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O'Rourke
Poisonous Junk Stuff That Blows Up Large Dangerous Things That Go Fast
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Poisonous Junk Eleven years ago, I was in college in______ , Ohio, about twenty miles north of Cincinnati. Three or four or five of us, all more or less in school, shared a house on the edge of town. And we used to have parties a couple of times a month, or whenever we had drugs or money. Three thirtyone West Whittier Street—it was a comfortable house by our lights: motorcycle parts all over the furniture, dog shit on the rug, trucks and things up on blocks in the backyard. And we had good parties. One of the people who lived there, Uncle Mike, was a math instructor at the school, a prodigious drinker and generally popular fellow. We planned a particularly good party to celebrate his birthday in the fall of 1966. And a particularly good party it l was, with lots of fistfights, car wrecks, and rape attempts, except that we ran out of liquor about 3 A.M. Stores and bars being closed, Uncle Mike and somebody went to Darktown and woke up an old colored man who was supposed to have moonshine for sale in his basement. I remember them saying that he asked their brand preference. But whatever it was, it came in Seagram’s Seven bottles with Royal Crown Cola caps on top, and looked like river water. Very strong stuff. I’d been off somewhere that night and was late to the party, so I was still nearly sober at 3 A.M., and I drank l quite a bit of it. Every mouthful tasted l like the first drink of whiskey you l ever had. But, as I said, it was a good party, and we kept drinking it until people started throwing up. Not that that stopped us right away. A certain amount of throwing up is to be expected at a really good party. Required, even, if your hosts are to know that the full thrust of their hospitality has been felt. And it didn’t seem to me that anything was very wrong until I saw Juanita, normally a fastidious girl, wretching into a sink full of dirty dishes. A few more drinks and I was sick, too. Sick as I’ve ever been. I felt my insides pulled out on a string, a cord, a rope of filth. It was a convulsive, projectile vomiting that brought no relief. I remember puking in a wastepaper basket, through a window, out the back door, into a plant, on the davenport, and finally, exhausted, I crawled upstairs to the bathroom. I woke up with a burning sensation in my gullet and a horrible headache. It was a struggle to open my eyes, and when I had, there was nothing there. Just a blank expanse of whiteness. I blinked and rolled my eyes in their sockets and blinked again—nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing but a featureless white glare. I was blind. “Blind,” I thought. “Blind. I drank moonshine whiskey and it made me blind. I’m blind. Blind. Wood alcohol blind. I can’t see a thing. I’m blind, blind, blind...” And I was ten or fifteen minutes like that, until Juanita came in and found me just where I’d passed out—with my head upside-down in the toilet bowl. Stuff That Blows Up Stuff That Blows Up
The next summer, Uncle Mike and Juanita and I and some other people lived out on a farm. The man who owned the land did the farming, but we had the house and some outbuildings to fool around in and sixty or eighty acres of woods and pastures. We had a terrific collection of guns and drugs on the farm, and it was our pleasure most afternoons to get high or stoned or what have you and blow things apart. We went shotgun sparrow hunting and used twelvegauge slugs to destroy an old truck. We found a sewing machine with a cast iron frame and knocked it to pieces with a 30/30, and we shattered every porcelain phone wire insulator in that part of the county. But best of all was a case of dynamite that we’d been traded in a dope deal. After a month, the north pasture looked like Axis night bombers had been by twenty-two years late and completely off target. And the sheep were beginning to really act strange. One August afternoon, when we had only one stick of dynamite left, we came into possession of some hashish of exceptional quality. And after several pipefuls, it seemed like an excellent idea to set that last stick off in the yard. Uncle Mike got the stick out of the refrigerator and, while we all sat on the front porch and smoked, began to slowly bore a hole in it. It took years to bore that hole, or so it seemed to us. And years more to measure out the fuse, crimp the cap, and so on. An eon, certainly. But we’d been sitting on the porch since time began, so we didn’t care. Not us. Maybe we’d been on the porch longer than that. Who could tell? Who’d care if we could tell? And who would we tell if we could or cared to? Anyway, eventually Uncle Mike began the Long Walk into the yard. Very far out into the yard. Farther out into the yard than we could personally imagine going. So far out into the yard that he had to run and run to get back on the porch, and he ran and ran and ran but it was so far to run that, even running and running as he was, he was barely running up the porch steps when, still running, a great blast and huge wave of dirt threw him through the screen door into the living room. Juanita, on the porch swing, was blown back through the railing. The rest of us, on the other side of the porch, were dumped over into a forsythia bush. Every window on the front of the house was broken, and no one could hear for two days. Uncle Mike, the crater indicated, had planted the dynamite eight feet away. We sold the rest of that hashish immediately. Actually, we didn’t sell it, we traded it for more dynamite, but this time we traded the dynamite right away for some peyote buds from a fellow from California who took the explosive back there with him. I understand it was used to fell a Pacific Gas and Electric high tension wire tower in one of those acts of terrorism so popular just then. No dazed activists were found at the scene, though, so presumably it was detonated by coffee drinkers.
Large Dangerous Things That Go Fast
I don’t really know any good stories about large dangerous things that go fast. Unless you count life. Which is a large dangerous thing that seems to be going very fast. Anyway, I’ll have to make do with a story about bullets—small dangerous things that go fast. For a while, in the spring of 196% before we moved to the farm, Uncle Mike and Juanita and I shared the house on West Whittier with a mystic fellow named Steve. Steve had very long fingernails and didn’t often bathe. He was in love with the daughter of an Air Force colonel in Dayton. The colonel spoke of Steve only as “Dirty Eddie:’ kept his daughter in a hometown junior college, and had declared that if “Dirty Eddie” ever so much as set foot in Dayton, he’d kill him with his own bare hands. Taking the colonel at his word, Steve retired to the pursuit of his own particular brand of mysticism. There were three bedrooms in the house. Two next to each other upstairs and one downstairs, which was Juanita’s and mine. Steve had found an old stand-up radio which he had carried up to his room and placed in the middle of the floor. The radio was broken, but, plugged in, its large orange dial would light up and the speaker omitted a low buzz. Steve claimed that this radio was an “Om machine:’ and that the sound it made was the first syllable of the Buddhist chant, “Om mani pad ne hum.” He filled the room with folding chairs that he’d stolen somewhere, arranging them in semicircles around the radio, and spent most of his time in there with all the lights off, taking drugs and staring at the orange dial. Few people ever joined Steve in his “Om machine theater:’ especially not Uncle Mike, who was a devout Catholic—something he showed every Sunday morning in his best suit and every Saturday night in a drunken rage. One such Saturday night, Mike came home more angry than usual and stamped upstairs. He was too drunk to notice that Steve was there. Even Juanita and I didn’t realize Steve was home, so low or so familiar was that om sound. Mike shut himself into his room with the five or six locks he had mounted on his door, got out his guns, and began firing into the wall between his room and Steve’s. He had a .25 caliber derringer, some off-brand .32, and a .22 Astre automatic. He fired a hundred rounds or so before we heard the door lock come undone and the sound of Mike’s footsteps headed for the bathroom. Then there was a pause and a loud scream from Mike. “I killed him! I killed him! I killed him!...” Juanita and I ran upstairs. Mike, still screaming, was kneeling over Steve, who was face down on the floor in a tangle of chair legs. Juanita turned the light on and began feeling Steve’s body for blood, trying to get him to talk. She rolled him over, but there didn’t seem to be any wounds. “I’m dead,” he said at last. Mike, meanwhile, had gotten up and wandered into his own room where I found him screaming, “I killed him! I killed him!” and staring at a wall full of bullet holes. I tried to tell him that Steve was still alive. But he wouldn’t listen, and stumbled back into Steve’s room and started staring at the wall in there. There were no holes in that wall. “I’m dead,” said Steve. “I killed him! I killed him!” yelled Mike. “I’m dead,” said Steve. “I killed him!” yelled Mike. “Look,” I said. “There aren’t even any holes in the wall.” “Of course there aren’t,” said Juanita. “That’s his closet.” Which was true. Uncle Mike’s closet was between the two rooms, and what he’d done was shoot up all his clothes. Which I demonstrated by putting on one of his sport coats and waving my fingers at him through the patch pockets. But it was some time before he left off screaming, “I killed him!” Steve believed it, too. He didn’t get up off the floor until the next afternoon. “I can’t get up,” he’d say, “I’m dead.” And he remained convinced for quite some time afterward —often refusing to eat or wear warm clothing on the grounds of not being alive. Death also greatly emboldened him. So much so that he went to see his girl friend at home and danced around her father, singing, “I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead. Eat shit.” The colonel fled the house, and Steve and his girl were married a month later—a spiritual union only, however, since Steve had left the corporal realm. Everyone concerned eventually came to their senses. Steve fully admits to being alive these days. He lives in Miami, where he writes detective novels. And his girl friend has a very wealthy second husband. P.J.
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