Futureproof (6 page)

“Way? No way. You got some Acid?”

“Fuck yeah, dude. I'm seeing fucking angels. I've got a whole sheet. Two bucks a hit.”

“Consider five of 'em taken off your hands.”

“Sold. Let's go back to my home base.”

“You sprang for a room?” I'm incredulous. Suddenly my new best friend is rolling in drugs and high-end hotel rooms.

“A room? No way. At $250 a night? I've just got the shit stashed under a trash can on the sixteenth floor.”

OK, maybe not a room, but still good.

We head for the elevators. “Hey, where's your girl?” Splinter asks.

“I don't know. I left her right outside the bathroom where I ran into you. She was with Trizden and that skinhead girl but when we came out they weren't there.”

I push the 16 button and the elevator doors immediately reopen.

“Damn, I didn't even feel any movement,” Splinter says. “I must be totally wasted.”

I wait for the doors to close again, then hit 16 once more. The doors immediately open.

“I think we're already on the sixteenth floor, dude.”

We look at each other, laugh uncontrollably, step back out of the elevator.

“Oh shit!” Splinter points to our left. I wheel around. A maid is emptying the trash can as we speak.

“Stop!” Splinter screeches, running toward her. “
Parada!
That's Spanish for ‘Stop,'” he yells to me over his shoulder, laughing as we run toward the frightened maid. I can feel the alcohol coursing through my veins, but am still newly invigorated regardless.

 

We've been tripping for…how long has it been now? Three hours? And we still haven't run into Animal Mother or the Michelles. So we're sitting in some guy's suite watching three girls dance to techno music in the dark. A glowing black light makes everyone's skin and eyeballs look creepy.

“Hey, Splinter?”

“Yeah, man?”

I momentarily forget what I was going to say because, as I lean forward to look at him, three of my dreadlocks drop down into my face. I jump back in split-second reaction, sure that someone has thrown snakes on me. But then I realize it's only my dreads and they look beautiful in this light. They have lives of their own. I lean over, look up, trying to see and admire every lock, how they each appear unique and perfect.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” Splinter asks.

I'm languidly moving my head back and forth, feeling the weight of the dreads pull my scalp in one direction, then the other. Every
molecule of my skin reacts to the weight of their pull. I love this feeling. I sway to the thumping beats.

“Dude? Hello? Are you still with us?”

“Yeah, I'm with you.” I'm caught in the rhythm of the music, the pull of the dreadlocks. I sit up suddenly, throw the dreads behind me with one head jerk.

“Why do all black guys own one of the same four dog breeds?”

“I don't know. What are you talking about?” Splinter says.

“No matter where you go: New York, Chicago, D.C., Philly, here in the ATL, black guys only own one of four different breeds of dog.”

“And which breeds are those?” Splinter asks.

“Think about it: pit bulls, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and Chows. If they do own a different breed, then it's a mutt. That's just my experience, anyway. I mean, didn't your family own one of those kinds?”

“No, man.”

“Well, there goes that theory, I guess.”

“What do you mean? You think I'm black? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that, but I ain't black, dude.”

“You're not? What about your skin? And the fact that you smoke Newports?”

“Man, you need to chill with the stereotype shit. I'm only half black. I'm half Puerto Rican, too.”

“Shit.”

“Does it make you think less of me or something? That I'm a half-breed?”

“Hell no. Why would that matter, man? ‘I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers because here you are all equally worthless,'” I say, quoting Drill Sergeant Hartman from
Full Metal Jacket.
“Everybody's a goddam half-breed. I'm half Jewish, and that's just the half I know about.”

“Shit,” Splinter says, “I know a black guy up in Pittsburgh who owns a fucking poodle.”

“You don't know any black guy that owns a goddam poodle. A black guy wouldn't get caught dead with a poodle.”

“I'm crappin' you negative,” Splinter says.

It's dumb luck we find them. Animal Mother and Skinhead Michelle just happen to stumble out of an elevator as we're walking by. He says he needs our help. “I'm too drunk and stoned to stand up,” he whines. Sinead appears slightly less damaged.

I've never seen Trizden so incapacitated. The whole idea of him out of his mind—Animal Mother in need of care—is disconcerting. But he's laughing, so at least there's that. Nobody wants to be around a weepy drunk bastard when everybody else is trying to have a good time.

We shuffle past a conference room where old-school Japanimation is being shown through the night. A guy is leaving the room as we pass by and says to his other friends with plastic pen cases in their cowboy-shirt pockets, “That's when cartoons were cartoons.”

“What the fuck are they now, Broccoli?” Trizden yells drunkenly.

“Very funny,” the guy says.

“God, I get so tired of people saying, ‘That's when cars were cars. That's when baseball was baseball.' It's all still fucking baseball,” Trizden declares.

“You're right, dude,” Splinter says thoughtfully. “It
is
all baseball.”

“Where's Michelle?” I ask.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, man. Rat and 8-Ball were at the GWAR show. That's the last we saw of her,” Trizden slurs.

“What do you mean? The last time you saw her she was with
them
?”

“No. Well, I wouldn't say
with
them, but she was in the pit and
so were they. 8-Ball had tried to get her to go with them earlier, said that he had a bunch of coke, and she said she was waiting for you. But then, once the GWAR show started she just kinda disappeared.”

“Do you vouch for this?” I ask Sinead. I'm really tripping hard now. The world is crashing down around my ears, my head spinning out of control.

“She was jonesing for some blow,” Sinead confirms.

“I have to find her,” I tell them.

“We'll go with you,” Trizden says.

 

The beauty of LSD is that any time I think about the possible worst-case scenarios of this Michelle situation (Rat's pounding her from behind and she's blowing 8-Ball while they take turns snorting fat rails of cocaine), the upside almost immediately distracts these conscious, soul-destroying thoughts into blissfully “tripping” from one harmless distraction to another:

“Look, you guys—Lights!
Lights!
They're magnificent, aren't they?”

“Dude, that's a potted plant.”

We happen into several different rooms, each suite renewing the need to search out any possible signs of Michelle. She's never there, though. I drink some more. Every room offers more alcohol, but I can't get drunk when I'm tripping no matter how hard I try. The Acid part of my brain cancels out the drunk part. I wonder aloud if I should try driving to test this theory. Trizden refuses to let me use his car.

“But I have a license,” I explain.

Animal Mother never has bad luck with women because he never allows himself to fall in love with them. But I'm not that smart. I
want
to fall in love. I want that
feel
ing. And right now the woman I
love is sitting in some kind of Oriental spin-fuck chair being double-teamed by two military rejects who have a bag of coke.

At some point my despair levels out and I resign myself to the tragic yet somehow comforting fate of the lovelorn and cuckolded. We all end up just sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall in a hallway. In short order Trizden passes out with his head in Skinhead Michelle's lap.

“I like your shirts, guys,” Skinhead Michelle says after a long silence.

“Thanks, man,” Splinter says. We both look down at our shirts to see what we're wearing.

“Oh, yeah, fuck Iraq.”

“I don't believe we should be fucking anyone, personally,” Skinhead Michelle says. “I think we're only in Iraq for our own selfish interests and I figured that's what you meant by the slogans on your shirts.”

“Yeah, well, that probably is what we meant when we made them, originally. But right now I couldn't give a fuck, to be honest,” I say. “I'm tripping my brains out. I don't even know what time it is, but I've eaten at least eight or nine hits since last night. And now my fucking girlfriend, who I am totally in love with—the slut—is at this very moment fucking two army rejects just because they could offer her a little cocaine.” I'm rambling but honestly
do not give a fuck
. “So to be honest, I wish there was a goddam war right now and they were right the fuck in the middle of it. Call me selfish.”

Skinhead Michelle uncrosses then recrosses her legs, moving Animal Mother's head to a more comfortable position. “Well, I guess I can understand that,” she offers.

Splinter is soon bored and says so, asks if I want to wander around some more, but I'm done. Done in. I say I'll catch up with him later.

“You wanna smoke a bowl?” I ask Skinhead Michelle.

“Sure.”

We brazenly smoke right out in the hallway. I feel better. Less obsessed. Philosophical.

“You know how the hippies in the '60s thought they were changing everything, all these stupid kids that had no real idea what they were doing or why they were doing it, dropping out of high school and making their way across the country to San Francisco?” I ask Skinhead Michelle. She is absentmindedly running her fingers through Trizden's hair.

“Yeah, my parents were hippies, too. Now my dad is a securities broker and my mother has worked for IBM for the last seventeen years.”

“My mother was a hippie but she never got a real job when all the hype died down. Just married a lazy retard.”

Skinhead Michelle hands the bowl back to me, delicious pot smoke leaving her nostrils and surrounding us.

“Look,” she says to me. Her voice takes on a sentimental, soothing quality. “I know how fucked up you're feeling right now. But you have to look forward, always. You think my parents are any better than yours? I never see either of them. Our entire relationship is based on some bullshit schedule they've designed around their careers.”

I don't say anything. I look at her eyes. Never leave her eyes.

“Luke, nothing can stay the same forever. What you have to remember is that everything you do will one day add up to a specific, perfect you—the you you were meant to be. Everything we have done in the past, everything we will experience in the future will add up to the sum of its parts, at age thirty and thirty-five and forty and seventy. We have to consciously operate with that knowledge every day. That's what I try to do anyway.”

And then I'm crying and then I'm being kissed on the forehead
by Skinhead Michelle and then I'm running down hallways with no direction or destination in mind. Free fall. The fastest way to freedom.

 

The sun shining in my eyes wakes me. I'm under a black linen-covered catering table. There are only short flashes of memory as I wander around the now quiet hotel. In my head I see snapshots of myself stumbling into people. I hear their condemnations. I faintly recall sitting somewhere on the higher floors, overlooking the mezzanine in its patterned tile whiteness hundreds of feet below. And crying and crying. I know that much happened for sure. Crying definitely occurred. Crying until snot mixed with drool and hung in long strings onto my t-shirt, turning the irreverent antiwar logo into a pond of spittle.

I don't know where anyone is. I don't know what floor I'm on. There is a maid vacuuming an empty room. I speak to her repeatedly and she finally turns around. She is Hispanic, looks like she won't understand English, so I'm talking loudly even after she switches off the vacuum cleaner. She says, with no hint of accent, that she can hear perfectly fine, tells me I'm on the forty-seventh floor.

“Forty-seven,” I say. “That's how many dreadlocks I have.”

The goddam elevator takes forever but I finally reach 17, the main Dragon*Con floor. The doors open and nobody is there. There is nothing scheduled today except good-byes. Everyone is gone.

Lights blur and swirl out of the corner of my eye, Acid residual. My stomach is an empty pit, gnawing me away from the inside. I lean into the conference rooms. They too are empty, save for multi-colored flyers still tacked to the walls. I take the elevator down to the lobby. The table that had been the main security monitoring station is abandoned. I sit and wait for five or ten minutes before a disheveled man, wrinkled and dark-circled, drags himself past
holding a trash bag over his shoulder with brown fur pushing through the top of the bag.

I go over to the bulletin wall and study a poster that proclaims

 

The Biggest Dragon*Con Expo
EVER
!

July 14–17, Houston, Texas

 

There will be people from this Dragon*Con at that one. There are people who follow this shit around like it's the Grateful goddam Dead. Losers.

I roll up the poster and aim down the corridor at the man who just walked by with the Wookie in a bag.

“Hey, man!” I yell. “Whatcha got in the bag?”

The sound of my voice is like an air-raid siren in this dead place.

The man stops and turns around looking bewildered, pointing at himself as if to say, “Me? What do
I
have in
my
bag?”

“What-do-you-have-in-the-bag?” I say, over-enunciating every word.