Heckle & Jeckle, Nite 2: The Juggernaut

My head was like an onion. I peeled off layer after layer of various personalities, emotional fronts, characters, facades, or whatever one might call them. The acid I had taken the late night before was wearing off slightly but yet another wave of it was hitting me as I stared at myself in the mirror. I began to breathe slow and deep and just stared until something let go.

The first personality reflecting back at me was the one I had ended the night with--the shiny, glassy blue-eyed vampire. But it was day and the vampire had played out his role, so I began to look deeper and peel. Many archetypical characters came and went; an evil sinister manic freak, an angry insane lunatic axe murderer type, a funny cheesy class clown guy... continuing to morph, I see my flesh at times peel off my skull and then back to...a sadman, a terrified victim, a pathetic coward, a flaming homosexual, a masturbating retard (as I grabbed my dick and stuck out my tongue while cross-eyed), a narcissist (kissing myself in the mirror), an intellectual all-knowing guru dude, a motherly woman, a sexy whore, a priestess, an old man, a little boy, a baby, and then just eyes floating on a foggy haze super-imposed on my skull that was fading away until all that was left were my eyes and the haze.

I continued to peel off even this translucent face and found what I considered my true and final self...and it was nothing, no characters, no eyes, and no haze. I found nothing. I looked in the mirror and I wasn't there! I saw the towels behind me where my body should have been! Yelling, screaming, flailing, and singing brought me back to reality, so to say, and to a body that previous to this morning, I considered real. Illusion or not, this body was exhausted and I agreed with it that we should unite once again and collapse into a coma on the mattress on the floor of my small, shitty apartment.

After 12 quick hours of beautiful god sleep, the phone finally woke my happy ass up out of bed. It was my partner in crime, my stripper friend Collin. It was the Juggernaut! Talk about one talented and fucked up individual! First of all, as a physical specimen he was only 5'5 but weighed 220 lbs. He had maybe 5 or 6% body fat at all times, a tiny waist, giant everywhere else, could bench press 500 lbs., was super flexible and had near Olympic sprinter speed. He was a kick boxer, a contending bodybuilder, and an assassin, pumped full of fuckin' steroids and growth hormone since he could get his hands on them when he was a teen. At the time, he had only two friends--myself and another one who was in prison. No one else could tolerate his constant daily rage episodes. He scared the fuck out of everyone and was always on the verge of killing or maiming someone or something.

To say the least, he was pretty stressed out all of the time. I held my fear down and never judged him for being the monster he was because I knew deep down that he was an unloved little boy whose scary outer shell was wrapped around an insecure inner core that was equally as scary and intense. I was also his babysitter. I assume because of all the steroids he took, he gradually became somewhat retarded acquiring, at times worse than others, an extreme case of attention deficit disorder. I had to keep track of his car keys and his identification, etc. or he'd lose them. One of the many times that he couldn't find his keys, he became so enraged that he pulled his shorts and underwear down to his ankles in public, bent over forward with his head looking back up at his crotch, spread open his ass cheeks, balls an' all swingin' in the wind, and yelled as loud as he could between his legs, "What, did I shove 'em up my motherfuckin' ass!!"

People were sprinting to their vehicles and I was rolling on the ground laughing, because I knew he was holding his keys in his hand throughout the whole incident, but the entertainment was too good to say anything. Plus the reaction and look on the faces of the common citizens, old and young, after being subjected to looking at the butthole of some short, huge, whacked out, disfunctional, crazy guy was some fuckin' flat out funny fuckin' shit!

On the phone, I told Collin the Juggernaut about the fucked up soulless girls I met the night before. I told him about the drugs, the sex, the spooky house, and the cartoons. I still can't remember the girls' names so I just call them Heckle and Jeckle.

"Let's go there tonight."

"Go back! I don't know about that man. I ended on a win. I don't know. It's breaking the rules of voodoo," I pleaded.

"You were just fuckin' high. It was just exaggerated. We'll be fine. I got a little bit of coke we could add to their shit."

I agreed and the Juggernaut flew over to my studio shithole. Collin craved drugs, pussy, and power but not primarily. He only had one root addiction and that was his vanity. In one summer he spent $8000 on reconstructing his face, hundreds on tanning salons and tanning solutions, more on hairspray and make-up, and who knows how much on juice (steroids). He was a glamorous Frankenstein.

"Look. Let's go if we're gonna go already there, vanity smurf! These girls aren't the type of chicks that give a rat's fuck of an ass if your hair is perfect or not...what? (For the 5th or 6th time)...Yes, you look fine...no, there are no boogers in your nose and no, I'm not looking closer! Your hair is fucking fine too you vain bastard!" I said this with frustration and apprehension knowing very well that I could potentially get a devastating punch in the upper arm that I would endure 3 or 4 times a day from him sometimes for no apparent reason. It just came with the deal, I guess.

So we ventured off to the house of Heckle and Jeckle arriving unannounced at about midnite. We just knocked and walked in. They weren't surprised or insulted or in the least intimidated by our entrance or by the Juggernaut's aggressive mannerisms. Remember. They are soulless shells, numb to just about everything. They didn't judge. They just needed and if they seen energy, good or bad, they wanted it because they had none. It was the "something is better than nothing" theory. We could use or fuck them. They could use or fuck us. It was all good to them because where they were spiritually was void. They were nonjudgmental and, in a sense, very real and beautifully apathetic.

I had them pegged but Collin was the perfect dimwitted candidate, so I thought. Ignorance turned out to be bliss in this case and to him they were just "another couple of bitches". He was a bit too selfish to look into the girls' personalities and could care less. He was too caught up in his own drama and thus, was immune to theirs. Me, on the other hand, possibly the bigger idiot, had to find the beauty in their hell. I started to feel sucked in. I felt a dark dangerous love for them not unlike the feeling you get when standing on the edge of a cliff knowing that jumping would kill you but feeling like doing it anyway.

Once again, the girls and myself took acid, as did the Juggernaut after some persuasion. He had seen acid as some "bullshit hippy thing" that gave him no power so he tried to delude it with large quantities of cocaine, which of course only added to the dilemma. The girls, as expected, indulged as well but, once again, I refrained, not wanting to mix the two substances. "Weird" was enough for me. "Evil weird" was too much though the whole thing got evil and weird anyway.

The girls were no less creepy than the night before and as the LSD started really kicking, they actually became darker and more wretched than my mind wanted to comprehend at the time. The albino blond one was sitting on Collin's lap and the black one was sitting on mine. The girls' actions were unintimidating and subtle but their vibe was murky, foreign, and discomforting, to put it lightly.

The word, "holocaust" kept repeating in my mind. It had a sizzling sound to it like it was frying itself into my brain cells. Everything became a browned out, black and white, grainy movie. Images kept popping up in my head of skinny and decrepit concentration camp victims being thrown into a rancid pile of dead bodies by some decorated nazi soldier. This, along with an old cartoon playing on the TV of these slick talking wolf characters dressed like pimps in overly elongated cars whistling at chicks was too much for me to take. I knew I shouldn't have come back.

The only thing that saved me was how funny Collin the Juggernaut looked on acid. His head and face became tightly scrunched horizontally to such a degree that there was only about a two-inch spacing from the bottom of his chin to the top of his head. It was funny because it matched part of his personality--tight, squished, compressed and suppressed, and damn angry because of it. He was more agitated and uncomfortable than tripped out or scared. It was hard, at first, for him to let go and have fun with the acid.

He had to squeeze himself into himself to keep his same raging, stressed out personality in tact and I found this hilarious. Every time I looked at him he laughed and told me to stop because my bone structure in my face was overly pronounced and I looked like skeletor, in which I in return, of course, had to fuck with him even more and would get right up in his face and bug my eyes out. I opened them so wide that my contact lenses popped off my eyeballs, which sent Collin into an uncontrollable laughing binge.

Finally, the girls hopped off of our laps, went into the other room to have their quick secret sinister little meeting of who knows what and came back to tell us that we were all going to a party. I didn't want to go. I couldn't imagine meeting more like them, but then again it was a first step in getting the hell out of their lair...once again.

So we hopped into some beat up, rusted out piece a shit of a car and were on our way. I felt claustrophobic. I couldn't breathe. Collin and I were in the back seat being driven by two soulless tweeked out automatons, somehow being able to work the machinery properly enough to drive at a top speed of 20-25 mph to a destination of some ungodly level of bullshit. I couldn't take it so I nonchalantly, almost casually, jumped out of the moving car. In my tripping mind, it was obvious that that was what I had to do, no problem. Luckily as my foot, knee, then shoulder touched the pavement, the Juggernaut, in slow motion because he was laughing his ass off, helped me pull myself back into the vehicle. He was one of those types of people who would laugh at the misfortunes of others especially if they were about to get physically hurt. He helped me anyway because if I was dead he couldn't make fun of me about it later.

I was back in the car and couldn't believe it. The soulless females actually had a reaction! It wasn't a big reaction. It was more of a, "if a man jumps out of our car and kills himself we won't get to go to this party and score more drugs" reaction. Nonetheless, it was a reaction and the girls immediately responded to our request to just drop us off at our car and call it a night. The sun was coming up and we drove away from Heckle and Jeckle forever. Amen.

After two nights of taking some pretty strong acid, I was beaten, haggard, and run down. As young and healthy as I was, my body could only take so much. It was Sunday morning and people were scurrying to church like guilt-ridden ants. The sun was just coming up over the horizon as Collin in a cobwebbed haze drove us to shelter. I had a moment of astonishing clarity and serenity. The sunrise was one of the most beautiful hypnotic sunrises I had ever seen in my life. On the radio, Jim Morrison's voice was screaming, "...break on through to the other side!...break on through..." as we rolled down the expressway, glaring and fixated on the multi-colored sky. I believe that too many drugs are harmful and wrong an' all that shit but these moments of perfect harmony and power that open up on occasion make them damn well worth it. Anything to shake up the suppressed, mechanistic, uncreative and unhealthy grind of living a programmed life in America. Fuck church and the weak sheep that attend it. I'll create my own fucking religion and it will have no price, I thought.

Instead of going to sleep we decided to go to our local gym and sit in the steam room and whirlpool to cook some of the toxins out of our systems. It was a good idea. If you are ever coming down off a hard drug definitely include a Jacuzzi of some kind into your recovery. On our way, we stopped at a market to get some vitamins and orange juice and of course, by odd chance, we ran into Collins mother in the checkout line. Definitely do not include meeting your mother or even your friend's mother into your recovery. She told us we looked like shit but also seemed happy to see us. She had a good aura and after she had gone to her car, I knew that it was good that we ran into her. It was symbolic of something that I can't explain. Maybe it was safety. Maybe it was security. Something along those lines. Whatever the case, we ended our journey in a hot steam bath surrounded by a marble floor. We felt like Greek gods. As the water rhythmically bubbled on my skin, I tilted my head back in relief and looked up at the ceiling through the steamy sweltering mist. I closed my heavy swollen eyes, took a deep sigh and, as I blew out, fell into a dreamy and heavenly oblivion.

(Minneapolis, Summer, 1990) . . . . . aa

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