Drug Stories, Vol. 1

Ric's house was on a circular side street off of College Station Road, itself a long stretch of not-very-busy backroad connecting the northern part of the UGA campus to the East Side of Athens. Nevertheless, the prospect of driving the half-mile down College Station to the supermarket, tripping as hard as we were, seemed risky. But common sense rarely prevails in these instances, and Jason seemed very sincere when he insisted that he was capable of driving that far.

The entrence to the parking lot was just a few yards before the busy main street, and it seemed like we would at least arrive there without incident. A car turned on to College Station just as we were about to turn, cutting off our path. Or at least that's how it looked to me. Jason apparantly had other ideas, was sure he could cross the lane before the car. It's hard to remember exactly what happened in that terrible moment, but I know that I screamed, that Bobbie screamed, that I was sure that our collective luck had run out, and we were about to become a flaming pile of twisted metal and cautionary tales. As we pulled into the parking lot, tears were running down my face, my nose was running, I felt as if I'd just had some sort of orgasm through my head, and I was furious that Jason had put us in such mortal danger. But before I could get a word of scolding out, he jerked the car to a dead stop, looked back at us, and yelled "Are you crazy? You're going to get us killed screaming like that! I'm trying to concentrate!"

A simple quest to grab some juice and smokes (or whatever it was we were grabbing) can turn into an epic journey when you're tripping. The supermarket that you regularly shop in becomes an animated theme park, a museum full of masterpieces that require intense scrutiny. This particular branch of the Kroger chain was even more dangerous--it had a live lobster tank! Did all Krogers have a live lobster tank? I struggled to remember if I'd ever noticed one before. I spent a good 10 minutes staring at those creatures from the deep, wondering that I'd never noticed quite how strange they were, but that wasn't even the worst pitfall we encountered. No, that was the lipstick display.

Women are well aware of this, but being men, Jason and I were taken quite by shock by the discovery that lipstick shades are all given fanciful names like "Cherries in the Snow" and "Call it Red!" and "Bashful Rose" and...God, I wish I could remember them, because I know I'm forgetting some of the funniest ones. There were dozens of shades of red, each with it's own name, and soon we were riffing on it, coming up with names like "Red is the Reddest Red You Ever Read!" I'm surprised we ever got out of their. Bobbie and I were lucky, though. As we walked out to the parking lot, Jason ran into one of his father's friends, who stopped him to ask questions about the family, school, and so on for several minutes.

As we waited for Jason, some drunk guy walked up to us and started a conversation. He had just witnessed an accident--someone had slammed into a parked car, then just drove away. "Well," he opined, "You pay all this money for insurance, you have to get in a wreck every now and then just to make sure you get your money's worth." This made sense at the time. Finally, his wife walked up, and he introduced us. Or tried to, before realizing he didn't know our names. "Well," he said after a brief pause, "they're them, and you're you, and that's that," which struck us as such a profound truth that we actually began cheering and clapping, blowing our cover completely.