You Might Be a Zombie . . . (16 page)

Why it makes sense

Pemberton said he was convinced from “actual experiments that coca is the very best substitute for opium addicts.” Of course, he was speaking from personal experience, since he himself was a junky who used cocaine to kick the habit.

In his book
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
, Mark Pendergrast claims there were about 8.45 mil igrams of cocaine in each serving, which is about one-quarter of what people put up their nose to get high these days. But fans of the drink were known to chug up to five at a sitting, or to drink the syrup instead of mixing it with water, both practices that would bring the high to right around street level.

So how instrumental was the drug in making Coke the largest brand on earth? By the time they removed its magic ingredient, in the early twentieth century, addicts were ordering the wildly popular beverage by asking for “a dope.”

Before you go trying it . . .

Turns out Pemberton was wrong about cocaine’s ability to cure morphine addiction. According to Pendergrast, the year he died he was so “worried about where money would come from for his morphine” that “John Pemberton sold two-thirds of his Coca-Cola rights . . . for the grand sum of one dol ar.” Of course, that’s one dol ar in 1888 money. Today, that’d be worth not even
one goddamned billionth
of what you should leave your family after inventing the most successful product in the history of capitalism!

1. DOCK ELLIS TRIPS HIS WAY TO A NO-HITTER

In the hundreds of thousands of games in Major League Basebal history, there have been only 267 in which the starting pitcher completes a game without giving up a hit. Pedro Martínez, like most pitchers, has gone his entire career without throwing one. In fact, the New York Mets have been sending a pitcher out to the mound 162 times every season for forty-six years, and not a single one has pitched one. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock El is did it on June 20, 1970, though he barely remembers being there.

The drug: acid

The day of his no-hitter, Dock El is woke up around noon on what he thought was Friday and ate three tabs of acid. When his girlfriend arrived carrying Saturday’s newspaper, El is realized that either his girlfriend was a time traveler or he’d slept through Friday. The sports page had more bad news—he was scheduled to pitch in San Diego in six hours. Not only had he woken up on the wrong day, but the city that was just starting to swim around him was Los Angeles.

Unfazed, El is hopped a flight to San Diego and faced down a lineup that had woken up knowing what day it was and also had the upper hand in the “not on acid” category.

Not a single one got a hit.

El is remembers very little about the game, other than that sometimes the bal looked huge and other times tiny, and that at one point he dove out of the way of a line drive, only to look up and see that the bal hadn’t even reached the mound.

Why it makes sense

Writing in the
New Yorker
, Oliver Sacks describes a state of mind known among athletes as “the zone” in which, “A basebal . . . approaching at close to a hundred miles per hour . . . may seem to be almost immobile in the air, its very seams strikingly visible . . . in a suddenly enlarged and spacious timescape.” The zone is typical y brought on by confidence, adrenaline, and being freaking awesome at basebal . El is was all of those things, and LSD’s effects include increased heart rate and the perception that time has slowed. So it’s conceivable that El is tripped his way into the zone.

There’s also the mental component. A large part of throwing a no-hitter is getting over the fact that you’re doing it. As the game goes on and the lonely bastard in the middle of 
“Time to pitch at baseball! Watch it throw, today! Sports forever!” 
the diamond gets closer to immortality, the tension builds in the park and in the pitcher. Trying to throw a no-hitter is so mental y taxing that it’s considered the height of dickery for a teammate to acknowledge it until the final out is recorded.

But basebal history was the last thing on El is’s mind that day. He was too busy trying to keep his shit together while a bunch of giant lizards had an orgy in the on-deck circle.

Before you go trying it . . .

El is never reached his potential because of drug addiction. Instead of being a household name, he’s just that guy who threw a no-hitter on acid.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY,
according to cryptozoologists, is the study of heretofore undiscovered species. According to everybody else, it’s what lunatics who prefer lying in the international language of science cal the animals they make up. Bigfoot is the spawn of cryptozoologists, for instance. It’s pretty much a bul shit factory, but every so often real researchers discover that the terrified vil agers were warning them about that monster because it’s
right behind
them
. These are the terrifying myths that turned out to be terrifying realities.

4. THE KRAKEN: MONSTER FROM THE DEEP

The myth

The word
kraken
is simply German for “octopus.” Kind of a letdown, right? An octopus isn’t very scary; it’s more like the physical manifestation of pubescent awkwardness—al flailing limbs and messy secretions—but as with many monsters, it’s really just a matter of scale. Nothing is cute when it’s big enough to eat your house, and the kraken is no exception.

For years sailors have been returning to harbor with stories of a giant tentacled beast. Some said that it was more than a mile in diameter. Others claimed that it was the first animal made in all of creation and would only perish when the world ended. We tended to relegate tales of the kraken to the same bin of bul shit where we throw mermaids and the Loch Ness monster—or at least we did until a few years ago, when a bunch of New Zealand fisherman hauled one into their boat.

The reality

It’s called the colossal squid. Now, we tend to get a bit unnerved by anything that scientists decide to label
colossal
, because they’re a moderate bunch. In the realm of science, something only gets dubbed as colossal because the textbooks frown on classifying animals as being of the genus
F**kmassive
holyshitbricks.

And the colossal squid is not just a name: It’s a thirty-foot-long flailing engine of nightmares. Scientists excitedly tell us of its oddities, such as tentacles lined with “sharp, swiveling, three-pointed hooks,” and how the 1,091-pound specimen on display in New Zealand is thought to be “much small er than average.”

It’s not like it’s a peaceful behemoth that we’re giving a hard time due to its appearance. Comparing the small er-than-average specimen the fisherman hauled in to the largest squid thought possible prior to 1997, experts from Auckland University of Technology noted, “The Colossal Squid, with the hooks and the beak that it has, not only is colossal in size but is going to be a phenomenal predator,” before helpful y clarifying that this made it “something you are not going to want to meet in the water.”

So no, ancient mariners weren’t just being quaint when they marked the deep sea as “here there be monsters” on their maps; it was just shorter than writing “here there be thirty-foot-tal multilimbed, razor-hooked fury beasts that look like a giant, wet bag of violence, and you should probably just stay home until somebody invents faster boats.”

3. IRKUIEM: THE GOD-BEAR

The myth

There could be all manner of bizarre creatures living in Siberia, the frigid wilderness that covers 10 percent of the earth’s land. Human beings didn’t really bother to set up proper civilizations out there. To this day, explorers come back from the Siberian hinterlands with tal tales about giant reptiles, living mammoths, and enough yetis to populate some kind of yeti academy. Mixed in with all that bulshit was the god-bear.

The reality

In 1936, a Swedish zoologist named Sten Bergman ventured into Siberia and started to hear stories about so-cal ed monster bears. After Bergman mussed the hair of a few tribal elders while saying, “Sure, buddy. Did he come out from under your bed?” the natives showed him pelts, skul s, and paw prints larger than those of any known bear in the region. That’s when science col ectively stopped rol ing its eyes and making wanking motions, and began taking the god-bear seriously.

It just so happens that the vil agers’ description matched that of an immense prehistoric horror called the short-faced bear (
Arctodus simus
), one of the largest predatory mammals to ever exist. A Soviet zoologist named Dr. Nikolai Vereshchagin postulated that
Arctodus
, thought extinct for twelve thousand years, was actually alive and wel in Siberia.

Other scientists have theorized that the god-bear is actually a colony of enormous black polar bears that found their way too far south and found the vil agers delicious enough to stick around. One way or another, Siberia sounds entirely too much like a frozen version of the island from
Lost
.

Even if reports of a real, live god-bear are false, anthropologists agree that they probably didn’t die off
that
long ago. But why would there still be stories about the creatures if they no longer exist? In most cases, we’d go with “people are ful of shit,” but when you’re talking about a giant man-eating bear, we’re will ing to make all owances for post-traumatic stress disorder so severe it’s become hereditary.

2. BUAJA DARAT: THE LAND CROCODILE

The myth

The East had always been a strange and mysterious place in the eyes of the West, and many tal tales emerged to keep whitey baffled and entertained while he butchered the locals. One of these legends was the Indonesian land crocodile, or
buaja darat
: A fearsome lizard-monster that lived on the nearby islands. The
buaja darat
could eat a man whole if necessary, but even a single bite from the creature was fatal. That’s why nobody survived to verify accounts firsthand.

But then the tales started to come true: In 1912, a group of fisherman docked on a small Indonesian island called Komodo and came back half-eaten and raving about monsters. After a 1926 expedition by W. Douglas Burden yielded twelve preserved specimens science final y woke up and realized
there are actually dragons
. They are a thing that exists. They’re just over in Southeast Asia. And they hate you.

The reality

The Komodo dragon is not only the largest lizard in the world; it’s also one of the few animals that will just up and eat you. We’re not talking about incidents born out of self-defense; we’re talking about an animal that is a hard-core fan of murder and not such a hard-core fan of your uneaten face.

That stuff about a single bite kil ing you? The dragon’s saliva has venom that will prevent your blood from clotting. Even if you escape, it can just follow you at a leisurely pace, eyeing you with that dickish, lizardy expression while you panic and bleed out into delicious human jerky.