SCUBA UBER TRAIPSE

The Excavation Begins.

 

 

 

My name is Boland Jenkins, but everyone with half an ounce of sense who knows me just calls me BJ.
Is this damned camera straight? Good.

People, three days ago, I smoked crystal meth and saw wonders.

Three days ago, I learned what Magic really is.

Three days ago, I met God.

There are three of us, three amigos, who chill out pretty much everyday. Nothing wrong with that. We all just happen to be college dropouts who watch too much television, eat too much fast food, and smoke too much pot. We three share a lot in common, although we didn’t actively seek one another out.

Suili, Boland, and Latishia.

Su, BJ, and Tish.

Suili hails from Okinawa, Japan. Her family came to the USA when Suili was just an infant. Suili’s 23 years old, now, and she dresses in vibrant 70’s style clothes and is a brilliant tactician. Just last week, she went through fifty online a******s who thought that they could teach her a thing or two about Net-Tician, which is an online version of chess, for those you who don’t know. Hardly anyone ever comes to really understand Net-Tician, even after years of playing it, but Suili understands it, oh yeah. Suili lives and breathes that mother-f*****g game as if she was born with the rules to it packed tight in her cerebrum, right alongside the eventual ability to speak.

Latishia has lived within the grimy confines of the Stoneham housing project for her entire life, as has her entire family, but that didn’t stop her from landing a job at a medical division of Duke Hospital. Duke, goddamnit. Something to do with phlebotomy. Something to do with her liquid skill with needles and blood. And she still lives in the Stoneham housing project and smokes crystal dreams every day alongside Suili and me.

Me, well, what can I say? I haven’t accomplished anything that comes close to the magnitude of my friend’s accomplishments. My claim to fame on the local college campuses is that I’ve found a way to cook crystal meth faster, more efficiently, and more effectively. I won’t tell you how I do it, so wondering won’t really help you, as you’ll never guess. Let’s just say that I add a few things. My addition to the smoking experience boils down to red-orange smoke rings that flow from the meth-pipe’s end like oiled angel water.

I guess you could say that I sort of excel at chemistry.

But I haven’t done a goddamn thing worth a s**t with this skill, this talent.

Nor has Suili used her unnatural talent with tactics and viewpoints to improve the world around her; the world beyond her flattop’s screen.

Latishia’s deft agility and knowledge with needles and blood hasn’t moved her from the decaying center of the Stoneham housing project because she hasn’t allowed it to.

The three of us do nothing with our skills to sharpen and clarify the world around us. We do nothing while children starve to death in Africa, while polar bears get cozy with extinction.

The other day, three days ago, we did something.

Suili came strutting through my apartment’s front door that evening, with her jet black hair flowing out behind her like a cape. She wore heels that were blocky and an inch and a half high. I have no doubt; if she could find heels with live goldfish in them today, she’d buy the b******s and wear them til the fish floated upside down in them. I’ve never known an Asian who loves western 70’s culture as much as Suili does.

“Nanji desu ka?” I said over my living room table. That’s the extent of my skill with Japanese.

“Time for you to cut the wannabe ninja film star bullshit out is what time it is,” Suili said. Suili never had much tolerance for Americans speaking her native language. I’ve never asked her why. Maybe I should one day.

“Where’s the good times? Where's Tish?” she asked, taking a sit on the floor next to me. I sat at my low living room table, as usual at that time of the day, milking raw materials of their essential components to make red-orange smoke swirls to color the ceiling and air as we smoked and talked politics and bullshit. One in the same, perhaps? Your call.

“I dunno,” I said. I turned the Bunsen burner up a bit, watching the blue-orange flame grow and touch the tip of the cracked beaker in the circular hold. The solid inside the beaker became a liquid almost instantaneously. Beside the Bunsen burner was an old digital clock. It was old, very old, but the clock still held the correct time, more often than not. It was 8:45 p.m. “She said something about getting her Ma an evening gown for her birthday before she dropped by here for Rings.”

Rings.

Our name for sessions of smoking illegal drugs in my living room.

“Evening gowns are for old farts and fat people,” Suili said.

“Fat dames,” I said. “Fat dudes don’t wear moo-moos.”

“Point,” Suili said. “Break out the good times, man.” She rubbed her hands together with a paper dry sound, as if she had sat down to a piping hot, four course Italian meal.

“What about Tish?” I asked, switching the Bunsen burner off with a smile.

“Listen, I love Tish, but what about her? If she can’t get here on time, then she misses out. Bring it on.” She smacked her lips. Ever the strategist. Ever the opportunist.

A knock on the door. In walked Tish, all black skin and bright teeth and curled hair. All hips and a*s and breasts.

You might be asking yourself; “What business does a young black (cool) man like myself have hanging out, almost full time, with a couple of damned fine females if he aint banging one of ‘em?”

Answer; I found out early on that f*****g and friendship hardly ever find a calm enough time to blend. When Tish and I first met, it didn’t take us ten minutes to know that we were gonna be at it like rabbits as soon as the pleasantries were out of the way. And we were right. Every night after that first, we had sex at least three times before the sun rose. As is the usual thing with sex, it wasn’t long before feelings came along. And then arguments. And then flat out battles.

So, one night after a particularly s****y fight, we both decided that we were better off as friends than we were as f*****g partners. And we’ve been tighter than ever since then.

Suili…Suili never dug black men, to be honest.

“Trying to get the party started without me, you martial arts movie reject?” Tish said, taking a seat on the opposite side of the table that has supported hundreds of Smoke sessions in the past.

Suili put on a simpering smile and clasped her hands before her. She bowed three times in quick succession.

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Neither could Tish.

“Cut the bullshit,” Tish said, still smiling. “Break out the good times, BJ.”

And just like that, the ornate Jamaican glass pipe that twisted in on itself several times was out, and we were once again chasing the white dragon.

Red-orange smoke rings drifted up, up, and away. They looked like gauzy, see through doughnuts.

The digital clock told us all that it was 9:00 p.m.

“Guuuud,” Suili said after her first turn at the pipe. Her eyes fluttered and she leaned back on the floor and put her right arm over her face. Her jet black hair spread itself into a fan on the floor as she settled herself, and it shined like priceless charred silk.

“How is it that something that feels this great is against the law in this petty, b*****d filled country?”

“Blame it on the massive breeding and frightening increase of republicans, technocrats, and unpunished white collar crime, Su,” Tish said. Tish was sitting Indian style with her head in her hands. Every second or so, she swayed in place. Her eyes were slits, and her hair was in her face. Her lips were full and lush, and her breasts pushed out from her chest. And just like that, I wanted her. I wanted her more than I have ever wanted anything in my entire life.

“Tish,” I said, finding her more and more attractive by the moment. She had to be mine. I realized then that I’d never stopped loving her. I’d also never stopped lusting after her. “Couldn’t we…”

“Sumimasen, BJ,” said Suili is a slurred voice. "Excuse me."

“Yeah?” I answered.

I don’t know how to explain to you what I was experiencing at that point. I can only tell you that every idea I’d ever had up to that point seemed meaningless, idiotic. Stale. I can only tell you that I felt instantly linked to all the great philosophers and geniuses in history, no matter where they lived, or when they lived. All my head had ever been filled with up to that point was rubbish and bullshit, I realized. Now, my thoughts were forming and driving themselves forward into the Earth’s dreary atmosphere at a million feet per second. I could feel them, these new and improved and shiny thoughts, dropping into the world like weighty globes of pure gold.

“I don’t want to interrupt what you were about to discuss, BJ, Tish,” Suili said, “But I thought that you’d like to see the Light as well. It is beautiful.”

On her face was a look of pure bliss. She moved slightly as she spoke, like a dying fish on an extinct beach, swaying from side to side on the carpeted floor, although it was obvious, even then, that she wasn’t trying to get up. She was trying to get a better view of the Light. She was pointing at the east corner of the living room, the corner beside the kitchen doorway.

From this corner erupted a Light.

Now, I won’t lie and say that I could ever describe the Light to you in a way that you’d understand. I’ve never been a good liar, and now wouldn’t be the best time to start lying. So, I’ll just do my best.

The Light was…physical. Tangible. I reached out to touch it, as now, it was moving closer to the three of us, where we sat transfixed. It seemed to know that we were there, waiting for it. I knew it was closer, but I also knew that none of us had yet moved, and nor had it. Not physically. It was just…closer. I gasped as I reached out and touched the Light with my fingertips, and from somewhere in the background of human existence, I heard my Suili and Tish gasp as well. I remember feeling my bladder let go when my fingertips touched the Light. I remember the warm wave that stretched down my crotch and onto the floor.

Piss in a carpet. Damned easy to get out. One way or another, at that moment, I didn’t care.

I felt myself being pulled into the corner that the Light poured from at breakneck speed. I didn’t even have the time to rustle up a proper scream before I looked over my shoulder and saw Tish and Suili gliding alongside me. That’s right, gliding.

And then, into the kaleidoscope corner of mind-bending, thought twisting Light we went.

Inside, the three of us were instantly assaulted by terrific winds of sound and touch, and taste and feel. My eye lids were peeled back and torn off. I felt my eyeballs slip free of my skull and roll to peer at the landscape around me. My right eye rolled south and spotted Suili’s head and neck, stretching over a mile above her like a flesh colored ball and chain. Her hair was a live music show that could only be witnessed with the toes, if that makes any sense at all, and I know it doesn’t. It can’t, not to anyone who wasn’t there. Suili no longer had a nose, nor were her ears any longer attached to the sides of her head.

Her ears were simply gone.

Tish had become a bloated blue and silver thing that was now collecting sound waves (which were about ten billion pounds apiece, by the way…don’t ask me how I know this, I just do) by the dozen. Tish waved at me with horrific concrete arms that ended in fingers that had become blue whales, except these blue whales were miniature in form, and they were smiling baleen cuissants at me. Tish and her miniature blue whale fingers floated inside of a gargantuan whirlpool of thought and feelings that sung in an A-flat tune.

Me, oh God, me, I was sitting on a black beach in the middle of a coked out version of Heaven. There were golden streets, and there were copper streetlights along these streets. For as far as I could see, ten foot tall rats danced with microscopic cats. Tom & Jerry on speed.

The sky was electric blue, and there were pointed, child-like stars everywhere. Planets bobbed quite visibly to a tune from five billion years in the future of a burnt out, dying Earth, and from where I stood on the black beach, I could see the polar ice caps melting and reforming. I knew then that they were always melting and reforming.

Animals of all shapes and sizes did widening pirouettes around me, Tish, and Suili, except…well, how do I say this? Suili and Tish were both there, and not there. They were in the Light with me, but they weren’t. Don’t try to think too hard about it, because sober, it makes no sense to me, either.

There were other animals that didn’t resemble any animal that I’ve ever seen on Earth, but I knew they were indeed animals the instant I saw them. These animals glowed with a light that poured from their many mouths, ears, and noses. These animals were hazy, almost smoke-like, but they were there. Something that looked a bit like a moose with a tiger’s lithe body and an elephant’s quiet feet whisked behind my back, sniffed me, and then was gone, a trillion miles away in an instant.

“Boland,” a thundering voice said.

I looked up, which had become down by this time, and there, sitting backwards in a rickety old wicker lawn chair, was God. How I knew it was God, don’t ask. I just knew. I know, I know. I’m short on explanations. Bear with me.

As the electric blue sky swirled above me, below the endless bobbing planets and the pointy, child-like stars, I saw that God was an old black man with thin, frizzy hair who wore a wide brimmed straw hat and a faded panama jack shirt. God wore brown khakis, and he wore red sandals on his feet. God’s toe nails could’ve used a trimming. Maybe He’s done that by now.

God was the source of the Light.

“Yes, God?” I answered.

“I am the finger that hooked you and your friends and brought you here. I brought you here for one reason, and for one reason only.”

“And what is that, God?” I asked. On the horizon, Suili’s face spread itself across the sky like melting candle wax. She was smiling.

Tish, meanwhile, was crying yellow quark tears of joy. With every impact of these tears on the atmosphere, there was a sunny implosion and a clap of opposite thunder. With every implosion, Tish clapped her massive, whale-spawn hands, which made more thunder.

“Boland, I have to say, I’ve enjoyed your visits every time you’ve come to see me, and every time you will come to see me in the future, and the past, I will enjoy your visits. But there is a problem, and that problem is that you and your meth smoking friends are visiting a lot earlier than you should be. Your massive black friend over there on fringe of Heaven’s northern and southern ice caps (and God pointed both north and south, at the same time, and there was Tish, grinning at the ice cap edges) is going to live to be one hundred. Your Asian acquaintance, who has spread herself across the sky quite well, will live to be one hundred and four years old. You yourself won’t die until you’ve got ten kids and twenty-one grandkids to spoil rotten.”

“Heaven is so cool,” said Tish’s voice from someplace outside of Time.

“The smoking is going to kill you before your time, Boland. You and your friends will die for your see-through elation if you aren’t very careful. And you three cannot die, for you see, you three have a massive collective goal to seek in life. You will better the world through your efforts to reach this goal.”

“What goal is that, God?” I asked.

The child-like stars twirled in their dark bed of black space pelt. The planets bobbed.

“What are you, stupid?” said God with a grin. He twisted his wide brimmed straw hat around on his head. “Like any good mystery, you’ll have to wait and see how it turns out. I will say this, though; look for the Magic in life. Look for Me, for I am the Magic’s origin and epicenter. Look for yourselves, as well, for although Magic started with Me, it ends with you. Humanity.” God smirked. “Now, you and your friends get the hell outta here. And don’t come back. I say this, even though I know that you will come back. Human beings are so selfish and stupid, but Go…well, Me help Me, I love ya.”

And God snapped the fingers of His right hand and just like that, Tish, Suili, and I were back in my apartment, stretched out on the carpeted floor like three big fish, ready for gutting. My crotch was cold. The digital clock on the table told me that it was 2:00 a.m. Five hours had gone by.

Suili was the first to sit up, and as such, she was the first to look into the corner.

“The Light is gone, and I have a goddamn headache,” she said. Her right hand went to her forehead.

Tish, meanwhile, was sitting Indian style and looking at me. She was smiling. “What did He say?” she asked, boring a hole through me with her eyes. “What is the point of us?”

I smiled back at her. The smile became a toothy and shiteating grin.

“He said that we should look for the magic in life. To look for the magic in Him. To look for the magic in ourselves. He said He started it, but we end it.”

“That all?” Suili said, rubbing the back of her neck and flinching at the cramp that had developed there.

“No. He also said that we should all stay the hell outta Heaven for a century or so.”

“Figures,” Suili said.

Ten minutes after this, Tish and Suili were gone.

Now, as I sit here with the twisted glass pipe in my left hand and the Bic lighter in my right hand, I have come to understand why I didn’t tell them of God’s plan for the three of us. I didn’t tell them because it would ruin the mystery of it all, of our lives. I didn’t tell them because sometimes, well, sometimes we have no right to know fate. Sometimes, wonder and questions have their places in life, and these places ought to always be occupied by something.

But mostly, my reason for telling you all this, my reason for not telling my two best friends this last bit, all boils down to one thing.

I like knowing things that other people don’t know. I like being the sole knower of secrets. How much bigger do secrets get than this, eh?

Now, it’s time for me to switch the camcorder that’s recording all of this off. Now, it’s time for me to take a tote and take a journey. I dunno for sure if God lied to me or not three days ago. I dunno if He lied when He said; “I am the Magic’s origin and epicenter.” I dunno if He was outright lying, but I do think that he was fudging the truth. I think that magic has another source, which is why He doesn’t want us back there, in Heaven, snooping. So now, I’m off to do a little snooping in Heaven.

As I take this first tote of fanfuckintastic crystal meth, I bid you all who will one day see this, farewell.

Somewhere in the world, specifically in the American Midwest, a recording light blinks off.

And another kind of Light blinks on.

It is 8:43 p.m.

 

 

 

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