaming through a terrible P.A. system: the sounded was like loud white noise with a beat. I managed to look around, but couldn’t see much: Mike was having a terrible time getting me through the crowd on the gravel bed of the pit, and from my vantage point in the wheelchair, all I could see was big, fat rear ends and stomachs the size of bean bag chairs. It was then I smelled…food?

“FUUUUD!” I yelled up at Mike, managing to get my arm to point to the other side of the crowd.

“WHA?” bellowed my brother, bending over and screaming in my ear, almost losing his balance and catching himself before he fell over into my lap.

“FUUUUUD!” I shouted again, finally getting him to notice the tables full of fried chicken, salads, and burgers on the other side of the pit.

Mike tipped me up on the two back wheels and shoved me through the crowd towards the food tables. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I needed to get something real into my body. I managed to get a couple of rolls, something in my stomach to soak up some of the alcohol. There was lots of water…I got a couple of bottles and started gulping the liquid down, spilling a lot of it, but I knew water into my system would help later on. Then, I saw some small bottles of orange juice.

Orange juice would help cut the effects of some of the substances I had coursing through my system. Between the hallucinogenic mushrooms and the constant, never ending, overly distorted, pulsing noise of the band, I was beginning to experience some rather particular sensory perceptions: the people gathered were turning into leather-clad, chain wearing, menacing looking blobs. The crowd was melting into a formless mass moving to the beat of the noise, ever changing, forming into a huge, almost demonic. fluidic organism. I could make out some Confederate flags scattered through the crowd, and there were some other flags and banners flying above the mass of fat balls writhing around us that I could not make out.

The orange juice was beginning to help bring me back down and the ether was starting to wear off. I could actually speak and operate my arms again though I was still slurring my words and my arms felt like they were made of wood. Mike was talking to a few people at the food tables, but I would not let him drift off. In the chair, on this gravel, I would be screwed if things got strange. I knew he had a fully loaded Glock under his jacket. He never went anywhere unarmed.

After a few hours and my third bottle of orange juice, my mind started to clear.

The sun had gone down. The night had come, hot and muggy, and bathed everything in moonlight.

I looked around to see if I could find my brother in the smocking-wetness of the mass of sweaty bodies and found him shaking hands with a huge, hairy mound of flesh wearing more leather than a sex shop. Then, he looked up; off into the crowd smashing together in the mash pit in front of the makeshift bandstand and, seeing SOMETHING in the crowd that made him almost instinctively reach for his gun, he immediately turned and rushed over to me.

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SCREAMING ABOUT?” shouted my brother as he ran around behind me to grab the handles of my wheelchair.

"Are you having some kind of brain bleed? I asked him. "I haven't said a WORD!"

It was then I turned around and looked up a hill that was just off to the right of the crowd, and I noticed a structure on top of the hill, surrounded by a few men with gas cans. 

The structure was a giant cross, and the men with the gas cans were wearing robes...

Ok. Fine.

Apparently, we're partying with the KKK tonight.

Good people. Salt of the Earth.

I looked back at him, chuckling.

“I've never been to one of THESE before...”

"WE CAN'T STAY!" he said, whirling me around in the chair and pointing me in the direction of the truck.

"What are you TALKING about?" I exclaimed as he began manhandling me through the dense glom of humanity that stood between us and the dilapidated Death Truck.

"There are two groups here that are seriously bad news and they both hate each other!! he shouted, huffing as he moved me slowly through the crowd. "I think there is about to be some bloodshed!"

Mike grabbed the back of the wheelchair and began to force us through the gelatinous aggregation of humanity. 

"Right at the moment, I'm not on good terms with the leader of one of the groups. He owes me money and I'm pretty sure, as long as he has his boys around him and there is going to be a fight anyway, he would rather shoot both of us than pay up!"

"Oh," I said, my head bobbing with every bounce over the uneven ground, "what an 'upstanding guy' thing to do! If that's the case, we should probably leave..."

“Do you THINK so, Professor?” Mike said sarcastically as he bent down and started to pour ether onto his handkerchief again.

“NOW?” I exclaimed. “YOUR PLAN IS TO GET WHACKED OUT ON ETHER NOW???”

Mike shoved the handkerchief under my nose.

“Take deep breaths, then start screaming and try to lurch around in your chair. I will get us out of here!” He instructed.

Suddenly, my body felt heavy. I slumped down in my chair.

“AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHH! AAAAAUUUUUGGGHHHH!” I screamed, trying my best to work my body back in forth in the wheelchair.

“GIVE WAY, PEOPLE!” my brother shouted as he shoved me through the parting crowd. “GIVE WAY, PEOPLE! MY BROTHER IS HAVING A REACTION! I HAVE TO GET HIM TO THE HOSPITAL! GET OUT OF THE WAY!”

We got to the truck, my brother virtually picked me up and through me into the passenger seat and pitched the wheelchair into the bed of the truck. He jumped into the driver’s seat and tried to start the truck. Suddenly, in the distance, the cross caught fire.

Mike turned the key again. The engine was turning over, but it wouldn’t start.

“Mike?” I said, trying very hard to get my mouth to form words.

“What?”

“You know that passenger door that is laying in the bed of the truck”

“What about it?”

“If you don’t get this pile of crap going right now, the last thing I am ever going to do on this earth is beat you senseless with it.” I exclaimed, speaking very slowly and deliberately as he tried yet again to get the engine to start.

Just then, the motor screeched into life, belching smoke and backfiring, and the radio, left on and turned up full blast, just happened to be playing the beginning of one of my favorite songs:

 

“Hey, hey Mama said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove…”

 

To the strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”, Mike jammed the truck into reverse to get it back onto the dirt road, and then muscled the truck into gear and hit the gas. As we roared off, the cross on the hill was almost completely engulfed as I heard the unmistakable sound of the exhaust pipe falling off the truck and bouncing onto the pavement.

“Mike” I said, still trying to speak clearly over the blaring radio, the squealing and throbbing rumble of the much louder, exhaust pipe-less engine. “I swear, if we survive this, I am going to get our sister and our mother together and the three of us are going to tie you up and take you to an exorcist!”

Mike lit a joint and passed it too me. “Shut up and smoke this,” he ordered, taking the Glock out of his holster and setting in in the console between our seats. “Keep your eye open for someone following us. Things might get tricky before we get back into town…”