Chapter Three – Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage

Chapter Three

Trey rocketed down the incline, wheels wobbling, spitting up small stones in his wake.  A sharp turn.  Plastic scratching on pavement.  Beautiful freedom born of speed.  His bearings spun smooth, the trucks limber on the lean.  He had to be topping 40 miles per hour on the deserted street as he hunkered low and leaned a little more forward on his skateboard.

He wasn’t alone on the hill.  Patty, Jesus, Marcus and Gerdie followed noisily behind, whooping and yelling.  The Broken Five attempted every suicide hill in town.  Jesus was the first down.  His wipeout was spectacular, they could hear the snap of his wrist when he first fell, and loud slapping followed as he tumbled uncontrollably until he came to a wickedly abrupt stop midway down the hill.

Patty and Marcus collided as usual.  They could never keep parallel when the speed really started picking up and they whip-tailed into one another with a painful finality.  Gerdie had almost caught up to Trey when a large stone threw him face first into the pavement.  Trey could hear his muffled gag and scream while he coasted slalom-style to slow himself as the bottom approached.  He was still traveling at a fast rate when he attempted an Ollie and lost it on the heelflip, falling into a somersault, his results a mild road rash, nothing too gruesome.

Trey got up and swooped up his board, enjoying the carnage that lay on the hill above him.  His little gang never failed to amuse him.  Jesus was already up and had reclaimed his deck, but his left arm didn’t look right as his hand seemed to jut in an unnatural direction.  Trey could see tears on his face as Jesus brutally shook his arm until his wrist popped back into place.

Jesus caught up to Marcus and Patty as they gathered their boards together and continued downhill without much serious injury.  Gerdie remained crouched on the ground, both hands covering his mouth, a pool of blood already accumulated on the pavement and starting a slow run down the incline.

Trey yelled the gang’s litany, “Show us the pain, Gerdie!”

Gerdie jumped up, arms outstretched, blood flying, to show a raggedly split lip that ripped down into his chin.  He was missing teeth and a chunk of his gums.  The remaining Broken Five cheered his injury heartily.  Trey might have won the race, but Gerdie got all the points for style this time.

“Come on, Gerdie. “  Trey encouraged him.  “You’ll be done bleeding by the time we get to Troll and Bones’ place.”

The group moaned communally.  They hated going to those freaks’ house.  It was one of the stranger dumps that Trey enjoyed visiting.  The silver lining was that Trey was at least aiming to score some psychedelics if they were going that far outside the weird.  Patty and Marcus escorted a wobbly Gerdie on their boards.  Jesus walked behind them smirking at how no one they passed even noticed that Gerdie was seriously wounded.  After a year of immortality, empathy no longer existed in these parts.

They arrived at Troll’s house fifteen minutes later.  As Trey had prophesied, Gerdie was finished bleeding, but couldn’t help playing with the flapping flesh of his bottom lip while it slowly tried to grow itself back together.  They parked their boards in a heap by the front porch.  Trey climbed up a couple of the steps before stopping to breathe deep the ocean air.  It had once been some nice beachfront property, but now stood abused and unkempt from its current tenants.

Trey slowly turned on the group.  “Guess what guys?  I heard Bones is awake.”

That drew a few gasps.  Bones had been in a foaming mouth, junked-up coma for over a month now.  Most of the gang had never even spoken to Bones before, but Trey had known him for a few years.  They didn’t really know the details but Trey had some sort of history with both Troll and Bones, and he liked to occasionally stop by and see what was going on.

Trey hopped backward up the remaining steps and spun to the door giving it a violent rattle by pounding on the flimsy aluminum frame.  He didn’t wait for an answer or look back at the gang, he just walked on in.  They entered slowly behind Trey, Jesus bringing up the rear.  It took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the muffled light brought about by no visible lamps, all the windows covered with whatever blanketing and linen were available.

“Troll?  Bones?”  Trey called, admiring how the place had fallen into greater disrepair since his last visit.

They could hear mumbling from back in the kitchen and Trey followed the sound.

“There’s one of ya.  Hey Troll.  What’s up?”  Trey approached a tall, thin, ugly woman who looked as though she wanted to scuttle away rather than acknowledge their presence.

She easily had earned the nickname Troll by being one of the ugliest women anyone had ever seen.  Her nose was hawkish and long enough to actually cast a shadow completely over her lips.  Her ears piped straight out from greasy straight peppered hair.  Not even Trey had ever seen her grin, but her recessed chin looked incapable of anything but a constant grimace.  What she lacked in looks and social grace she made up for in her genius in the pharmaceutical arena.  Troll was an artist in the concoction of illegal drugs.

“Bones is up.”  Her voice was pure monotone nasal.  She seemed to finally notice the whole crew scattered around the kitchen and its entryway.  “The freaking Broken Five come to see Bones.  You guys are making a name for yourself.  They say you’re all insane assholes.”

Trey laughed, “Well, they’re right as rain, Troll old girl.  We’re crazy with the pain.”  He reached over and squeezed Gerdie’s cheeks together, giving a shake so the mangled flesh flapped around.  Troll rolled her eyes, lit a cigarette and pushed her way through the group out into the living room.

“Sit.  I’ll let Bones know you’re here.”

Troll wandered down the hallway while the gang pushed and moved stacks of various junk to the floor in search of seating on the rotten furniture.  Patty fired up her last joint while Jesus looked for an ashtray and Marcus looked about in wonderment at the total disaster of the room.  They were able to pass the joint around the ring a couple times before Troll made her way back out from the back.

“He’ll be out in a few,” Troll started, then saw how they were all sitting.  “I guess I should have mentioned to grab a seat but not freaking move anything.  Move over punk.”  She gave Gerdie a nudge to the shoulder.  “You make me lose a sheet of blotter and you’ll owe me about three hundred dollars.”  She reached down into a recently moved stack of unassuming trash and whipped out what looked like a badly printed page of small stamps and headed back to the kitchen.

The gang gave a few chuckles.  Marcus snuffed out the roach in the ashtray Jesus was still holding when they heard commotion from down the darkened hallway.

Even to Trey the sight of Bones was surprising.  Bones had been a middle-aged man when immortality set in, so he had already sported gray hair that fluttered wistfully from the slightest breeze, thinning hair that exposed glimpses of scalp during its convulsive dance.  He walked with a slight limp, which was surprising considering the regenerative powers everyone possessed anymore.  Dressed in a wife-beater shirt and denim shorts it was easy to see how Bones had acquired his name, he was a walking skeleton, his bone structure even more diminutive than Troll’s.

What the Broken Five were seeing now was Bones at his skinniest.  His flesh was stretched tightly across a toothpick frame.  Trey could see sunken pockets between his ribs and his collarbone jutted out grotesquely.  The seriousness of his emaciation made him appear much older than his age before the alien magic.

“What the hell, Bones?”  Trey blurted in surprise.

Bones came into the living room and smiled a rickety smile, shooing Gerdie out of his favorite seat.  It was a slow and painful process for Bones to lower himself to the seat.  Patty and Marcus exchanged curious looks, no one they knew ever moved like that unless they had just bit it on a wild deck ride.

As if on cue, Troll came out of the kitchen and handed Bones a bowl larger than his head and possibly weighing a good five pounds filled nearly to the lip with spaghetti.  From her back pocket she retrieved a fork and large spoon and handed them to Bones once he had the large bowl situated on the crooked arm of the recliner.

“Damn, I heard of munchies before, but Christ, Bones!”

Bones regarded Trey with a wink and started to slowly wind up a knot of noodles on his fork that was anchored into the large spoon.

“I woke up pretty hungry.”  Bones’ voice was gravelly, and once again, as if they shared the same brain, Troll reappeared, this time with a 2-Liter bottle of soda and set it on the carpet next to him.  “Bless you, “said Bones appreciatively, and set down his utensils to grab the bottle in both hands and chug a large portion of it.

The gang sat in stunned silence as they witnessed what could only be the most extreme case of munchies ever.  Bones didn’t even acknowledge them for a good five minutes while he wolfed down a good deal of the spaghetti and finished off the soda, leaving an empty, crinkled carcass of plastic on the floor.

Trey thought they’d better get him talking before he ended what appeared to be only a break from his feast.  “So, now you’re awake.  Tell us what happened.”

Bones sat back and the chair groaned in protest.  He let out a long loud belch and began speaking.  “Well, last year we had our little twenty-two foot tall visitor come and tell us he was making us all immortal.  We might have all wondered about if aliens even existed, but damn, to have one show up and gives us the gift of eternal life.  Now that’s something! “

“I remember actually feeling that; that he had given us a gift.  It was a remarkable gift.  And now here we are, a year later, and all we see is anarchy everywhere.  Scientists and governments are going nuts because they need to find the quickest ways to start hauling us out into space.”  He looked off into a distant thought.  “Immortal children, I mean, what kind of science do these things have?”

”Even dear Troll, “he continued, “with her scientific knowledge that rivals some of the best minds in the world when it comes to our biology and physiology, cannot fathom what they have done to us by simply sprinkling spores into our environment.”

“So I sat back and wondered what could I do now that I can’t die?  What can we do to our bodies now that we had never been able to do before?”

“An idea came to me.  Since I have always been thought of as a prime example of a college professor going through a never ending mid-life crisis, why not call upon some of my past experiences.”  He laughed.  “Why not drop a little more acid?”

“See, there’s always been something about LSD that spooked and intrigued many people.  Aldous Huxley dropped acid, why not me?  Hell, if the CIA started Operation Bluebird to study mind control, leading them to experimenting with LSD, then there must be something there.”

Bones waved his hand absently to the kitchen.

“I have known Troll and her ‘specialties’ for years, but I thought maybe we could team up and really try something new.”  Bones studied his audience.  Some of them looked bored, some looked anxious for him to get to the point of his speech, and Trey, as usual, was a little hard to peg.  Trey was an enigma to Bones and always had been since his days as a promising student.  But then, his friends probably had no idea that Trey had ever even been to college, let alone graduated by the age of 16.

Trey was studying Bones’ rheumy eyes while he spoke and noticed that they were starting to glint with more life; he was getting ready to finally tell the real story.  Trey thought he might as well give it a kick-start.  “Come on, Bones.  You’ve been in a coma for two months, and completely out of your freaking mind.  Hell, I’ve come by just to watch you foam at the month while Troll chain-smoked over your impending corpse.”

“You always had a way to cut through the bullshit, Trey.”  Bones watched some of the group exchange curious glances.  “OK, so here you have an old burnout hippie professor that wants to bring us to a higher existence than mere immortality.”  Trey was the only one wearing a wry smile as the rest of the group hadn’t picked up on his sarcasm.

“I started quizzing Troll on how much LSD a human could ingest.  Troll was cooking some of the best trip that had been seen on the coast, and it was averaging around 500 micrograms, and extremely potent.  Well, that was about a good twelve hour trip, with about four hours of peak-time, where the hallucinations are full bore with light trails, melting faces and everything.”

Drug talk, that got the gang’s attention.  Bones chuckled as the dark-skinned Marcus fired up a huge joint and started passing it around.  “I told Troll that I needed something more.  I wanted to go long and deep into the trip.  So, I asked her for something around the area of 7 million micrograms to start and see what happens.  Ha!  Can’t hold your hits, Marcus?”

“See, I figured that might get me into the nooks and crannies of the weird-world that no one had ever been into and survived, mentally.  But I also wanted to make sure that if I went in there and found something I liked that I wasn’t going to be pulled out too soon.  So I had her set up a drip for me.  I kicked off with 7 million mikes and had a constant dose of 4 million going for two weeks straight.” He had their stunned and undivided attention now.  No one was voicing it, but they all were dying to know what happened next.

“I knew this first trip was going to be hard-core.  It would be my first dive into an unknown depth of madness and hallucinations.  I didn’t know what to expect.”  Bones smiled.  “But I knew it wouldn’t kill me.”

It had taken Troll a few weeks to get everything ready that she thought would be necessary.  She was good though and she knew it.  Years ago she had proven and perfected the theory of persuading the lysergic amide acid from morning glory seeds instead of picking away at some moldy rye for her necessary ingredients to produce some of the purest LSD the country had ever known.  Once she had cooked and derived her clear, pure crystals, she concocted a liquid solution especially for Bones’ intravenous drip.  In earlier times she would have stocked up on some Thorazine to drop him out of his trip at the first sign of trouble, but he was looking for trouble, and his health was not such a big issue any more.

“I didn’t take a very scientific approach.”  Bones continued.  “But we did take some precautions, like making sure I wouldn’t go running out of the house as a crazed idiot, and limiting external stimuli for me.  I wanted to go inside myself, not necessarily look at the pretty colors of the paint as it bubbled down the wall.”  The look on Bones’ face made some of the gang believe that he had seen and did enjoy something of that nature.

“The day came to hook me up, drop me out, and tune me in.  Or something like that.  Though she won’t admit it, I think Troll was pretty spooked.  Her curiosity too was in full effect.  She pandered over me like an invalid, which I would soon be for real.  And the needle stuck me and the liquid heaven went into my veins.”

“It wasn’t that dramatic at first.  It took a little while for me to notice anything was really starting to work, but then I could feel my pulse building, and if I tried I could send my adrenalin charting up the scales.  Having tripped enough years ago though I knew how to rid myself of the fear and lower my levels to enjoy a relaxed ride through my mind.”  Bones sat up a little after realizing that he had put himself back into that calming state by just trying to explain it to Trey and his friends.

“I believe my first thoughts were how quickly it seemed to be getting dark in the room, as though dusk had arrived in minutes when we had started the drip in the afternoon.  I’m not sure if time was slipping away from me or if I was already starting to merge with my internal self.  I do know that it wasn’t long after that when I was completely living within my mind; there was no sense of my body anymore.  Though from what I’ve since been told, my body was still there and quite active at times.”

“I remember so much of what transpired, in such great detail that if I were to tell you all of it, we would be sitting here for weeks, and you little tramps would be quite bored.  If you’re not already.”  Bones had noticed a stifled yawn from Jesus and peered around the room at the group.  He locked his stare on Jesus first.

“Yeah, I’m going to snag some food from Diago’s.  You guys fill me in on Bones’ story later.”  Jesus said, as he was getting up and hurriedly heading for the door.  Marcus shot up also and joined Jesus, mumbling about being hungry after watching Bones chow down that spaghetti.

“Italian sounds good.” Spoke Patty, as she also got up to leave.

Diago’s was a rundown Italian eatery on the other side of town that the gang liked to steal food from.  They had dined and dashed there quite a few times, but now made more bold moves through threats of protection that kept the old man Diago hopping at their orders.

Gerdie’s lip was finally healed up, so he merely smiled and followed the gang outside.

Bones fixed his eyes on Trey for a moment.  Trey stared back at him.

“So, are you going to finish this story?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”  And with that, Bones continued his story right where he had stopped.  “I was heavily trying to keep myself relaxed as the acid started to invade my system, because in the back of my mind I knew that this was going to be very intense.  As I relaxed, I felt myself sort of slowly sinking deeper, sinking into a half-slumber, even though my heart was racing.  I could hear crickets.  I haven’t noticed the sound of crickets since I was a child.”

“The next thing I knew, I was standing in a grove of dark trees somewhere and it was becoming dusk.  I couldn’t exactly see the sun, but I could tell by instinct that soon it would be setting.  I just stood there, watching the leaves on the trees change from summer green to autumn gold and brown as the sun was setting.  It was as though their seasonal cycles were based on one single day.  I could still hear the crickets too, but their chirping noises were slowing down into a long thrum with a strange Doppler effect, like a car driving by slowly.  They would start quiet and far away then gain in volume so they sounded as though they were vibrating right under my feet, then they would fade away into the distance again.”

Bones stuck out his feet.  “They made my feet tingle.  Just thinking about it is making them tingle again.”  He wiggled his toes and let out a long satisfied sigh.  He retracted his legs and sat up a little straighter as he continued.  “The peace in the forest didn’t last though.  As soon as the sun settled and the moon had risen to give me some vague light, I could hear a loud crashing through the trees.  It was a horrific sound.  It was a sound of pure violence and it was crushing the trees.  It was a sound of hatred that had turned into a physical weapon and was killing anything it could.  I could hear the trees dying in pain as the sound came pounding down from above, starting at the very tip of the tree tops and smashing down like an invisible hammer, pulping the tree down to the base of its trunk.”

“I turned and ran.  I could hear the thumping behind me, the screaming of the trees, and I ran and ran.  I was covered with sweat and gasping for breath, but the sound kept following me.  As soon as I was thinking I would never clear the trees and get out alive, I was running out of the grove and into a field.  For a few minutes I still kept running, I thought I could be in worse danger because now I was the only target available for that force of hate.  It could smash me out of the blue now because I would never hear it coming until it was crashing down on me.”

“Now here I found myself walking and stumbling through rolling plains with nothing else in sight under the moonlight.  Many strange things happened during that walk that reminded me that I was deep into an acid trip like never before.  Flocks of flying hands surrounded me at one point and led me in one direction.  They cleared away and there was the corpse of my father speaking to me in Latin, yet his tongue spit out a ticker-tape written in English that I had to rip out of his mouth to interpret what he had said.  It was freaky stuff, Trey.  I was in an odd world, alright.”  Bones burst out laughing.  “Hell, at one point my nipples were blinking like eyelids, and to me it felt the most natural thing in the world.”

“The real mystery underlying this trip was that I was being led.  I always had some sort of familiar or totem that would keep me following whatever path my psyche had created for me to travel on.  Finally, the path before me became obvious; it was a simple cement sidewalk leading up to a barren building.  I felt like I had entered a carnival.  The sign on the building read, Houdini’s Escapes.”

“I remember stepping into the doorway of the building and instantly appearing onstage at what looked to be a mix between a magic show and Let’s Make A Deal.  There was a small man, not even five foot tall, and surrounding him were all of these magician’s trunks of various sizes all standing on end.  Each trunk was locked with a large rusty padlock.”

“The man told me that each trunk held a mystery of life and that I could choose one trunk to open and behold the truth within.  I think I stunned him when I asked which one he would choose.  He glanced quickly over his shoulder at one of the larger trunks but led me to the smallest trunk on the stage; it wasn’t much larger than a shoebox.”

“I’m sure the disappointment on my face was quite evident, so he explained to me that even though the larger trunk held a greater surprise, the smaller one was the wisest choice for now.  I asked him what that meant, and he told me that I could return when I was ready to learn more, if I were able to.”

“I told him then that I would choose the smaller trunk.  He hesitated before opening the trunk and looked up at me and said that these boxes were supposed to be locked forever.  They were not of our future anymore.  We had taken a different route.  Then he reached down, tapped the lock and swung the little lid open.”

“I was expecting some sort of blinding light after that anxious little introduction, but anticlimactically, the only item inside was a small white feather slowly turning in midair.  And then I started coming out of my trip.  What had initially been a planned as a two week trip had been a two month journey.”

Trey sat back hard in his seat.  “That’s it?  You went away for two months for a freaking feather and winking nipples?”

Bones started laughing at Trey.  But Trey realized how he’d sounded just then and let out a small chuckle himself.  A thought came to him.  “There’s more to it.  What did you figure out?”

Bones grew a little more serious.  “I’m not sure if it’s that I actually figured out anything.  But there was something.”

“Alright, quit fooling with me.  You chased away all of my friends to tell me this story, and Troll’s in the kitchen like a zombie.  What is happening?”

“A couple more minutes of patience are all I ask of you, Trey.”

Trey gave an impatient snort but said nothing else.

Bones accepted that as an agreement and continued.  “I want to recruit you to accompany me on my next trip.  Don’t say anything yet, just listen.  I’ve had some ideas that I would like to try out.  It involves more than just you and I but it could also change the way we live forever.”

“We’ve had that speech already, Bones.  Remember, large alien, bad hair-lip?”

“It’s something more than that, Trey.  It is so much more.  I told you about the small trunk on the stage, but I didn’t tell you everything.  That feather?  It came out with me.”

Bones was looking at the floor by his recliner.  Trey looked down to see the empty crumpled 2-Liter bottle, slowly turning in midair.

It had been a couple of weeks since the remainder of the Broken Five had seen Trey.  In fact, they had not seen him since that night they left Troll and Bones’ place.  Life went on, and they thrashed and crashed and healed, as usual.  It wasn’t unusual for Trey to leave them at times but this had been the longest period yet.  What was unusual was for the gang to see Troll waiting for them at the bottom of one of their favorite hills.  She never came outside.

They gathered around her anticipating some news about Trey but she had something different in mind.  She held out a syringe filled with a clear liquid.  It didn’t take much to coax the idiots into passing it around and shooting it in fractional doses.  Hey, they were immortal, what did they have to lose?

Troll left them during their initial euphoria from the injection and began her trek back home.  They would have a small heroin high for a while, and then it would kick in as an acid trip.  It was nothing close to the doses that Bones and Trey would soon be ingesting, but was a little stronger than the average street strength.  What really set it apart though was that Troll had created a fully addictive strain of LSD, one that was habitual from the very first dose and durable enough to last a painfully long time, even for an immortal.

In a few days the gang would come down from their buzz and within another few days start feeling the affects of withdrawal, until it ultimately led them to Troll’s door.  And she would gladly take away their pain.  She would gladly shoot them full of more and more of her magic potion.  It would be the genesis of a new army.  A new kind of army for a new kind of war.

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