A Dusty Night on Juice

As we pulled out of 86th St. everything slowed down. I felt like I was under water. I had woken up at 5 p.m. and smoked a bowl of hydro. As the train bucked uptown I felt edgy. I looked around at the passengers and imagined I could pull their limbs apart and watch their flesh stretch like cheap slime from a 25-cent machine. I pictured myself beating them with their own limbs and started to laugh.

"125th St., stand clear of the closing doors."

"Yo!" I said and me and Gerrar jumped off the train. This night the plan was for me and Gerrar to cop a half-ounce of Juice, smoke some back home in Queens and sell the rest at the rave we were going to on Friday.

Gerrar is a thin Colombian dude with a big nose and I'm a skinny 21-year-old Irish kid with skin as pale as paper. Walking through Harlem we stood out like blood on white tiles.

"Yeah, we stick out. Everyone knows what we're doing here," I said.

"Keep ya head up."

When we reached the corner I ducked into a supermarket and walked to the back near the meat. I watched an old woman pick up calf brains and study the price. Blood leaked off the side of the plastic wrap. I counted my money and put what I needed in my front pocket and buried the rest in my boot.

I walked out and saw Gerrar talking to the Juice Man on the corner. "Ah, my Irish boy from da Q-Boro." The Juice Man said in his Rasta accent. "Walk with me."

I could see in his eyes that he was high on his own supply. "I only need a half tonight," I said.

"Half? Half? C'mon, my man, go for tha whole. Ha ha ha! Ya, man, go for tha whole." The Juice Man looked at me like a crazed dog.

"Wish I could. Only got a buck seventy-five to spend."

The Juice Man signaled to a guy on a green mountain bike. He rode up and handed off to the Juice Man. I made the pass of the money?$175?with a handshake and got back a small bottle.

Gerrar smiled. "Aight! No doubt you old-timers are all about business."

The Juice Man nodded and we headed down the block. We moved east to Park Ave. and stopped under the overpass. The sidewalk was covered in pigeon shit. Above I could hear the birds cooing and flapping their wings, but they were hidden from view. I pulled out the bottle to get a whiff of the sweet-smelling PCP. To me it smelled like a mixture of some strange and beautiful fuel?full of laboratory aromas and nail polish. I opened the bottle.

"Oh shit! The Juice Man made a mistake. He gave us a full fuckin' ounce. Damn, Gerrar, should we go back to him?" I said.

"Nah, fuck that. We'll just pay him back with the dough we get from pumpin' it."

We had money and the extra half-ounce of Juice, so we were tight for the next few days. It didn't get better than that. Least not where we lived.

We rode the 6 train down to 42nd St. and switched over to the 7. I couldn't stop thinking about lighting up the first dipped cigarette of the night. Take a Newport and dip it into the bottle of Juice and smoke it down. I would be on a Dust cloud floating over Queens. I was in a trance thinking about the fuzzy feeling that surrounds your brain, and then your whole body. I loved the way Juice made me feel like an animal that has just been released from a zoo. How all inhibitions left and I felt wild.

Gerrar broke my reverie with a tap: "I got to piss bad."

The train pulled into Queensboro Plaza. It was a few stops from where I wanted to get off but I stood and grabbed Gerrar. "C'mon then. We'll walk the rest of the way and you can piss in the dark."

We walked up the dark Queens street. Gerrar pissed on the wall of a closed store, then zipped up and pulled his pants halfway up his ass. "So wutup, we gonna blaze some dippies?" he asked.

I gave him that familiar look that said, "Yes, damn man, get ready for another insane journey down a dusty path."

I dipped the Newport three-quarters of the way down, then pulled on it to soak the cigarette completely. My teeth found their way to the filter; I bit down and ripped it out.

I stared deeply at my Angel Dust creation with lust yet sadness. I felt helpless to its power. Angel Dust was the only thing I felt I had left to create warmth inside my soul. God knows I destroyed everything else. I found my lighter, flicked it twice and brought the flame to the dip. Dust being flammable, the cigarette exploded into a burst of light, singeing my eyelashes. I sucked my teeth and let out a slight growl. I moved the lighter away from my face and inhaled deeply.

After my second pull, I passed the cigarette to Gerrar. "Bust into flames, feel the pain in your brain," I said.

We walked slowly down the dead streets, passing the dippie back and forth. The flickering street lamps showered us with an eerie iridescent glow that seemed to be the Earth's strobe light. Before I knew it I was burning the tips of my fingers with the end of the cigarette.

"Yo?yo," Gerrar stumbled over his words. "This is the real Guerrilla Juice," Guerrilla Juice being the best on the market.

"Yeah," I replied, "the Juice Man did it again."

We began stretching our limbs, feeling the adrenaline rush through our veins. With each motion we could feel raw power that only Dust can provide. My mind was cloudy and filled with abnormal thoughts, scenes of such wicked insane violence that a sober mind struggles to finds words for it. So to keep the dementia flowing I pulled another Newport from my pack and performed the ritual all over again.

After the third dip, we weren't able to comprehend exactly what we were telling each other, but that didn't stop us from making our plans for that evening. I found myself instinctively punching in digits on a payphone. My vision was blurred; it seemed as though I was seeing the world through a kaleidoscope. Just as I forgot who I had called, I heard the familiar drunken voice of Kaz, one of my Irish drinking buddies.

"Yo! Wutup man, come through, I heard there's some crazy party goin' down in that abandoned warehouse like three blocks from my crib!" Kaz said.

"Word?"

"So, you comin'?" he asked.

"What?" I had forgotten what he told me.

"Fuck is wrong with you! Come through!"

"Oh yeah. Party? You got money?" I asked.

"Not really."

"Fuck it, yeah I'll be there. You talkin' about the warehouse we was throwin' bottles at last week?"

"Yeah."

"I'm out, meet me in half an hour," I said as I attempted to hang up the phone. I missed and it dropped down, swinging back and forth. I turned around and looked at Gerrar.

"C'mon man, party."

He nodded in agreement. I walked toward the street, waving my hands in the air for a cab. We must have looked like raving lunatics because cabs kept slowing down, then passing us by. Gerrar wobbled around with his eyes wide to the world, and I kept jumping up and down waving my hands in the air. Finally, a gypsy cab stopped.

The car was dark green with tinted windows; it looked like it was alive like a green lizard. I could hear the deep thumping bass of some crazed music from inside. Somehow I knew we were getting into the right cab. I hopped in and blurted out the address, then my jaw dropped?in my mind I saw my mouth fall to the floor, dripping with saliva the way it happens in the cartoons. There was a short Hispanic man driving and a beautiful light-skinned Colombian girl about 26 in the passenger side. She looked so seductive, yet so evil at the same time. I shot a droopy-eyed look of awe in Gerrar's direction.

"Yo, she's feeling us," Gerrar said with a vehement look in his eyes.

I glanced over to see this beautiful creature glaring deeply into my eyes, biting her lip. A barrage of erotic thoughts stormed through my mind as she rattled something in Spanish.

"Yo, kid!" Gerrar exclaimed. "She said if we pay the driver 50 bucks he'll pull over for half an hour and we can both do what we want with her!"

I couldn't move my eyes off her. I dug into my boot for the money I had left. I had about $60 and change, enough for the ride, and, well?the ride. The next thing I remember, we were parked in the lot of a closed-down supermarket and she was in the backseat stripping. She smelled of sweet cherry; she almost smelled sweeter than my bottle of Juice. My head was removed from my shoulders and I couldn't control my appendages. That sort of thing wasn't rare on Dust. Mind and body are easily separated. It's like I was watching me and Gerrar in the backseat with that young seductress.

Knock, knock, knock. The pounding on the window frightened me. I tried to pull up my pants and reach for my knife. As our newfound acquaintance wiggled her panties up and crawled up to the front seat, I remembered where I was. Disappointment worked its way into my life as soon as the cab driver returned. He started the car and we were off once again. On our way to the party, I still stared at the girl, and she still stared back, biting her lip. My mind flashed white, and she transformed into a vampire with blood dripping from the corner of her mouth. The car stopped and my vision faded.

It's funny how the in-betweens of every Dust trip seem to vanish into the night. We found ourselves at the warehouse where the party was supposed to be, banging our fists on the metal gate. No answer. We stayed for about five minutes trying to figure out if we were at the wrong place, or if there was a back entrance, before we gave up and smoked some more dippies. Dip, smoke? Dip, and smoke.

After about four more dips, we reached complete incoherence. Walking down the block was like going through a tunnel of gloomy, blurred colors and shapes. No objects any longer held any importance, and time was nonexistent. Somehow we managed to make it onto the G train. This is where we entered a state similar to a coma. Every time I managed to open my eyes it seemed that the train was on the express track. This happened about four of five times before we realized we had been on this train for hours and had gone back and forth from Brooklyn to Queens several times.

"Yo, what? I mean where?" I said.

"Oh shit!" Gerrar jumped out of his seat as if a bolt of electricity shocked him right in his ass. "I think we stuck."

I got up to peer out of the window, but could only see darkness and still trains that were all powered down. We were in the train yard.

"The trains are all sleeping," I said

"Nah, can't be, how do we get out?"

Gerrar tiptoed to the front of the train and reached for the door handle. The next thing I remembered was an ear-shattering boom, along with glass spraying all over the front of the train and Gerrar. I don't know if the boom was the sound of a gun, a hammer or something else, but out of the shadows came an MTA worker. His hair and beard were silver and stringy, he sort of resembled Albert Einstein. His eyes glistened with lunacy.

"So you like riding the train, huh?" he said in a low, raspy voice. "You like riding the train!"

We were paralyzed in puzzlement. He walked back and forth, continuing his exclamation that we liked riding the train. Gerrar and me looked at each other in complete astonishment. He got on his radio and told a worker that we had broken the window trying to get out of the train.

"Nah! Yo! You broke the window, you broke the window!" I yelled.

"Well, okay, then," he said with a mad look in his eye. "You just sit here until the train starts running again in the morning." He walked away muttering, "They like riding the train, they like riding the train?"

As he walked out Gerrar and I lay back again and took a deep breath. When we woke up the train was rattling its way out of Brooklyn. It was 7 a.m. and all I could see was crowds of people going to work. I picked the crust out of my eyes and held my head in my hands.