The Misadventures of Goofy Wally and Stoner Joe
In a very large city, where populations become spatially intimate beyond safety and endurance, people can get crazy. Too much of one thing, too little of another, too many people wanting to take what little shit you have, too few wanting to share what shit they have too much of to even use themselves...folks get nuts.
Some get Nasty nuts, aggressive and even violent, for no other reason than to discharge whatever little power they can lay claim to. No one likes Nasty nuts. Some get Cold nuts; detached and completely self-gratifying, spending their days in emotional isolation, counting victories and conquests. We all know how small Cold nuts can be. Some get Sad nuts, their tearful paths leading ultimately to some level of fatal deprivation. no joke here. point is, everybody goes at least a little bonkers from living in a concrete jungle. this is the story of two such bonkers individuals; Goofy Wally and Stoner Joe.
Wally and Joe were happy survivors. Dirty, broke, and often homeless, they struggled daily, but were young and resilient and always seemed to find a way to scratch together enough coin for a couple cups of java, a bottle of stagger and a few joints, and were even occasionally gratified by the attentions of the fairer sex.
Goofy Wally was a tall, gangly man, with little musculature and even less fat on his rail-like frame. His large cuboid head, capped with greasy, short blond hair, and prominent brow, which shadowed distant blue eyes, virtually tottered on a neck, bent at the huge adam's apple, that seemed too long even for his expanded frame. His armor of choice was usually an old ike jacket or a beaten biker leather, leather pants (which he wore exclusively until one day they actually disintegrated, the constituent molecules exploding in all opposition to the laws of physics, so appalling the smell) and combat boots. He also liked to accessorize with chains and spikes wherever he could.
Stoner Joe, in contrast to his lanky counterpart, was a smaller man of average height and build, and had long shaggy brown hair well past his shoulders, which was forever tangled in a beard that wasn't really a beard, but two weeks of 'i don't give a shit.' He wore a fringed suede jacket, buffalo bill style, t-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. He accessorized solely with a cylinder of paper and plant, perpetually adhered to his thick lower lip.
Goofy Wally dressed like a warrior, however, he was anything but. He was a shy boy, quiet and gentle, and had never fought even once in his life. this was an anomaly for any poor kid living in the city, and some concluded that an angel had taken a fancy to the grimy street urchin. How else does someone so ill-equipped to handle a violent situation survive the streets of the big city without visitation from a single faceful of fist? His vulnerability was compounded by the fact that he was also quite simple-minded, finding comical solutions to simple problems. One instance found Wally purchasing several gallons of various, unrelated colors of latex house paint to paint his static van, rather than buying the parts needed to free it from it's stasis. The supposition was that, since he slept in the van, why not use house paint on it? which he did. Fortunately, he decided to not paint the windows, as there was apparently the possibility of divine intervention resurrecting the long dead, though now thoroughly colorful vehicle.
Stoner Joe was in many ways the polar opposite of Wally. He carried on like a grinning surfer hippy, and often raged and got in fights and consumed illicit chemical concoctions and mixtures as if not only chasing inner demons, but fully intending to poison them. He was the smart one of the pair (if someone hell bent on self-destruction can be classified as such). Stoner Joe came up with the plans; to procure fun, food, drugs, alcohol, or whatever else might present itself, and Wally was usually either a willing participant in the shenanigans or too easily swayed by his bored, manic pal. Often the plans were of devious and/or mischievous intent; taking the pair to varied locations to shoplift food, or abscond with a nice flag or luxury car hood ornament.
Wally was a good running mate for Stoner Joe, and not only for his agreeable nature. Joe knew that his friend needed protection, both from a hostile world and from Wally's own ignorance and naivete. This simple fact probably saved Joe on several occasions; from imprisonment, hospitalization, and even worse, as he was tentative to perform many of the daredevil antics which drew him in and flirted with his need to push the limit, this because of his concern for his slow-witted friend's safety.
Together they survived, somehow...
The Peyote Dash
One lovely summer day, Goofy Wally returned home (the pair had made temporary residence of Wally's mom's house, vacated for the summer months) and presented his crazy friend with the days early foraging.
"Look what i got." Wally stated proudly, laying a small bundle of paper towels in front of Stoner Joe.
Unwrapping it, Joe stared at several large plant bulbs, not entirely dissimilar to tiny greenish pumpkins.
"What is this? I've never seen this stuff before." Joe declared, a look of concerned dismay on his face.
"They're Peyote buttons. They're supposed to make you trip or something." Wally returned, smiling widely.
"Ahh." Joe said. "Never tried this before but read about it lots. We can make some tea like some Native American medicine men and trip our asses off!"
As joe eagerly searched through the kitchen for the hardware necessary to concoct the desired brew, Wally took to the task of cutting the cactus fruit, and when finished, had a nice platter of what looked a little bit like sliced kiwi.
Stoner Joe, looking at the prepped display, decided that they might get a lot higher if they just ate the entire fruit rather than diluting it in water, so he gave up on his previous plan of compound extraction through heated dilution.
"Lets make sandwiches!" Joe offered, fruitlessly explaining the basics of property loss through cooking to his vacuous pal.
"Okay, whatever." Wally relented, shrugging his shoulders. "But they taste really bad. That's what the guy i got them from said."
"No problem!" Joe stated confidently. "We'll use peanut butter. There's some in the pantry there. That should hide the nastiness."
So Stoner Joe and Goofy Wally set about the task of creating two peanut butter/peyote sandwiches that were so disgusting and repulsive that the corpse of the storied Earl who created the original recipe exhumed himself, threw up on a patch of dandelions that did nothing wrong at all, and went back to sleep.
The two young men stared in dismay at the open faces of what they were to consume.
"Y'know," Joe began, "...The story is that these things can make you sick...that there's something poisonous in them that you're supposed to remove i think. like those fluffy seeds."
Normally, Stoner Joe avoided nothing chemical. He drank ethanol straight, and chased it with 151 just to show off. he mixed narcotics, alcohol, hallucinogens and stimulants freely, and did so without thought of personal injury or harm. Though he didn't fully appreciate his own mortality, he did, however, everyone else's that was foolhardy enough to party with him.
"I think we should remove the fuzzy seeds." Joe said finally after some thought, and he removed the seeds from one of the sandwiches. Wally's.
and they ate, Wally his less toxic version, and Joe, his own perversion. this in and of itself was a feat of almost superhuman endurance. The texture was that of a cold, slimy washcloth, with a taste like balsa wood and rotten lime juice. and peanut butter. Somehow they managed to force the vile aberrations down. keeping them down would prove to be an entirely different battle, especially for Stoner Joe.
As is the case in most tripping situations, the first phase was just sitting around waiting to feel something.
"You feel anything?" Joe said, making motions with his hands to see if the inevitable trails had kicked in; trails being the name given to hallucinations which held after-images in the visual field.
"Nope."
"Me neither. This is fucking boring. I'm goin' to the store to get a cup of coffee. Comin?"
"Nah." Wally said. "I don't want to be outside when this stuff kicks in."
"Fair enough. If I'm not back in a day, send a search party." Joe smiled and bolted outside to find coffee, and he hoped, adventure.
The house the pair were occupying was located on a small side street to a very busy shopping, dining, and pedestrian populated section of the big city. There were dozens of people scattered about every length of sidewalk. Punk rockers pan handling and drinking bagged iron city, business men and women escaping to cafes and necessary lunch cocktails, shoppers looking for trendy textiles and shoes they have little need for, beyond the gratification of having more than someone else, bohemians sipping espresso and smoking cloves outside the local hang, and more.
As Stoner Joe made his way toward his favorite cup of coffee, he made note of everything in his periphery, seeing the vast and eclectic array of activity, looking for familiar faces, dangerous characters, and any female of the species. He thought that he might be feeling something, so he again tested for visual hallucination, but was unsure if what he saw was new or just attributable to his frequent LSD usage, a byproduct of a compound that the human body was unable to fully filter and pass. Yet he felt some...thing...
and just as he stepped into the street to cross, he found out what he was feeling. The entirety of the street found out as well.
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!"
Out of Stoner Joe's gaping maw, a plume of semi-opaque greenish vileness unseen since Dante conjured the levels of hell, erupted outward covering a sizable portion of his immediate area of the street.
Joe stared in disbelief. He was no stranger to hurling. No drug addict was. but this was something else, something... special...
He wiped his mouth and looked around at the 50-some innocent bystanders who had personally witnessed this primordial act of nature. To a one, they were horrified. Some had hands to their faces, others had arms draped about their children, protecting them in maternal embrace. Joe could only look to the ground in shame and proceed to his destination. Fortunately, he didn't really feel sick, just embarrassed, so it was ove....
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!"
Again, and with the same force and suddenness came a second eruption. Joe stared in disbelief at the carnage he had created, as did everyone else. Anyone who had missed the first show, certainly caught the second act. Joe now stood before Lake OMG and realized that he hadn't anticipated either discharge...what if it wasn't ove...
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!"
At this, Joe began to run. He didn't know what else to do. If you were getting your ass beat, you ran. if the cops were chasing you, you ran. So it makes some kind of odd sense that if you are puking without remit or warning, get the fuck out of there!
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!" He ran.
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!" He kept running.
"BBBBRRRRAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!" He didn't miss a step, as jacket fringes and planes of olive hued bile billowed behind him, seeming to chase the hapless vomiting young man for blocks.
when it was finally over, Joe looked back on his work, still in disbelief at what had transpired, and was disappointed.
"Peyote sucks." He thought finally
~end?
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